Why Leaders Should Move to Think Better
When an executive is mentally stuck, the instinct is often to work harder.
Stay at the desk. Read the document again. Open another spreadsheet. Have another coffee. Push through.
But leadership is cognitive work. Strategy, judgement, problem-solving, creativity, emotional control and decision-making all depend on the quality of the brain doing the work.
So there is another question worth asking:
What if one of the simplest ways to change the state of the brain is to move the body?
Movement is usually discussed as a health behaviour. For leaders, it deserves to be discussed as a performance behaviour too.
The Executive Brain Does Not Operate Separately From the Body
Modern leadership work creates an artificial separation between thinking and moving.
We sit to develop strategy. We sit to solve problems. We sit in meetings to generate ideas. Movement is often treated as something that happens before work, after work or when the “real work” is finished.
Biologically, that distinction makes little sense.
A 2025 meta-review combined 30 systematic reviews and meta-analyses, representing 383 unique studies and 18,347 participants. Acute exercise produced a small-to-moderate overall improvement in cognitive performance, with benefits observed across attention, executive function, memory and information processing. The largest effects were observed when cognition was assessed after exercise.¹
This does not mean a short walk automatically produces a better CEO decision.
It means something more useful:
The physiological state of the body can influence cognitive performance.
For a leader whose primary tools are attention, judgement and thinking, movement therefore belongs in the performance conversation.
BDNF: Why Movement Matters to the Brain
One biological mechanism that has attracted considerable attention is brain-derived neurotrophic factor, or BDNF.
BDNF is involved in neuronal health and neuroplasticity—the brain’s capacity to adapt and modify connections. It is sometimes described informally as “fertilizer for the brain.”
A meta-analysis of 55 studies in healthy adults found that peripheral blood BDNF concentrations were significantly higher following a single session of exercise.²
BDNF should not be oversimplified. Blood concentrations are not a direct measure of everything happening inside the brain, and BDNF is only one of several mechanisms through which exercise may influence cognition.
But the executive implication is important.
Exercise is not merely training the cardiovascular system and muscles. It produces biological responses relevant to the organ leaders depend on most: the brain.
When Strategy Is Stuck, Walking May Help
Consider a familiar executive experience.
You have been staring at a strategic problem for an hour.
The numbers are unchanged. The presentation is unchanged. Your thinking is going in circles.
So you leave the desk and walk.
Ten minutes later, a different possibility appears.
Research by Oppezzo and Schwartz provides an interesting empirical basis for this experience. Across four experiments, walking improved divergent creative thinking compared with sitting. In one experiment, 81% of participants showed improved divergent-creativity performance while walking. Importantly, walking did not improve every form of cognition; performance on a convergent-thinking task did not show the same benefit.³
That distinction is valuable for leaders.
A walking meeting may not be the place to approve a detailed financial model.
But when the task involves generating alternatives, reframing a problem, exploring a strategy or developing new ideas, movement may be useful.
This turns walking from a “break from work” into a potential thinking tool.
Movement Between High-Pressure Meetings
There is another executive application: stress transitions.
A difficult board discussion ends at 2:00 p.m.
At 2:05 p.m., another senior-management meeting begins.
The body may have left the first meeting, but physiologically the leader may still be carrying it into the next one.
A 2024 systematic review of 31 studies involving 1,386 adults examined whether acute exercise altered responses to subsequent laboratory stressors. Acute exercise was associated with reliable reductions in blood-pressure and cortisol reactivity, while effects on heart-rate reactivity and self-reported stress were mostly negligible.⁴
These studies were not conducted specifically with CEOs moving between board meetings, so we should not overstate the finding.
But they raise a useful leadership question:
Does every transition between demanding meetings need to be filled with email?
Sometimes the better transition may be:
Meeting → Movement → Next Meeting
A short period of movement may provide something another five minutes of screen time cannot: a change in physiological state.
A Five-Minute Executive Reset
The practical application does not need to be complicated.
When you notice:
My thinking is stuck.
My attention is fading.
My stress is still carrying over from the last meeting.
I need a different perspective.
Do not automatically respond by pushing harder.
Stand up.
Walk for five or ten minutes.
Take the stairs.
Step outside.
Turn an appropriate one-to-one into a walking conversation.
Then return to the problem.
The objective is not to escape difficult work.
It is to create better conditions for doing difficult work.
Rethinking the Walking Meeting
Not every meeting should become a walking meeting.
Detailed financial reviews, presentations requiring screens and formal decision meetings may clearly be better seated.
But other executive conversations are different.
A one-to-one.
A coaching conversation.
Brainstorming.
Exploring a new strategy.
Reframing a problem.
These may not require a boardroom at all.
For time-poor leaders, the walking meeting is particularly interesting because it does not add another task to the calendar. It combines movement, conversation and thinking within time that was already allocated.
From Wellness to Executive Capacity
Organizations invest heavily in executive capability.
Strategy programmes.
Leadership development.
Communication training.
Decision frameworks.
Executive coaching.
All of these are valuable.
But capability still has to be accessed through a biological system.
A leader may know how to think strategically, regulate emotion and solve complex problems. The question is whether the brain has the capacity to access those capabilities consistently across a demanding day.
Movement is not the answer to every performance problem.
But neither should it be dismissed as merely a wellness activity.
The evidence suggests that acute exercise can influence cognition, creative ideation, BDNF and aspects of physiological stress reactivity.¹⁻⁴
That makes movement relevant to a much bigger question:
How do we create the biological conditions that allow leadership capability to be expressed?
Leadership Insight
An executive walking outside at 3:00 p.m. may appear to be taking a break.
But what if that executive is working on the most important problem of the day?
For leaders, thinking is work.
And sometimes movement can support that work.
So the next time your brain is stuck, your attention is fading or you are carrying the stress of one meeting into the next, resist the instinct to simply push harder.
Stand up.
Walk.
Move.
Then return to the work with a different state.
Movement is not necessarily time away from executive performance.
It can be part of executive performance.
References
1. Chang YK, Ren FF, Li RH, Ai JY, Kao SC, Etnier JL. Effects of acute exercise on cognitive function: a meta-review of 30 systematic reviews with meta-analyses. Psychol Bull. 2025;151(2):240–259. doi:10.1037/bul0000460.
2. Dinoff A, Herrmann N, Swardfager W, Lanctôt KL. The effect of acute exercise on blood concentrations of brain-derived neurotrophic factor in healthy adults: a meta-analysis. Eur J Neurosci. 2017;46(1):1635–1646. doi:10.1111/ejn.13603.
3. Oppezzo M, Schwartz DL. Give your ideas some legs: the positive effect of walking on creative thinking. J Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cogn. 2014;40(4):1142–1152. doi:10.1037/a0036577.
4. Morava A, Dillon K, Sui W, Alushaj E, Prapavessis H. The effects of acute exercise on stress reactivity assessed via a multidimensional approach: a systematic review. J Behav Med. 2024;47(4):545–565. doi:10.1007/s10865-024-00470-w.