A Daily Walk Puts You on the Right Path to a Healthy Brain

If you don’t exercise because you don’t relish a hard workout, put your mind at ease — and start walking.

Simply increasing the number of steps you take each day can help support your brain health, recent research suggests. In a study published in 2024 in Preventive Medicine Reports, 676 men ages 40 to 79 wore pedometers for a week to log their step counts, and then returned an average of five years later for cognitive testing. Those who had higher step counts at the beginning of the study performed better on the screening tests years later. 

When the researchers analyzed the data further, they found that every additional 1,000 daily steps were associated with cognitive performance similar to that of someone one year younger.

Some complex cognitive skills — e.g., multitasking, making decisions, solving problems, setting priorities and following instructions — involve more than one region of the brain. Your brain’s white matter encourages this communication by sending signals across various brain regions — but it's vulnerable to aging-related damage.

The good news is that “walking can significantly improve connectivity between regions of the brain,” says cognitive neuroscientist Art Kramer, director of the Center for Cognitive & Brain Health at Northeastern University. He co-authored a study in which 180 healthy but mostly sedentary adults ages 60 to 79 were randomly assigned to six months of either walking or dance training (two forms of aerobic exercise) or an active control group that did gentle stretching and strengthening exercises. The walking group started out gradually with 20-minute sessions and built up to three 40-minute walks per week. All participants received brain scans and cognitive tests.

In the brain scans of people in the aerobic exercise groups, the researchers saw evidence of improved white matter function; participants in the active control group, meanwhile, showed a decline. The walking group saw the most benefit and was the only group that improved their episodic memory (the ability to recall details about past events). The results were published in NeuroImage in 2021. “Walking doesn’t have to be intense for you to reap a benefit — a moderate pace is sufficient,” Kramer says.

What do we mean by moderate intensity? The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says moderate exercise will raise your heart rate, cause you to breathe a little harder and get you to break a sweat. You’ll be working hard enough that you can’t sing a song at the same time, but you can carry on a conversation. Walking is one of the most popular forms of exercise in the United States, the CDC notes, but only 39 percent of adults age 65 and older get the recommended 150 minutes per week of moderate aerobic activity. That’s 30 minutes more than in Kramer’s study.

“More is always better,” Kramer says. “And remember: You can do this kind of exercise almost anywhere — no special equipment required.”