A new study has found that previously sedentary people over age 60 who walked rapidly for 45 minutes three days a week can significantly improve mental-processing abilities that otherwise decline with age. The findings centered not on the benefits of physical conditioning but on the frontal regions of the brain, where the additional oxygen taken in during walking triggered faster reaction times and heightened the ability to ignore distractions when completing a variety of mental tasks on a computer. Some of the findings appeared July 29 in the journal Nature. However, the walkers were better able to process and ignore irrelevant cues and successfully complete tasks than were those who had done only toning exercises. Processing relevant information and discarding distractions are essential to executive control, a term that covers such things as planning, inhibition and temporarily maintaining information in memory.
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The benefits you get from walking are in the varieties of cognition that show the largest age-related decline. Study participants walked 15 minutes a day, three days a week, at 17.7 minutes per mile, with a nurse supervising, to start. The toners and stretchers met three times a week for an hour during the six months of the project. Walkers improved their oxygen intake by 5 percent, a modest but significant result, Kramer said. These people were de-conditioned.