1 . Walking might seem simple. “But it’s not,” explains Peggy Cawthon, a professor at Harvard Medical School. “It’s an amazingly complex behavior when we try to understand how to improve our lives as we age.”     1    ? Here are a few ideas.

Don’t stop exercising

Cawthon agrees that the worst thing a person can do is to stop exercising. “You’ll feel the effects almost immediately,” says Cawthon. Sitting for hours leaves her uncomfortable, and it’s the days when she types that her arthritis (关节炎) doesn’t cause much pain.     2    .

Train yourself to walk with skill

To truly improve your walking, you need to think like an athlete. Imagine you want to play tennis, but you have a bad backhand. Playing lots of tennis won’t fix the problem, Cawthon says.     3    . It’s the same thing with walking.

Give your brain a boost (激励)

    4    . So don’t forget that when working out your fitness plan. Cawthon has been studying an area of the brain related to motivation (动机) and executive function. Subjects with a boost walk more steps on average than the control group, and they have been maintaining that even several months later.

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So when should we face the music about our mobility? There is no final answer for when walking problems begin to come up. “You should be as active as you can at any age,” Cawthon says, noting that people who are healthy in their 20s and 30s are best equipped to deal with future age-related challenges. “The best time to start is now. Next best is tomorrow,” she says.

2 . Back in January, I was determined to get fit seriously.     1     But then just as I was close to giving up again, I discovered a brilliant new way to make exercise better: by turning it into a video-game.

Zwift is essentially a cycling game that you control by riding your real bike, which is equipped with a device called a turbo-trainer. This makes it like an exercise bike. As you ride, the trainer sends signals to your computer or tablet to control the character on screen.     2     For example, as you’re cycling up a hill in the game, you can actually feel the different levels of resistance on the bike.

After signing up for a £12/month subscription, you can participate in virtual cycle rides in 3D-recreations of real places, like London or in fantastical fictional locations invented by the game designers.     3     As you cycle along The Mall towards Buckingham Palace, other real human cyclists appear alongside you, sharing the journey. Though it is obviously only a game, just seeing the character move is surprisingly motivating.

    4     Go a little faster and you’ll be rewarded with a little achievement marker. If you ride harder, you might win a race against another real player and unlock a new item in a regular video game, which can never be matched by a traditional exercise bike.

I’m not the only person who has noticed this.     5     Today there are many other companies chasing the same audience, and they all offer their own unique twists on the formula.