Why I Love Walking

I love it for getting lean. I love it for thinking. I love it when I’m stressed. I love it on rest days.

And increasingly, the more I think about health and performance, the more I come back to something ridiculously simple:

People need to move more. Not necessarily train more. Move more.

Walking might be the easiest form of exercise we’ve got

A few years ago, I could quite easily have days where I barely moved.

Desk. Commute. Desk. Home.

Maybe 3,000 steps.

And when you live like that for long enough, it starts to feel normal.

Now I’m at almost the opposite end of the spectrum. I box, do gymnastics, strength train and spend a lot of time trying to make my body capable of increasingly demanding things.

But one of the most useful things I’ve added isn’t complicated at all.

It’s walking.

You don’t need a programme.

You don’t need to recover from it for three days.

You don’t need a gym.

You can just get up and go.

And 10,000 isn’t some magical number

We’ve become obsessed with 10,000 steps.

But newer research suggests you don’t necessarily need to hit that number to get meaningful benefits.

A major 2025 review published in The Lancet Public Health found that around 7,000 steps per day was associated with meaningful improvements across multiple health outcomes compared with very low activity.

That doesn’t suddenly make 7,000 a magical number either.

The more useful message is:

Moving from barely moving to moving considerably more matters.

And that’s probably a much more useful target for someone sitting at a desk all day than obsessing over whether their watch says 9,843 or 10,000.

Walking is one of my favourite weight-loss tools

I’ve used walking with clients and I’ve used it myself.

Not because walking has some magical fat-burning property.

At lower exercise intensities, your body generally gets a greater proportion of its energy from fat than it does during very high-intensity exercise.

But that’s not the main reason I like it for getting lean.

I like it because it’s easy to accumulate without exhausting yourself.

You can walk and still train later.

You can walk on a recovery day.

You can add another 20 or 30 minutes without needing to psych yourself up for another workout.

And you can do a lot of it consistently.

That matters.

Some of my best thinking happens while I’m walking

This isn’t just personal experience either.

Stanford researchers compared people walking and sitting across a series of experiments and found that walking increased creative output by around 60% on average.

That makes complete sense to me.

If I’m stuck on something, stressed about something or trying to work out what I actually think, sitting in front of another screen isn’t always the answer.

Sometimes I need to move.

In fact, a decent amount of the thinking behind Ogo has probably happened while I’ve been walking around talking into my phone.

There’s something about moving that seems to let my brain move as well.

And apparently there is some science behind that.

Not every bit of movement needs to be a workout

I think this is the bigger point.

Fitness culture can make movement unnecessarily complicated.

What’s your programme?

What’s your heart-rate zone?

What’s your split?

What’s your recovery score?

What’s your VO2 max?

All useful things in the right context.

But sometimes:

Go for a walk.

That’s it.

Walking doesn’t replace strength training, cardiovascular fitness, mobility or sport.

It doesn’t need to.

Walking can be exercise.

It can be active recovery.

It can help you increase your daily energy expenditure.

It can be thinking time.

It can be transport.

It can be a break from a screen.

And it can simply be a way of reminding your body that it was designed to move.

And if you’ve been at a desk all day and feel stiff when you finally get up, that’s exactly what we built the Ogo Reset mobility tool for — it takes two minutes and no equipment.

Move, move, move

I actually think we’re getting better at this.

Run clubs are everywhere. Hyrox has exploded. People care more about recovery. Walking meetings are normal. More people seem to understand that movement doesn’t always have to mean spending an hour pushing yourself in a gym.

That’s a good thing.

Because the message doesn’t need to be particularly complicated.

When I’m stressed: I walk.

When I need to think: I walk.

When I’m trying to get lean: I walk.

When it’s a rest day: I still walk.

Sometimes health advice deserves nuance.

Sometimes the answer is:

Move, move, move.