In 2025, Paul Jarle Mork and a team from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology studied 11,194 adults over time. They tracked walking habits and lower back problems, comparing those who walked more to those who walked less, focusing on daily minutes rather than speed.

In 2025, Jingfeng Chen and a team from Chinese universities reviewed animal and human studies on how vitamin D and exercise together help keep brains healthy as people age. They looked at things like brain growth proteins, blood flow, and swelling in the brain, focusing on older adults with memory problems.

In 2024, Harvard Health Publishing reviewed studies on how exercise helps chronic pain, like back pain or arthritis. They looked at how activities such as walking, swimming, or yoga affect pain levels, inflammation, and mood in adults with ongoing pain, drawing on clinical trials and expert insights.

In 2023, Ben Singh and a team reviewed 97 meta-analyses covering 1,039 trials with 128,119 adults to compare exercise against psychotherapy or medications for mental health issues like depression and anxiety. They looked at various workouts—brisk walking, weights, yoga—measuring effects on mood, stress, and brain chemicals.

In 2025, Melody Ding and a team from The University of Sydney reviewed 35 studies with over 16,000 adults from 2014-2025. They analyzed how daily step counts affect eight health outcomes, including heart disease, type 2 diabetes, dementia, cancer, depression, falls, physical function, and overall death risk, using data from PubMed and EBSCO CINAHL.

In 2025, SWM Cheng and a team analyzed data from 36,192 adults with high blood pressure in the UK Biobank. They used wrist trackers to measure daily steps and walking speed for a week, then tracked heart issues like heart failure, heart attacks, and strokes over 7.8 years.

In 2025, health experts from EatingWell reviewed studies on walking after eating. They looked at how even a short stroll, like 15-30 minutes, can help people with or without diabetes by preventing blood sugar spikes, easing digestion, and more. Research showed walking right after meals lowers glycemic response better than before, cutting blood sugar rises by 20-30% in some cases.

In 2021, Yumeng Xie and a team from Renmin Hospital of Wuhan University reviewed many studies on how exercise helps people with depression. They looked at different kinds of workouts like running, swimming, or yoga, and how they change brain chemicals, reduce swelling, and improve mood. Exercise works by boosting happy brain signals like serotonin and dopamine, growing new brain cells, and cutting down harmful stress.

In 2025, Daniel S. Rubin and team from the University of Chicago studied 125 older adults (some frail) using a smartphone app to measure walking pace. They tracked steps per minute and physical abilities like balance and strength over 12 weeks.

In 2025, Melody Ding and team from the University of Sydney analyzed 57 studies with over 160,000 people across multiple countries. They used data from wearable devices like pedometers to track daily steps, comparing health outcomes like death rates, heart disease, dementia, and depression against a baseline of 2,000 steps.

A 2025 study analyzing 85 previous studies found that people who stay consistently active have a 30–40% lower risk of early death—especially from heart disease. Even those who start exercising later in life still see a 20–25% drop in mortality risk, showing it’s never too late to change your future.

A 2024 randomized controlled trial at Zhejiang University had participants either sit all day, do one 30‑minute walk, or take 3‑minute walking or squatting breaks every 45 minutes. The walking and squatting groups saw significantly better post-meal blood sugar control, with squats and walks far outperforming sitting and even surpassing the single walk.

A 2025 study led by Columbia University found that people who spent more time sitting after a heart attack or chest pain episode had more than 2.5 times higher risk of dying or having another heart event within a year. But there’s good news: swapping just 30 minutes of sitting for light activity—like walking or tidying up—cut the risk by 50%, and moderate activity cut it by 61%.