I was watching a video about the great stoic philosophers from back in the day, and one thing they all extolled the virtue of for well-being,

creativity and deep insights, was walking. Now, getting outdoors without listening to a podcast or distracting

yourself in any way, just being present with the sights and sounds around you and the

sensations of your body moving is so good for you on so many levels, physically, mentally,

emotionally and creatively. It's definitely where I get my best ideas and so many of the

world's all-time best thinkers were exactly the same. Here to give you a walking nudge this January

is Professor Shane O'Mara, best-selling author and world-renowned neuroscientist.

Let's talk about the health benefits.

So Hippocrates, one of the most outstanding figures in the history of medicine,

the father of medicine, as he's known by many, came out with the quote, didn't he,

that walking is the best medicine.

Now, we're very much a sedentary bunch, aren't we?

Dodgy hips, myself, from sitting down too much, weak, sleepy glutes.

And you say inactivity means less muscle volume, less muscle strength. But interestingly as well, it means our brains start to wither.

Yeah, of course. And we have bodies that are built for movement. And we have bodies that profit from

and get back from movement. So to give you a

simple example, we now know, for example, that if you're engaging in lots of walking, the kind of

inflammatory factors in the bloodstream drop down when you do lots of walking. And molecules

produced in muscle leak into the brain and facilitate resilience in your

brain. So there's one that goes by the acronym SMVEGF, which stands for skeletal myofiber,

vascular endothelial growth factor. And when you unpack that, all it really refers to is a

molecule that helps the vature, in other words,

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