3 Miles Per Hour: Why Walking Changes the Way You Think

This episode of the Movement Sherpa Podcast, hosted by Chris Luby, explores Walking. This episode focuses on Dr. John Francis, who walked across the United States in silence for 17 years, highlighting the power of walking and silence for connection and environmental awareness. The episode also delves into the science of walking, emphasizing the cognitive benefits of a 3 mph pace, known as the “speed of observation,” and the importance of optic flow for brain health.

Walking benefits the brain by quieting the amygdala and activating the Default Mode Network, leading to relaxation and creative problem-solving. Global data shows that countries with high walking rates, like Hong Kong and Japan, often have happier populations due to their built environments. In contrast, car-centric cultures like the U.S. have lower walking rates and face challenges like unsafe streets and car-dependent infrastructure.

Thank you as always for taking your time to listen. 

Until Next time, Just Keep Trying!

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:13

Welcome and hello to the Movement Sherpa Podcast. I'm Chris, a physical educator, author, and lifelong student of movement. Every week on this podcast, I explore different facets of the movement world. Not to improve our athletic skills, but to expand our understanding of the language of movement with the core belief that movement is for everyone. I know what you're thinking. This is the third episode and the third different intro song you've heard. Totally my fault, my bad. This song is the one that my son prefers the most, and I decided to just trust his instinct, so there you go. I promise I'm not changing the song again. I had a lot of fun with the last episode, and I hope you took a chance and danced if for no one else other than yourself and your health and looked a little goofy. It's good for us, right? So for today's episode, I really did give myself a challenge, but I think hey, that's what good conversations come from. I want to start this episode today talking about someone who's done an incredible physical feat. Really, he's done incredible physical, spiritual, emotional, intellectual, whatever uls you can come up with, he's done it. And I'm telling you, if you have the time, this is an engrossing rabbit hole to go down. There have been so many people who have taken these immense journeys simply by walking, and each one of these stories is a fascinating read. So while I'm focusing just on one of them today, really, if you get the chance, you won't be disappointed to uh read some of the other stories, okay? So I want to ask you a question. Think really hard. How far do you think you could walk? Okay, so here we go. I want to talk to you about Dr. John Francis. Our story with Dr. John Francis starts in 1971 when he's just John Francis. And uh around January of that year, there was a terrible accident. Two standard oil tankers collide. Uh it's it was in like the fog. It's underneath the Golden Gate Bridge, but 800,000 gallons of fuel is spilled into the bay. It's I think it's still the largest spill in the bay's history. But the trauma of the damage leads John Francis to make a radical decision. He decides to walk instead of riding in any motorized vehicles. And for a nice long time, he begins to walk. So, two years in, now in 1973, he's been walking for these two years, but he's grown very frustrated trying to explain what he's doing over and over and over. So he decides to to do a day of no-talking, just a gift to himself and the community. But that one day turned into 17 years. That's yeah, that's a long time to be quiet. And here's where I'm just blown away because during the 1970s and 1980s, he crosses the United States all the while, earning a master's degree from the University of Montana, and then eventually a PhD in land resources from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Like, I have no idea how he did this. My professors got were inundated by questions from me every single day. So, wow. It wasn't until April 22nd of 1990 that he broke his 17-year-long silence to speak at a uh gathering of the 20th anniversary of Earth Day. In 1991, the United Nations Environmental Program made him a goodwill ambassador. And finally, in 1994, he broke his 22-year-long protest against riding in motorized vehicles and rode in a car again. I mean, since then he has sailed the Caribbean, walked the length of South America. He founded an environmental education nonprofit called Planet Walk. And the guy's an amazing human. Really. And what's what I think is fascinating is his decision really was an experiment in perspective. It wasn't a stunt. The walking and the silence, he said, forced him to listen. He said that walking connected him to the community through these micro interactions. A wave, the smell of dinner. It was just very fascinating. Really, if you get a chance, look up planetwalk.org. The tagline is fostering kindness and environmental stewardship. Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. Okay. So today's episode is called Three Miles an hour. We're talking about walking. And I know you're like, hey, this is an audio podcast. What can we learn about walking through an audio podcast? Well, here's the even the bigger challenge. Today I don't really want to focus on the exercise aspects of walking. Okay. I want to talk about the cognitive side of walking. All right. It's about perspective. So stick with me here. Like in an airplane, at that speed, we're seeing geography. And then, but if you slow it down to a bicycle, it's more about kind of like understanding your neighborhood. But you slow it down to walking, and now you are noticing details. Okay. Scientists have noticed that we have like a default speed as humans, and it's it's three miles an hour. I call it the speed of observation, but for hum for scientists, it's our default speed. It's a speed that allows us to burn the least amount of energy but still reap the benefits of walking. If you go any faster than that, uh that's when the body starts doing its complaining bit, whether your stomach hurts, your knees hurt, your back hurts, your ankle. For me, it's all of these, you know, the usual suspects. Now, I know I can already hear someone saying, Well, I mean, three is already slow, so why not just go one or two miles an hour? Great question. But the reality is at that slow walking speed of one to two miles an hour, it doesn't burn enough calories, it fails to stimulate your cardiovascular system, and unfortunately, it is a strong biological marker for declining muscles and underlying bad health. Okay, so three miles an hour. It's definitely not fast, but it connects us to so many aspects of our health, right? In increased life expectancy, disease prevention, cognitive health, and physical independence. All right, so with the physical independence, that's just if you're an elderly, if you can't walk three miles an hour, you're needing assistance with move with your movement. All right. So, what I want to do is I want to go deeper than just these exercise health benefits of walking. All right. I want to really examine this speed of observation. Alright, do me a favor and think about a time you were stuck trying to solve a problem and you're sitting at your desk trying to do this. Okay. So the problem's not coming to you. I mean, the answer's not coming to you, you're stuck on a problem. So what do you do? You get up, you go for a walk, you walk the dog, you go to the grocery store, some kind of movement, right? And it was in that process that the answer appears. Now, I promise you, this isn't luck. You know, we as humans we're not meant to be sedentary, our brains prefer moving scenery. Now, there's actually a scientific term for this, it's called optic flow, and it's the continuous visual motion we experience when moving. You see, when our eyes see us moving through a landscape, it tells us that we're okay, okay? But without this movement, our brains can be can experience some really negative side effects in its absence of this optic flow. It will uh it'll impair our spatial navigation, our posture stability, and even our stress regulation, okay? But you notice I didn't say just pace in your kitchen back and forth until the answer comes to you. But and and why is that, right? I mean, if if you take 500 steps, it's the same whether it's 500 in your kitchen or 500 steps up and down your street. But it's not, okay? There's that where this optic flow comes in again because your brain, it's not just counting steps, it's watching the world slide past you. You know, as you as you walk down the street, whether it's a sidewalk or just on the street, you're gonna begin to notice things coming and going. You know, the trees they're gonna drift by. You're going to see a mailbox in the distance and then appear and then go past it. And as the horizon slowly changes, your your brain starts really soaking up this river of visual information. Okay, and you know you're going somewhere, but you don't have to actually know where you're going, it just helps your brain. It it does a surprising amount of work behind the scenes, okay? It helps you know figure out where you are without consciously thinking about it. It's part of the reason, really, uh, you can wander through a new park or even take a few turns and still have a pretty good idea of sort of like how to get back from to the start, okay. So things even get stranger though with this whole flow, okay. Researchers, researchers, they uh they found that when we're moving forward through the world, that that flowing scenery appears to quiet the body's alarm system. It's known as the amygdala, okay? It's that part of the brain that is always scanning for danger. And when you're walking at this, like I say, three miles an hour, your nervous system begins to shift away from stay on guard, and it starts to say, Oh, I think I can relax. And and maybe, I don't know, maybe that's the why the solution to a stressful day has rarely been walk laps in your living room. What your brains I think our brains seem to crave is is motion through changing horizons. And then as I was as I was jotting all this down, uh I I definitely came across the most boring scientific term of all the ones I've discovered so far. But scientists call something the default mode network. Yeah, that's absolutely boring. Nothing cool about it. But what this what this is, is it's that brain setting when you stop trying to think. Um like I can't be the only one. I know I'm not the only one. Your best ideas come to you in the shower. Uh you know, when you're mowing the lawn, um, you're you're walking in the woods and you don't have anything to write down or anything. You know, you know, you're you're doing one of these tasks, and that's when, oh my gosh, I remember where I put something, or oh my gosh, I've just discovered the greatest thing in the world. That is our default mode. You know, the brain is is doing, it's like connecting the dots while you're not looking. There's actually this great Greek phrase. I read about it when I was in college, and then I came across it again as I was prepping for this episode. And I'm gonna slaughter this name as I do with all names, but uh solvature ambulando. I like I like that name, okay? But it means it is solved by walking. Not might be solved, not could be solved, not should be solved, not let's consider solving it is a wonderfully confident phrase. Walk first, figure it out second. I wrote this to myself as a note. I think that the walking is the only movement where your body is almost doing the work automatically and leaves your brain free to wander. I mean, in a lot of ways, that that three miles an hour is is a lot like breathing. Okay, I mean we're we're doing it, but if we just let go, the body will keep going. Okay. Now, I'm not naive, okay? I know that walking will not magically solve every problem. If your basement's flooding, you don't go grab your hiking boots and say, all right, I'm gonna go go to the optic flow. No, that's not what I'm talking about, okay? Obviously, real-world problems need real-world solutions. But if a problem is tangled up inside of your head, then maybe that walk is what we're looking for. So, next I started wondering about culturally walking around the world, okay. And I found a Stanford University Global Step Study, and it paints a very fascinating picture of the infrastructure and culture and even the happiness around the world. So the the winners, the the biggest walkers, I found from Hong Kong and Japan. They constantly top the leaderboard at around 6,900 steps a day. Now, this is not because they're you know going to the gym. It's it's incidental movement that's built into their high-density, highly vertical, transit-first urban design. That is a mouthful there. Uh, they walk because the environment makes walking the most logical. Okay, and you know, in Japan, walking is a communal daily ritual, it links directly to their world-leading longevity and sense of daily focus. So after them, then came uh like Denmark and the Nordic nations, okay? Denmark, Sweden, Finland, they are always up there between 6,000 and 6,600 steps per day. And and this is a choice-driven walking, okay? Nordic urban design is wrapped up in a Danish concept of hug. It means coziness, and the Norwegian Freelutzlive, it means open air life. Oh, I'm sure I slaughtered that. Free Lutzlive. I hope I didn't. I apologize if I did, but it's a cultural belief that being outdoors in nature, moving slowly, is essential to being human. And again, that's that three miles an hour, right? And these countries constantly rank as the happiest on earth. They're walking, it it isn't a stressful sprint, you know, to a destination. They're not checking these steps off to make their watch happy or some app on their phone happy. And then we contrast that with the car first culture of the United States. Um, we're not alone. Us in Saudi Arabia are usually at the much, much lower steps a day, between 3,500 to 4,500 steps a day. And I know what you're thinking, right? I I or I think I know what you're thinking, because you can easily fit all the Nordic nations, Hong Kong, all of Japan, into the state of Texas, and still have plenty of room to spare. But size is not the reason, okay? In the United States, walking isn't taken seriously as as other as a form of transportation, largely because post-World War II, city planning, we've moved to what's called a car-centric infrastructure. And not because of our country's size. We were obsessed with cars. In fact, over a quarter of all daily car trips in the United States are under one mile of distance. That's an easy walk, right? Now, there are several like factors that discourage walking. I mean, there are zoning laws, you know, unlike a lot of the European cities where shops and homes seamlessly like coexist, we have like strictly separated land uses. So our daily necessities, like grocery stores and schools, end up miles away from your homes. Then you look at our road design. Our streets have been widened and redesigned to move as many cars along them as possible. And that certainly makes walking feel, I mean, uncomfortable, inconvenient, and really inherently dangerous. And because of that, these dangers, our pedestrians are well, they're at risk. And this one really frustrated me because studies show that Americans walk far less than Europeans, but we are six times more likely to be killed by walking per mile travel. And then there's this this this parking mandates I discovered, and this one's just nuts. Um, zoning and and and deck these zoning codes they require developers to build massive parking lots for every new building, and that pushes the buildings further apart from each other, and that makes walking between destinations so much more of a challenge. And lastly, time. I mean, where does our sense of time fit into this? Uh you know, are we always on the go? And the idea of walking to the grocery store almost laughable? Like, A, how am I gonna carry all those groceries home? And B, I don't have the time to walk to the grocery store, walk the grocery store, walk back from the grocery store. You know, I I don't know. I I live in Roanoke, and we are not a flat uh place to live. But then I'm asking myself, is that a reason or an excuse? It's a really great question. That sure is a lot to take in for today's episode, from the incredible story of Dr. John Francis to understanding why our mind benefits from walking. And then, of course, comparing walking around the world. Um we have work to do here in the States, but we're going to have to make some big changes. And it's it will be hard. Okay, some will tell us it's impossible, but I'm gonna tell you what I tell my students. Trying makes the impossible possible. If we never try, it will always be impossible. But if we just keep trying, who knows what we can accomplish. Uh, if you like today's episode, please subscribe so you never miss another one. Uh, I always appreciate rating or review, and if you could share this with a friend. Don't forget to check out movement sherpa.co and the cleverly named Sherpa Shop for all your movement Sherpa gear. My next episode is gonna be another kind of challenge, if you will. The episode is called Reading the Ground. I'll be excited to share this one with you. But that's our journey for today. Do me a huge favor. Go outside, lift your face to the sun, move around a little bit. It doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to be yours. I'm your movement, sheriff, and I'll be back to talk to you next week.