Start Small, Live Long: Movement As A Lifelong Mindset

A single habit can protect your future mind. We dig into why daily walking—especially for women—delivers outsized benefits for memory, mood, and long-term cognitive health, and how to make it fit when your calendar is already bursting. Drawing on research around gray matter, hippocampal blood flow, and executive function, we connect the science to a simple routine you can actually stick to: walking during internal calls, short outdoor loops, and small strength add-ons when life allows.

I share how an hour on a treadmill during morning meetings became my anchor, why that brain-scan image of intact gray matter at 85 changed my motivation, and how to push past the “it’s just walking” critique with data and lived results. We also get practical about barriers—childcare, commute timing, fatigue after heavy lifts—and the tools that lower friction, from an affordable walking pad to stacking steps with everyday tasks. If you’ve ever stalled out on a 5 a.m. gym plan, you’ll hear a kinder approach that still compounds: start where you are, keep it consistent, and let your identity shift toward “someone who moves.”

By the end, you’ll have a realistic blueprint to boost processing speed, focus, creativity, sleep quality, and stress resilience without overhauling your life. We also look ahead to seasons when schedules open up and heavier training can layer in to support muscle and bone health. If you’re ready to trade all-or-nothing for always-something, press play and walk with us.

If this conversation helped, follow the show, share it with a friend who needs a gentle nudge, and leave a quick review so more women can find practical strategies that protect their minds and time.

Chapters

• 0:00 Cold Morning, Warm Welcome
• 0:13 Why Walking Matters For The Female Brain
• 2:07 Brain Scans, Gray Matter, And Aging
• 3:28 Building A Sustainable Walking Routine
• 6:13 Cognitive And Mood Benefits Explained
• 8:45 Start Small And Make It Fit

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

Hello everyone, this is Still Rose's podcast. This podcast was created for women by women to elevate women's voices. I hope everyone is doing very well. It's been really cold, and I complain about it every episode, and I'll continue to complain about it until it's not really cold. Something that I've been doing, and I actually have talked about it before, but I wanted to talk about it again now, with health and wellness being top of mind in January, was the benefits of walking every day on the female brain. I had I read something recently, and I'm gonna do a little bit more research so I can bring it to you guys about the longevity that exercising gives you. Now, I'm not just talking about physically your body, which actually is huge, like making sure you have that physical element for your body and like your muscle tone, bone density. It's important for all this. And obviously you want to look and feel good, but it actually has a huge benefit to your brain. And this the article that I was looking at, it actually showed this a scan of a person's brain that exercised throughout their life versus somebody who is mostly sedentary sedentary. I can never say that word right, but somebody who mostly sits all day, which, you know, raise your hand. I work at a desk from nine to five. Um, the person who moved, the person who exercised, their gray matter was intact at 85. Your gray matter is where your cognitive function happens in your brain. The person who sat around mostly throughout their lives and didn't do much physical activity, they had lost a majority of their grain matter, gray matter by 85, which means they're not functioning to the best of their ability. They've lost a lot of memory, they've lost their focus. This is the when you see the older person and they really can't help themselves, like this is that. And to be perfectly honest with you, that spurred me on more than like pretty much anything else. My husband consistently, when he is trying to get me to exercise, is like, come on, you know, you want to look good in the bathing suit and this and that. And I'm like, yeah, I guess I do. I do. You know, like it's not that I don't care. I do care about that. But this actually matters more to me. Retaining my brain and my function, my cognitive function is actually much more critical to me than anything else, looks-wise. Now, looks will be great. That's gonna go hand in hand, but the cognitive function is much more important to me. So something that I am able to do every day without fighting, without fighting myself, is walking. Now, this past year, I was blessed with this really great job. And there, my boss is really truly amazing. And so I'm able to walk during internal calls. It became like a thing. She started doing it, and I was like, well, I'm gonna start doing it too. If she can do it, I'm gonna do it. And thus, almost every single morning, unless I'm very busy and need to be like sitting to do something, majority of the days of the week, I walk on my treadmill for about an hour in the morning every morning during my morning meeting. That nice hour-long walk really helps set me for the day. And I actually miss it. I physically miss it when I don't get to do it. Now, you're sitting here thinking to yours like, well, you're just walking, like you're not really doing anything. That's what my husband says. He's like, You're just walking, like you really need to challenge yourself. You need to do this, you need to do that. Yeah, yeah. No, you're right. You're absolutely right. I do actually need to do more. However, the walking is really what I can fit into my current schedule today. My biggest challenge with working out is fitting it into what I currently do. Because the only way to fit working out in is if I drop something else. And I don't have anything else to drop really at this point. Like everything's pretty critical. I've culled down everything that I do quite a bit. So walking is actually something that like I can do it. I need to be able to just like, you know, that that I can weave in. I am excited because in the next year or two, the next one to two years, my kids are all going to transition from their current school to the older school. And the older school starts with kids on the bus at 6.55 in the morning, which means that I would be getting my mornings back and be able to go to the gym. I'm thrilled. When the kids were really little, when the kids were really little, I used to work out every morning. We would drop them off at seven o'clock at daycare. I would go and work out for an hour and a half, then I would have time to hop on to work, and it was all good. Where I currently live, they don't get picked up until 8:55. That was it. That was it. That shot my whole morning. So I get to do the walking, right? For now, this is where I'm at. Um, when I looked it up to see, well, how is this benefiting me? And I've done this a couple of times. Dealing walking significantly benefits the female brain by boosting cognitive function, enhancing mood, improving creativity, and lowering risk of cognitive decline. With some studies suggesting women gain greater mental well-being from low-intensity exercise like walking, improving sleep and brain resilience through increased blood flow and brain-derived growth factors. So cognitive benefits are memory and learning and increases blood flow to the hippocampus, vital for memory and learning, improving recall and preventing age-related decline. I wonder if walking on my conference calls is why I'm able to remember more from the conference calls, but let's continue on. Processing and focus boosts process speed, boosts processing speed and executive functions, planning, focusing, multitasking. Well, we all need that. Brain structure promotes healthier brain tissue and white matter linked to better cognitive health. Um, mood enhancement, stress reduction, increased energy. Let's see here. Creativity boosts, mental clarity, better sleep, brain resilience, reduced decline. I mean, there's like, if you Google benefits of walking every day, there are so many things here. And I think the biggest barrier for most of us, and I know the biggest barrier for me, as I said, was when am I doing it? Now, this was a fix for me. Prior to that, I was walking outside every day. Um in 2024, I was walking outside every single day for like 30 or 40 minutes, but then that got a little bit too complicated with my current job. So I had to find a different way to do it. So this was the fix. This is what what I found. And then once a month, twice a month, I try to work out with my husband because he's very good at it. And for now, that has to be good enough. Like I am doing what I can and combined with healthy diet, I'm hoping that this is gonna be it. And for now, like I'm gonna suck it up, I'm gonna do what I can and be able to move forward from there. But the point is that you find something that will work for your schedule that is not gonna be a huge lift to tackle every single day. The things that I get most discouraged about doing are the things that I feel like are huge tasks that are gonna take a lot out of me. When I work out, and granted, I don't work out heavy a lot. So when I do lift weights, even if it's just a small like couple of sets or three sets per exercise, I'm so fatigued afterwards because obviously I'm not used to working out. If you're used to working out all the time and you do it consistently, then you're not gonna get as fatigued. But that's like a big barrier for me, is because when my husband on Saturday at 11 a.m. is like, hey, let's work out for two hours, which is what we used to do before we had kids, I don't want to because then I have to make lunch and then I gotta clean that up, and then I gotta make dinner, and then I gotta clean that up. Most of the time on the weekends I'm podcasting, or I'm working on other business ideas. You know, like I have other things that I want to fit in there too that are really important to me. So it's a matter of finding, and this is like broken record Jenny on Still Roses podcast, but it's a matter of finding something that suits you and your lifestyle. If you try to force yourself into I'm getting up at 5 a.m. every day and I'm going to the gym and I'm working out for an hour, you are going to fail at that. Unless, unless you really love it. I used to love getting up early. But if you're putting that kind of pressure on yourself, most likely you're not going to be successful because it's something that like you don't really either want to do or it's something that like is taking so much out of you that it's impossible for you to achieve it. So the idea here is that you're gonna start with something that's achievable. Walking for me for an hour is achievable. It's easy for me. I can do it while I'm working. It makes me feel good that I'm even doing something, period. So you have to just find what's gonna work for you. And perhaps it's not walking inside, but I will say this walking pads, you don't need a whole treadmill. That's the other part that people get hung up on. I need the equipment. I have to go to a gym. I need to, I need to pay for the gym membership. Well, yeah, you could. Like it's it's good to have the gym membership. However, are you really gonna go? I'm currently paying$25 a month and I never go. Walking pads are not terribly expensive. They're about$100 on Amazon. If you wait for a sale day, you'll probably be able to catch something really good. There's some nice ones in here right now on sale. But again, for$100, that's what, four months of a gym membership that you might not ever use. But a walking pad, if you walk work from home, is something that's viable that you can actually use. Sometimes I grocery shop while I'm walking. You know, you kind of have to just do what you have to do. And again, as a mother and a working professional, finding some time to do something like this for myself is really hard to do. But this is something I'm proud that I'm continuing to do because it is something I'm able to fit in. Um, and I do hope that I'm able to expand and enhance as I as I go because the benefits you already heard of just simply walking are tremendous. Imagine actually working out, really feeding your muscles and your bones. I mean, that does so much to your health that it's it's crazy. I mean, I'm wondering how the whole workout surge is going to impact the amount of people living into their hundreds. It's gonna be truly amazing to see because now, you know, when I was in high school and grammar school, high school, college, working out was something that like athletes did, you know, it wasn't something that like everybody was going to the gym and it was like a social thing. Now people are going to the gym. Like it's a it's a big deal. Like high school kids, my stepson, huge gym person, you know, and there's young women at the gym. Like, I mean, going in droves. I think this is amazing. This is huge, this is a huge deal for our health. So try to find something. And again, start with something that's like five minutes. Do something small. That's all you have to do. When my dad started working out when he found out that he had diabetes, he started with just 10 minutes on the treadmill. That's all he started with. He couldn't really do much, but he was able to do that. And then it kind of ballooned from there and he was able to do more. One of my uncles, I always think about him. He did spin classes at like 5:30 a.m. every single day. Like, this is amazing. He's gonna live for a longer time and be healthier and be able to move more because he did that. This is a big deal. So I do really hope that you hear this and think, like, oh, how can I make this work? What can I do? And perhaps it is just three sets of squats every day. That's fine. But as long as you're doing something to get yourself started. I hope you found this episode informative. I really appreciate you guys hanging out with me. Um and more to come as we gain momentum into 2026. The format of the episodes have shifted a bit, but I really do hope that you like the shorter format better. It's a little bit more digestible. And I get to actually squeeze in more topics per week. Um episodes you'll see are going to flow and be released based on my availability with my work. So it ebbs and flows, as you can tell. But I was able to get some good episodes in this week. So I hope you enjoyed them. And thank you for hanging out with me. And I will catch you on the next one. Take care.