Some of my best Spanish came from a thirty minute loop around my neighbourhood.
Same route every morning. Same podcast in my ears. Same pace. The houses, the trees, the footpath, all so familiar that my conscious mind had nothing to do except receive the Spanish flowing through my headphones.
I did not plan this as a learning strategy. I planned it as exercise. The podcast was just something to make the walk less boring. But over weeks and months, I noticed that the vocabulary from those walks was sticking in a way that vocabulary from my desk sessions was not. Words I encountered while walking seemed to land deeper, stay longer, and surface more readily in conversation.
I assumed this was a quirk. Then I found the research, and it turns out my brain was doing exactly what brains do when they walk.
The science of walking and memory
A study published in Behavioural Brain Functions in 2014 tested whether walking during vocabulary encoding improved recall compared to sitting. Researchers had subjects learn foreign vocabulary in two conditions, while walking on a treadmill at low intensity, and while sitting at rest.
The walkers remembered more words.
The effect held across two separate experiments. Subjects performed better when they were physically active during the learning compared to when they were sedentary, and even at very light intensity, the kind of gentle walking you would do around your own neighbourhood, the movement improved subsequent recall. Other research in the same area has found that the timing matters too, learning while moving beats learning before or after moving.
The researchers noted something that would have made the ancient Greeks smile. Walking while memorising text used to be a standard practice among philosophers and monks, pacing and reciting, long before anyone had a lab to explain why it worked.
The likely mechanisms are reasonably well understood. Walking increases blood flow to the brain, delivering more oxygen and glucose during the exact moments new information is being processed. It supports the physical infrastructure behind memory formation, and it creates a mild physiological lift that sharpens attention without the interference that more intense exercise can bring.
In plain language, a gentle walk puts your brain in a genuinely good state for absorbing new information. If that information happens to be English flowing through your headphones, the walk is doing double duty.
Why walking beats the desk for listening
Beyond the research, there is a practical side to this too.
When you sit at a desk to listen to a podcast in English, you are competing with distractions. The phone, the laptop, the browser tabs, the impulse to pause and look something up or drift into something else entirely. The desk is a distraction rich environment, and your attention fragments across it.
When you walk, most of that falls away. Your body is occupied with a simple, automatic task. Your eyes are on the path ahead. Your hands are busy with nothing. The only channel available for complex input is your ears, and the podcast has your attention by default rather than by discipline.
There is also something about the rhythm of walking that seems to sync with the rhythm of listening. The pace of footsteps creates a steady pulse the brain settles into, and podcast speech flows across that pulse in a way that feels natural rather than effortful. The experience is closer to absorption than study, which is the state where acquisition tends to happen most deeply.
The habit that builds itself
Most English practice habits require willpower. You have to decide to sit down and read, or choose to open the app, or deliberately carve out time that could go elsewhere.
Walking with English in your ears sidesteps most of that friction, because many people already walk. To work, to the shops, around the park, with the dog. The walk is already happening. The English is just riding along.
At thirty minutes of walking a day, this adds up to roughly 180 hours of English listening per year, a substantial input investment built entirely from time that already existed.
What to actually listen to
The content matters more than the walking itself. A boring podcast on a boring topic listened to during a beautiful walk is still a boring podcast, and your brain will not process it deeply regardless of how much blood is reaching your brain.
Find podcasts that genuinely pull you forward, on topics you would listen to in your own language anyway. True crime, sport, business, comedy, history, culture. The content should make the walk feel shorter, not longer. If you keep checking how much time is left, the content is wrong.
For learners who want to go beyond passive listening, combining the walk with shadowing, speaking along slightly behind the narrator, adds a production dimension on top of the input. Your mouth practises English while your body walks and your ear receives. Three systems training at once, during a walk you were going to take anyway.
The accidental routine
My morning walk became the foundation of my entire language practice without me intending it. The podcast was the anchor. Everything else, the reading, the watching, the conversation sessions, grew around it. The walk was the constant, the thing that happened every day regardless of motivation or mood, because the walk was happening anyway and the headphones went on automatically.
On days when I did not feel like practising, I still walked. Because I walked, I still listened. And because I listened, the input kept accumulating even through the unmotivated stretches. The walk protected the habit from the fluctuations of willpower that quietly kill most language learning routines.
If you want to put whatever your walks have filled your head with to use in real conversation, you can find a teacher on iTalki, or book a session directly with me.
Try This
Tomorrow morning, or whenever your next walk happens, put your headphones in and press play on something in English. Anything that interests you. Walk your normal route at your normal pace. Do not study, do not take notes, do not pause to look things up. Just walk and listen.
Notice how it feels compared to desk listening. Notice whether the focus comes more easily, and whether the walk feels shorter because the content was actually good.
If it works for you the way it worked for me, the headphones will go on automatically within a week, and the habit will build itself from there.
If you have a question about your English, something you have been stuck on or curious about, let me know in the comments. I read every one, and I might turn your question into a future post.
If this post helped, a like lets me know and a restack helps it reach another learner who might need it.
Richard, English fluency coach in Auckland, New Zealand, still doing most of his own Spanish listening around the neighbourhood.
Tools I recommend:
LingQ — find podcasts and content that make your walks feel too short, and read along with transcripts once you are back at your desk
Lingopie — real TV shows and films with interactive subtitles for your evening input once the walking is done
Glossika — add a production dimension to your walks through structured sentence repetition, available in both British and American English
StoryLearning — compelling, story driven English listening at just the right level
iTalki — talk through everything your walks have filled your head with, or book a session directly with me
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