Sun, air, and movement

If getting outdoors and exercising is so good for us, why is it so hard to fit into the routine each day?

Find a park nearby and schedule a sunset or sunrise walk, jog or run.

Fitness doesn’t require a gym membership or financial commitment. For many of us, a local park is waiting around the corner and offers a chance to get some movement. 

Add audiobooks, podcasts or a phone call and your 40-60 minute walk is a more effective use of time.

Studies continue to show that walking is an often-overlooked fitness strategy that comes with zero risks and minimal effort or maximum benefit. Even with an injury, walking is still possible (slow down the pace or go for less time.)

Are one or two intense workouts per week equal to walking every day for 30 minutes or more? 

Steady and consistent movement each day includes standing between periods of sitting. Consistent and varied movement is what our ancestors practiced rather than intense monotonous cardio workouts.

I think the reason a lot of people hate to exercise, or strongly avoid it, is because we are led to believe that it won’t be fun if it is “real” exercise. 

What is real exercise?

Everyone is different, some of us need stronger movement. But in our current culture of adrenal fatigue, many people actually would do better just remembering to get outside and walk each day. Especially if the alternative is an exhausting gym session that leaves the person more tired than they were to begin with. 

But walking is definitely “real exercise”.

Natural movement increases circulation, lymphatic flow and if done outdoors, exposes us to sunlight (with the host of benefits from getting at least 20 minutes of sun per day).

What is the purpose of fitness, anyway?

Is your goal to have a better body? Increase muscle tone? Target a certain area of your body?

Walking and getting outdoors on a regular basisequates to physical, mental and spiritual health. Going to a gym can also equal these things, but being indoors under artificial blue light without fresh air has its downsides.

Artificial light has three main issues

The color temperature is unnatural and often has too much “blue spectrum”, which is linked to serious disease and circadian rhythm dysregulation especially when blue light exposure happens after the sun goes down. Only the spectrum of candle and firelight are what we evolved for after sunset.

The flicker rate and intensity of artificial light is far more the light of the sun. Sunlight is calm, constant and confident while most fluorescent or LED lighting has a varying flicker rate that irritates the nervous system.

The heat produced along with light in sunlight’s full spectrum of UV to infrared is extremely healing and humans have evolved with this form of light. Most of us work indoors and spend little to no time outdoors, especially in bad weather. Exposing the skin to a reasonable amount of natural light will depend on the person and region, but 20 minutes per day of pure sun exposure with no sunglasses or suntan lotion is a good place to start experimenting with. 20 minutes is a significant amount, it does make an impact, and most of us can get outside for at least that amount of time. Even on a cloudy day the sunlight is actually strong enough to have an impact.

Fresh air

Even in polluted cities like Los Angeles (where I used to live) the fresh air outdoors is superior to indoor air. In fact, indoor air is orders of magnitude more polluted than outdoor air! Open a window when possible. Use a quality air filter like the Air Doctor. Workout and do intensive breathing exercises outdoors. There are always exceptions to this, such as severe pollution days. Weatherbug.com offers a global pollution monitor so you can check the air quality in real-time where you live.

As a general rule, just avoid indoor air whenever possible, especially during times of working out where your respiration volume is greatly increased.

Contact with nature

Outdoor fitness gets us in contact with nature, away from digital screens and into a fractal-based environment (rather than manmade). The brain has been shown to respond to fractals. 

The patterns and layout of nature are fractal, the growth and placement of plants and animal movements are what humans evolved with over time. Trapped indoors, with 100% manmade environs, it puts measurable stress on our nervous system.

Switching fitness to outdoors gains us valuable nature-fractal time for additional benefits.

Rather than artificial angles, nature is all about curves, fractals and plant growth that follows non-logical placement. Plants and trees have growth placement that follows fractal patterns, and there is a healing effect to being exposed to these alignments.

Walking on uneven grounds, such as over rocks and stumps, stimulates the movement centers in the brain to “come back to life” after long periods of time simply walking on flat surfaces, with the occasional staircase.

Balance and coordination gained by walking on unpaved surfaces are a potential benefit of outdoor fitness.

The reality is that many people dread working out because they are operating with false information about “calories in-calories out” and are told that only intensive exercise will be effective for losing weight or getting fit.

Luckily this isn’t the reality.

Finding a consistent fitness practice can include walking, moderate exercise and “HIIT” workout in some cases.

Establishing a healthy metabolism and body is always a work in progress that we build for ourselves over time.

Exposure to natural light, fresh air and actually looking forward to fitness is essential to “actually doing fitness”.

What kind of fitness do you enjoy? Have you discovered interesting ways to “hack” your fitness routine and have fun while working out?

Here is South Denver, I have an awesome park minutes from my house with a bluff that views downtown Denver and the amazing mountains to the west. 

Despite authoring this post, I myself have to put a reminder into my google calendar to keep myself on task to do the walk, and as with anything there is resistance to getting out the door. Even just 40 minutes of waking leaves me feeling so refreshed that I wondered why I ever resisted it in the first place.

I think it comes down to screen addiction (cell phone, computer). That’s a topic for a future post.

The loop takes me about 40 min, just about enough time to listen to a podcast or catch up on the latest in electronic music.

For fitness classes indoors, though not ideal, I love Vinyasa, Kundalini and Corepower yoga as well as Parkour.

If you live in the Denver area and are looking for acupuncture, nutrition consulting and/or wellness consultations, I am accepting new patients at my clinic in Lone Tree!

—> Check out my bio and click here for information on booking a free initial session with me.

Conclusion

I hope you find some creative ways to stay active. I find that traditional indoor environments allow me to pursue interesting fitness classes, while simply taking a walk in nature has a huge range of benefits unto itself that is unrivaled by any “gym” or class. The latest health research supports this as well, its not just my personal opinion 🙂