How Walking for 20 Minutes Daily Can Change Your Life

When we move our body, it has an immediate positive effect on our body, including improving mood and focus. But the even greater thing is that this same exercise can have long lasting positive effects as well. Studies have shown that a regular exercise habit can protect you from Alzheimer’s disease, dementia or depression. In fact the best way to predict aging is to look for presence or absence of a sedentary lifestyle. But even more fascinating is that exercise changes your brain, literally. Exercise is immediately so good for your body for 3 reasons.

1. It has an immediate effect. A single workout increases levels of neurotransmitters like dopamine, serotonin and noradrenaline.
2. That increases your mood and focus which lasts for 2 hours.
3. It improves your reaction times.

Exercise actually changes the brain’s anatomy, physiology and function. Long term benefits of exercise include the following:

1. Exercise actually produces brand new cells in hippocampus and increases its volume. It also improves long term memory.
2. It improves your attention function, dependent on your prefrontal cortex.
3. You get a long term boost of the neurotransmitters.

But the most transformative thing that exercise does to your brain is protecting it. You can think of the brain as a muscle. The more you exercise, the bigger the hippocampus and the pre-frontal cortex get. These are the two areas that are most susceptible to neurodegenerative diseases. These are also areas associated with normal cognitive decline in aging. So even if you don’t cure dementia or Alzheimer’s disease, you can effectively delay the onset of them.

At this point you must be wondering how long you need to exercise every day to achieve that. The good news is that you don’t need to be a body builder. Studies have shown that exercising 30 mins for 3-4 times a week is enough to get these benefits. And do aerobic exercise that ups your heart rate. And the good news is that you don’t need an expensive gym membership to do that. Take a 20-minute walk each day and you can cut your risk of having a stroke by 57 percent.

So it turns out bringing exercise in your life will not only give you a happier and more productive life today but will protect your brain from incurable diseases in the longer term as well along with providing you with greater long term memory and changing your life for the better. And you don’t need to spend a penny for it!