The joy of walking

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1:02This is the documentary from the BBC World Service. People, people fixing the work. Hi there, my name is Maira Anuby and today I'm out for a walk at some woods right outside my doorstep. It's mid-morning on a typical autumn day, so a little windy and wet but warm enough for me to be out here without a coat. And despite the odd muddy patch of ground, it is actually a pleasant walk. I mean the air is so clear here and if you listen closely, you'll hear birds and distant noises and catch the trees as they move about in the wind. A walking is a normal part of life and it's easy to overlook just how good it can be for us. I find it gives me a chance to step away from the normal rush of day-to-day life and

2:04slow down for a bit. I'll sometimes go for a walk in here when I need to clear my mind or when I feel like I haven't done enough steps or exercise during the week but also sometimes when I just need to find a solution to a personal problem and it is amazing how often the solution comes when I put one foot in front of the other. So in this edition of People Fixing the World, we're exploring how walking is changing lives. We'll hear about a crowdsourced walking network in the UK that's encouraging people to leave their cars at home but first we're finding out how a simple stroll in the park is helping doctors and patients connect around the world. So get your walking shoes on and let's go find out more about these solutions. Physical activity is really the miracle drug. Dr David Subger is a cardiologist in Columbus, Ohio.

3:06Day after day he treats people with conditions that can be improved by regular physical activity. In the United States about 80% of us are sedentary and that means we're not getting the 150 minutes of recommended physical activity a week. That can lead to all kinds of things that we don't want. Heart disease, cancer, dementia. David found his most active patients tended to remain healthy and independent well into their later life. So he started prescribing exercise plans to help his less active patients get moving. But he found few were following through. So I was really frustrated, Myra, with my ability to motivate my patients to be physically active. I invited a patient to go for a walk with my family in the park that Saturday and that's where all the wonderful stuff started happening.

4:07How did it grow from there? Our first walk was six months later. We had over a hundred people and we knew that we were on to something. This was the start of his nonprofit walk with a doc. Once a week David heads out to his local park to meet his patients. He starts the session with a short talk on health related topics like sleep or high blood pressure. And then everyone sets off together on a 30 to 60 minutes stroll. It's just really a wonderful way to connect. It's also important, I think, for our community members, if they do want to talk about whether or not they should take a cholesterol medicine. It's nice maybe to have the ear of a physician and see what she or he says. And I wonder does it break down barriers, you know, like the fear of the white coat seeing doctors in a different setting? Yes. Out in the park were all on the same, same ground. The doctors are wearing baseball hats and shorts.

5:09He started the project in 2005 and a few years later, he was visited by a group of other doctors who were inspired to start their own walk with a doc branch. Where it started to spread and his local initiative steadily grew into an international movement. We now have rapidly grown to 735 chapters in 42 countries, which is super exciting. We provide everything for whatever the physician needs. If it's insurance, a webpage, merchandise for their chapters, paperwork, all the things that we don't want the doctor to have to deal with. As a physician, you know, as a doctor, it started with your patients. Have you seen any changes? I have. Our patients that are going to the walk, they feel more empowered. They feel more educated. We did an informal survey and we saw that over 90% of our responders increased their level

6:14of exercise. And are the doctors participating for free? They are. We have an incredible global community, thousands of physicians. Everyone is a volunteer. The reward of being with our community outside the sterile walls of a medical office are so rewarding that it's something I'll be doing and our global physicians will be doing for a very long time. I wanted to know how the initiative has worked in different countries. David told me it's been particularly successful in Hungary. So we sent our reporter Jakob Thorpe to take part in one of their recent outings. It's 8.30 in the morning in Vesprem, a city in Western Hungary. I'm standing in a hotel car park as a crowd gathers. Small family groups, a few older men and lots of older women wrapped up against a blustery wind.

7:15They agreed with Dr. Borbála Stán, known by the group as body. Dr. Stán had the local branch of walk with a dog. Around once a month she leads a group on a walk and took through the city. Every walk starts with a short conversation and I thought we could talk about mindful eating. It's important because at mere times we often forget about what we are doing. We keep tapping our phones on watch the TV and don't pay attention to what we are eating. So I'd like us to do an exercise where we pay more attention. Dr. Stán asks everyone to sit down and gives everyone a single raisin. Where is the light rolling on the surface? She asks the group to use all their senses as they hold the raisin in their mouth before slowly chewing and swallowing it.

8:16How did this experience feel for you? How conscious are you normally? For example, of a cup of coffee or a cake or a delicious soup? I'm a slow eater. I enjoy chewing on my food, tasting the flavours, spreading through my mouth. The interesting thing for me was that while the raisin was in the palm of my hand, it's wrinkly surface actually looked like a human brain. Your homework, if you would like some, is to pay full attention to one activity this week, like your morning coffee or the first page of a book you read each day. After the health chat, we get on the move. There's around 20 walkers ranging from energetic children to older adults. Are you ready to go? We can go on our usual route. We make our way down into the shade valley, above us, vast-prime castles wide plastered walls shining the morning sun.

9:17I joined Dr. Stan, who's walking at the front of the group. She tells me she started this group in July 2024. We switched over to English for a bit, as Dr. Stan explained, she was interested in holistic medicine. This is where you treat the whole person, rather than focus on an isolated symptom or disease. The lifestyle medicine has six pillars. They are the nutrition, exercise, sleep, social connection, stress management and avoiding harmful substances. With the walk, with the dog, we can deliver three of six pillars. We are exercise, stress management and social connection, and we have an extra bonus, the time in the nature.

10:18We continue along the green path next to the shade stream. As we pass through the old town, Soviet style apartment blocks make way for all the village houses. I get talking to Lasla, who is 75. He said it had been a while since he had gone on a group walk, but he'd heard about this session at his pensionist club. People need to be part of a community. Unfortunately, I lost my wife 12 years ago, so I live alone. So in order to live properly, you need to go to programs and activities. That's very important. You mustn't just sit at home. You definitely need to be physically active for one, two or three hours a day, even if you don't move very quickly. Because if your blood isn't circulating, your physical condition deteriorates more quickly too. A little further ahead, I fell into step next to Zhuzhzhyevgyesh, a retired maths teacher, who tells me she started coming last year.

11:24I like the fact that doctors step outside the confines of the operating theatre and the doctor's surgery. And that in a freer, more informal setting, you have the opportunity to ask questions if you want to. So if someone has a particular kind of problem or a question, she can answer that as well. It's an added opportunity on top of simply being outdoors and going for a walk in nice weather. As we walk in the shade of popular oak and chestnut trees, I ask Dr Shen how she got involved with walk with a dog. She tells me she first heard about it when living and working in Spain and set up brunch in Valencia. But when she returned to Hungary, she realized there were just two branches in the whole country. One of the things holding them back was that all the resources were in English. Hungarians generally aren't very good at foreign languages and we also have several older walk leaders. Even though they are doctors, English isn't so easy for them.

12:26We didn't want them to be excluded from the walks and we wanted to reach as many people as possible. So Dr Shen worked with David and his US team to create a Hungarian registration form that connects with the central organisation. They also launched a Hungarian social media account to spread the message. Within a year they had expanded to 38 branches. One of the newer branches is run by on Nathimar, who joined us on the walk. I've been running the programme in my hometown since 2025. It's a small town of around 20,000 people and we get between 20 and 60 people on the monthly walks. Some of them are regular but there are always three or four new walkers as well, ranging from very young children to elderly people. As a GP, I was worried that I'd effectively be opening up an extra surgery session but fortunately that hasn't proved to be the case.

13:27When people come on these walks, they don't want to talk about their illnesses. They're more interested in talking about being healthy and for us too, it's something that recharges our batteries and gives us a sense that what we do is worthwhile. Dr Tirmar has seen a rise in demand for the community of walks. In our town, people of different ages go walking weekly independently of our programme. They organise it themselves through social media, choosing different distances. What's their main motivation? It's the simplest form of exercise there is. You don't need anything special, really just a comfortable pair of shoes and it's accessible to anyone. We're also managing stress because while I'm walking and talking to other people, whatever it's preoccupying or worrying me, recedes into the background for a while. And then there's the personal connection which I think has largely disappeared from our lives. We reach Senn Stevens by a doctor, a towering bridge carrying traffic across the valley

14:29below. As we head up to the Carpoque, the group is in great spirits. As we say our goodbyes, Dr Stan leaves me with a parting thought. I think it is much more than a walk. It is social connection, education, but I think the most important thing is the genuine care of the doctor. Without that, I think it couldn't work. Dr Boba Lashchen, ending that report from Jakob Thorpe in Hungary about the doctors taking their patients on walks. This is the documentary from the BBC World Service. Investing with Schwab is like spending a Saturday at a great farmers market. You can fill your reusable tote with a bit of everything. Maybe you go for some free range self-directed investing. Or perhaps you pick up a few farm fresh trades while you peruse. You can even get help from a dedicated advisor.

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17:31But if you're like me, you're probably wondering how much walking should you even be doing? Well, a study published by the Lancet Medical Journal last year found that walking 7,000 steps a day could be great to boost your brain power but also to help protect you against a range of different diseases. That would mean walking for about an hour at a brisk pace. And we've just heard how doctors leading walks is helping to break down the barriers that exist between medics and their patients in Hungary. But now we're going to London where our reporter Clare Bates is finding out how an innovative walking map of the UK can help her reconnect with her home city. London is a busy place and as someone who lives in Watson the city, I'm usually trying to get from A to B the quickest way. The trouble is when I get to my destination I often feel tense and stressed with a little sense of how I got there and it turns out I'm not alone. If I wanted to drive or get the train or if you even want to fly somewhere, then quite

18:35often there's an app for that but for some reason even though we've been walking on these islands for hundreds of thousands of years, actually it's not that easy to always find your way so I wanted to do something about that. That's Daniel Ravan Ellison. He realised modern life is set up for speed and at all too often we're encouraged to focus on the destination rather than the journey itself. His solution was to create a national walking network with routes crisscrossing Britain but he couldn't do it on his own so he put out a call for volunteers to help map and test the parts. He called his nonprofit slow ways. Our incredible network of volunteers have shared over 10,000 routes that stretch for 150,000 kilometres. These routes connect every town, city and national landscape across the country and you can walk for the north of Scotland, right down to the south of England entirely on routes that are rated four or five stars and have been tripled trep by our volunteers which is absolutely incredible.

19:36The routes are available through the slow ways website where walkers can browse and download them. It answers they can be used on other navigation apps and followed on a smartphone. He hopes the project will help reconnect people with our oldest form of transport. Humans are a walking species. Fundamentally the evidence shows us that it can lengthen by lives, it can improve the quality of our lives, it can improve connections between people, places, nature while having this light of touch on the planet, literally reducing carbon emissions. We can agree to show me how slow ways works and we chose a route starting near BBC headquarters and heading to one of London's major train and tube stations. Now as you can probably tell from the sounds around me we are now at a very busy intersection we are by Oxford Circus Tube and this is going to be the start of our walk. Exactly it's the beginning of the slow way that heads north west, surrounded by retail across the high part and up to Paddington which is a busy train station.

20:38Alright so I have got the app on my phone, so here we are we have got it it's called Pad Ox III and it's been given already a five star rating. Ok so we need to cross over the road and take the first ride so let's do that now. I must say I would usually pop on the tube to get to Paddington. It's about a ten minute tube ride. I think this will take us about 30 minutes to go and walk it. It's a two-thirds longer but a thousand times better. I mean it's a lovely sunny day so I'm already quite a lot happier than I would be if I was down in the bals of the underground system. Right so we're in a place called Hannover Square which is rather nice it's a nice little green away. It's a straightaway, absolutely beautiful giant London plain trees we've dappled like and we've got the branches and some birds flying around. And over here we've got some water.

21:40I'm never noticed this either. We carried on passing Hotel Dormenon, Top Hats and Waste Coats, a giant pink limousine and an old house with purple flowers tumbling over the brickwork. We are entering Hyde Park. It feels like a sudden relief doesn't it? It feels like a whole weight has come off our heads and shoulders. It's so tranquil and peaceful instantly. By going this way we go into a beautiful area of woodland with really long meadow grass and you get butterflies there. And all this nice cream van if you want a nice cream. Which you can already buy a nice cream with a three quid you say but not going on the tube so... Yeah if you're lucky. Head in north out of the park we passed the usual cars and black caps but also some horses coming there by stable. It was a small unexpected detail that's easy to miss if you're in a rush. When you go into the tube or a bus or get into a car it's really teleporting you from one place to another

22:43especially if you're you know bearing your brain in a telephone conversation or some music or something like that. Whereas the more you slow down the more open you are as well to having experiences. After moving to southwest England town used walking to get to know his new surroundings. You know I moved myself to Devon and a key thing I did to get to know my local area was I got the train or the bus to neighbouring villages and towns and walked back in again. It gave me an incredible sense of place and grounding. We've been all the way from Oxford Circus to Pondton. I could see a group of women wearing pink hats and pink tutus so I'm guessing they're on a hendee. Yeah I guess if I'd gone by tube I wouldn't have thought twice about the journey but I think this evening when I go home I'm going to remember bits. There's the power of it I think the motor car and faster forms of travel

23:44have broken our memory and to like asking people good ways to go we can remember that reflex and you know discover places in a way that we used to. I enjoyed my walk with Dan and for the most part it was remarkably straightforward. We only made one small diversion to get round a bus water main in the park but Dan says creating slow ways has revealed that walking is often treated as an afterthought in the way we design and manage our landscape. About a quarter of the time there are things that go wrong and often what that is is that paths turn into roads and the roads just aren't safe to walk down. Sometimes you find that there's a farmer who's blocked a path that should be accessible and for some reason when it comes to walking this thing that's most accessible to the most people that's most affordable, that's most environmentally friendly there's often no signage and if there is signage it's hard for people to understand. So you know what if Britain, what if the world had a footpath network

24:46that was fully properly signed, inviting people, guiding people and supporting people to make those journeys by foot. And given the present reality as we said there are challenges, have you changed your approach are you going to do something different now? So we're evolving slow ways into a much bigger project, much more ambitious project called good ways and good ways will enable people and nonprofit organisations and charities to share walking routes and networks that meet people's different interests and needs and sharing those routes that are great for finding kingfisher's or discovering castles or those things that will motivate people to get out and about and we're hoping that millions of people will join in. Many thanks to Claire Beat for that report. Now let me know if this programme has inspired you to either walk a bit more or spend time outdoors by sending me a WhatsApp message to the number plus 4408,321721. You've been listening to people fixing the world on the documentary.

25:49I'm Maira Nubi and I'll be back next week with more positive news. Until then from me in these words the trees and the birds. Thanks for listening. When you shop online with Ralph's, you'll find more than just real savings and real quality. You'll also find the dependability you expect from browsing to checkout. At Ralph's, that means your groceries can be waiting to go at the store with careful handling from the shop to the handoff. The same quality you'd want if you were choosing them yourself. Save now. Download the app to get $20 off your first order of $75 or more. New customers only terms and conditions apply see online for details. Thanks for watching.