Hey everyone, I'm Gretchen Reynolds. Welcome to Radiohead Space and to Monday morning.

I'll be guest-tasting Radiohead Space this week and it's great to be here with you.

I'm a journalist, author, and I write about exercise, science, and fitness in my Washington

Post column, Your Move. My work is all about helping people understand why incorporating

movement into your day can benefit your body, mind, and overall well-being.

This week, I'm breaking down the science and benefits of exercise. We're going to dive

into how a physical movement can improve our mental health, give us a fighting chance

against disease and just help us feel better at any age.

As someone who writes about the science of exercise, probably the most interesting thing to

me is how deeply exercise and the need for movement is embedded into our very genetics.

We long ago were hunter-gatherers as a species and when you're a hunter-gatherer, you have

to move either to find food or to avoid being food. If you didn't move, you didn't survive

and pass along your genes. So very early in our evolution, the need for movement became

just entwined into our genetics. Because of that, it's very important to our health

and it's very important to our mental health. It affects how calm you are, it affects

how anxious you are, it affects your blood pressure, it affects how well your brain works,

almost everything about how you feel and how your body is functioning depends on getting

up and moving around. Some of the common misconceptions about fitness that keeps so many

of us from actually being active are that it has to be hard, it has to be at a gym,

you have to have the right shoes, you have to be thin, you have to be coordinated and

the fact of the matter is not one of those half-tos is true. There's very good science

that any amount of movement can contribute to better health and that means 10 seconds

...