#84 Why Walking Is The Superpower You Didn’t Know You Had with Professor Shane O’Mara
Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee
Dr Rangan Chatterjee
4.8 • 10.9K Ratings
🗓️ 20 November 2019
⏱️ 93 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
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?
Show notes available at drchatterjee.com/84
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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 |
| 0:12.4 | amazing substance, BDNF in the blood. And the 72-year-olds start to perform on psychological tests |
| 0:20.9 | at the same level as 68-year-olds do. So in a very important sense, you've reversed the functional |
| 0:27.6 | aging of the brain. Hi, my name is Rongan Chasji, GP, television presenter and author of the best |
| 0:35.2 | selling books, The Stress Solution and the Four Pillar Plan. I believe that all of us have the |
| 0:40.2 | ability to feel better than we currently do, with getting healthy as we can far too complicated. |
| 0:46.2 | With this podcast, I aim to simplify it. I'm going to be having conversations with some of the |
| 0:51.2 | most interesting and exciting people both within, as well as outside the health space, |
| 0:56.3 | to hopefully inspire you, as well as empower you with simple tips that you can put into practice |
| 1:01.6 | immediately to transform the way that you feel. I believe that when we are healthier, we are happier |
| 1:07.6 | because when we feel better, we live more. Hello and welcome back to episode 84 of my feel |
| 1:16.7 | better live more podcast. My name is Rongan Chasji and I am your host. Now, before we jump into today's |
| 1:24.0 | conversation, I just wanted to share something with you that has been really exciting for me to |
| 1:28.8 | hear. As you may know, I recently set up my own private Facebook community so that listeners of |
| 1:35.1 | this podcast could have a safe and supportive space to connect, talk about the podcasts and help |
| 1:40.5 | inspire each other to make better choices in their everyday lives. Now, there are over 5,000 active |
| 1:46.9 | members in the group and some of them have been arranging local meetups. These are a bit like |
| 1:52.1 | book clubs, but instead people are having feel better live more podcast clubs. People have |
| 1:57.2 | decided to meet up in person to discuss each week's episode and share insights, learnings, |
| 2:03.3 | takeaways and so much more. This is really, really exciting that many of you have this |
| 2:09.0 | honest use this digital and online podcast as a way of making offline connections. If you are |
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