Famous author and naturalist Henry David Thoreau admitted he couldn't have preserved his health and spirit without walking at least for four hours through the woods or fields everyday.
Samuel Johnson walked 52 kilometers of muddy road out of Birmingham, England, everyday.
The philosopher Immanuel Kant walked so regularly through town that shopkeepers set their clocks by his passing. Charles Dickens walked around London by day and by night (his novels captured life as seen at a walker's pace).
Religious writer C.S. Lewis took daily walks to be able to see and hear and smell and touch the beauties of nature, which are, he says, "a secret which God shares with us humans alone."
Today, many people walk as a hobby. Most of them know that walking is good for the body. Walking, after all, is one of the safest things we can do with our body. It's much easier on the knees than running and doesn't trigger untoward side effects. In fact, increasing documented evidence suggests that walking offers several health benefits.
"Regular physical activity is probably as close to a magic bullet as we will come in modern medicine," says Dr. JoAnn Manson, chief of preventive medicine at Harvard's Brigham and Women's Hospital in the United States. "If everyone were to walk briskly 30 minutes a day, we could cut the incidence of many chronic diseases by 30 to 40 percent."
Even if you're 50 and have never taken part in a physical activity, a brisk half-hour walk three times a week can "basically reverse your physiological age by about ten years," says Dr. Gareth Jones, a Canadian geriatric specialist.
His source for claim: A three-year study of 220 retirement-age men in which half didn't exercise and the other half walked briskly for 30 minutes three times a week. After a year, the exercise group showed a 12 percent increase in aerobic power and a ten percent increase in strength and hip flexibility - equivalent to what they would have lost over a decade had they not exercised at all.
People in France and the Mediterranean tend to be slim because they're a lot more active. And it's all because they walk more. A study of 200,000 Americans at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, found that city dwellers were almost three kilograms lighter than their suburban counterparts, largely because, instead of driving, they walked more. "You're not working out," says Dr. Will Clower, author of The Fat Fallacy: The French Diet Secrets to Permanent Weight Loss . "You're just moving."
Here are more health benefits you get from walking:
Heart disease. Brisk walking is good for the heart, which makes a lot of sense. The heart is a muscle and anything that makes the blood flow faster through a muscle helps keep it in shape. But regular walking also lowers blood pressure, which decreases the stress on the arteries. It can boost the amount of HDL cholesterol (the good one) in the blood. It even seems to make the blood less "sticky," and therefore less likely to produce unwanted clots. This all adds up to as much as a 50-percent reduction in the risk of suffering a heart attack, according to doctors.
Stroke. Walking also decreases the risk of a stroke. In an analysis of the health habits of 72,488 nurses over the past 14 years in the United States, researchers from the Harvard School of Public Health recently found that those who walked six or more hours per week decreased by 40 percent their risk of suffering strokes caused by a clot.
Low blood pressure. In one study of older people with low blood pressure after meals, walking afterward restored their blood pressure to normal. "These findings support an old German proverb - 'After meals, you should rest or walk a thousand steps,'" says Dr. Lewis A. Lipsitz, assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School in Boston.
