#271 Why Walking Is The Superpower You Didn’t Know You Had with Professor Shane O’Mara (Re-Release)
Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee
Dr Rangan Chatterjee
4.8 • 10.9K Ratings
🗓️ 14 May 2022
⏱️ 90 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This conversation was first released in November 2019.
When was the last time you gave any real thought to walking? It’s so easy to put one foot in front of the other. Yet this unique, underrated activity sets us apart from other species, and brings incredible advantages – yes, superpowers – if we do it enough.
My guest on this week’s podcast is the neuroscientist Shane O’Mara, a professor of experimental brain research at Trinity College Dublin. After reading his remarkable new book, In Praise of Walking: The New Science of How We Walk And Why It’s Good For Us, I couldn’t wait to talk to him about the topics it raises. Shane has always been a keen walker and aims to clock 15,000 to 17,000 steps each day on his pedometer. But as we discuss, the positive effects of walking go way beyond the fitness benefits we all know about.
Walking helps more than our hearts and lungs, our muscles and posture, yet modern, sedentary lives mean we’re doing far less of it than nature intended. It can increase creativity and problem solving, lift our mood and protect us from depression. Shane reveals how it helps learning, memory and cognition and how it can slow and even reverse the functional ageing of the brain. All this science, he hopes, will help convince town planners and public health officials that we must redesign our environments with pedestrians in mind.
This is such an enlightening conversation and I know you’ll gain some fascinating new perspectives on how you could (and why you should) fit more walking into your life. Why not head out for a stroll as you listen?
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | What you see is in the walking group, improvements in memory, improvements in attention, |
| 0:06.1 | an increase in the volume of the hippocampal formation, an increase in the amount of this |
| 0:12.6 | amazing substance, BDNF in the blood, and the 72-year-olds start to perform on psychological tests |
| 0:21.0 | at the same level as 68-year-olds do. So in a very important sense, you've reversed the functional |
| 0:27.7 | urging of the brain. Hi, my name is Rongan Chasji. Welcome to Feel Better Live More. |
| 0:39.8 | Hey guys, how you doing? This is another one of my special Sunday rerelease episodes, and this |
| 0:45.7 | conversation is all the way back from November 2019. The one was the last time you gave walking |
| 0:53.0 | any real thoughts. Well, it turns out that the simple act of walking is the superpower |
| 0:59.1 | that many of us have forgotten about. You see, walking is a unique, but often underrated |
| 1:04.8 | activity that sets us apart from other species and brings us incredible advantages if we do it |
| 1:11.1 | enough. Now, my guest is the neuroscientist Shane O'Mara who wrote the wonderful book |
| 1:17.0 | in Praise of Walking. And in this conversation, we talk about the positive effects of walking |
| 1:22.6 | that go far beyond the fitness benefits we often hear about. Walking helps our hearts, our muscles, |
| 1:28.1 | our posture, yet our modern sedentary lives mean that we are doing much less of it than nature |
| 1:34.3 | intended. Walking helps us with creativity and problem-solving. It lifts our mood and protects |
| 1:40.0 | the system depression, and it also helps with learning, memory and cognition, and it can even slow |
| 1:46.4 | and reverse aging in the brain. This honestly is such an enlightening episode that I'm pretty |
| 1:52.9 | sure will inspire you to get out there and walk more in your own life. I hope you enjoy listening. |
| 1:59.5 | Before we get started, just a quick shout out to athletic greens who are supporting today's show. |
| 2:05.5 | Now, good quality nutrition is an essential pillar for our physical health, |
| 2:10.2 | but also our mental health. And in an ideal world, I would much prefer it if all of us got all |
| 2:16.8 | of our nutrition from real Whole Foods. But I know from nearly 21 years now, I've seen patients |
... |
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