I am a professional walker. I try to walk almost every afternoon, often with friends. I live on a canal, and there is a path along the water where I can walk for kilometers. When I am in Europe, I walk everywhere for hours, and somehow I never get tired. My father has walked all his life. He never played a sport and never went to a gym. Walking is his only workout. He is 89 now, in good shape for his age, and his mind is still sharp.
Most people do not count walking as exercise. The research says they should.
The number.
The 10,000 steps goal did not come from a lab. It came from a Japanese pedometer sold in 1965 called manpo-kei, which means "10,000 steps meter."
The real numbers are friendlier. In 2025 The Lancet Public Health pooled 57 studies. People who walked 7,000 steps a day had a 47 percent lower risk of dying during the studies than people who walked 2,000. Their risk of dementia was 38 percent lower, death from cancer 37 percent lower, and symptoms of depression 22 percent lower. In a Harvard study of women in their seventies, about 4,400 steps a day already went with about 41 percent lower mortality.
How you take the steps matters too. In a 2025 study of more than 33,000 people who walked less than 8,000 steps a day, the ones who walked in stretches of 15 minutes or more had a much lower risk of dying than the ones who only walked in bursts of five minutes or less. One real walk beats a day of shuffling.
What it does to your brain.
At Stanford in 2014, people came up with 60 percent more creative ideas while walking than while sitting. "We're not saying walking can turn you into Michelangelo," the lead researcher, Marily Oppezzo, said. "But it could help you at the beginning stages of creativity."
In a trial with 120 older adults, a year of walking three days a week grew the hippocampus, the brain's memory center, by 2 percent. The researchers wrote that this effectively reversed one to two years of age-related shrinking. The people who only stretched lost volume.
For mood, a 2024 review in the BMJ pooled 218 trials on exercise and depression. Walking or jogging had the biggest effect of any type of exercise.
Andrew Huberman points to something else that happens on a walk. As you move forward, the world streams past your eyes. He calls it optic flow and says it "has this incredible property of lowering activity in the amygdala," the brain's alarm. The study behind it tested eye movements in a scanner, not walks, so take it as a lead, not a law.
Where you walk counts. At Stanford, people who walked for 90 minutes through nature dwelled less on their worries afterward, and the part of the brain tied to brooding quieted down. People who walked the same time along a busy road saw no change. The neuroscientist Shane O'Mara, who wrote a whole book on walking, puts it this way: "Our sensory systems work at their best when they're moving about the world."
We were built to walk.
Mark Sisson, the founder of Mark's Daily Apple and one of the best known voices of the primal movement, puts it plainly: "Humans are the best walkers on the planet." His rule is to move often at a slow pace, with your heart rate around 180 minus your age. At 50, that is about 130 beats a minute.
The Hadza, hunter gatherers in Tanzania, still live much as hunter gatherers have for thousands of years. Measured by GPS, the men walk about 11 kilometers a day and the women about 6.
The thinkers knew it. Charles Darwin walked a sand path behind his house every day until the last weeks of his life, and called it his thinking path. Nietzsche wrote: "Only thoughts reached by walking have value." Steve Jobs held his serious conversations on long walks. And in 1847 the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard wrote in a letter: "Every day I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from every illness; I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it."
How to make it count.
Walk after you eat. When your muscles work, they pull sugar out of the blood without needing insulin. In a study in New Zealand, in people with type 2 diabetes, a ten minute walk after each meal lowered blood sugar more than one thirty minute walk a day. I went deeper on this in Experiment 008, Sugar Rush.
Walking also heals. In a 2024 trial in The Lancet, 701 people who had recovered from low back pain were put on a walking program. They went a median of 208 days before the pain came back, against 112 days for people who did nothing.
To make a walk work harder, the Japanese have a method. Researchers at Shinshu University had people in their sixties walk three minutes slow, then three minutes fast, five rounds, four days a week. After five months their leg strength was up 13 to 17 percent and their blood pressure down 9 points, more than people who walked 8,000 steps at a steady pace.
Peter Attia, the longevity doctor, adds weight. He walks hills with a 60 pound pack and says walking downhill trains "the brakes," because "most people fall because they lose the brakes." He suggests starting at about a tenth of your body weight.
Walking is not the lesser version of running, and it could be considered the better one. You get much of the same benefit with far less wear. Moderate running is good for you, and recreational runners even have healthier knees than people who sit. The trouble starts with long, hard mileage, year after year. Sisson knows this from the inside. He ran marathons at the national level and finished fourth at the Ironman World Championship in 1982. Today he calls himself an "anti-chronic cardio" guy: walk every day, lift a few times a week, and sprint now and then.
Here is what you can do today. One walk of at least 15 minutes without stopping, outside if you can. Three minutes easy, three minutes fast. And ten minutes after dinner.
Kierkegaard had it right. There is no thought so heavy that you cannot walk away from it.
Georges
Usually one Experiment on Sunday. Lab Notes in between. Free.
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