Fitness

The Acute Benefits of Exercising Outdoors

By XPT Life | Thu Feb 17 2022

We often focus on why and how we train. Where we train, however, has a huge impact on what we get out of it. 

The evolution of modern society has resulted in an increase in sheltered exercise. You’re not alone if your routine looks something like this: Head to the gym, work out indoors, drive home. With the at-home training boom, even that might be exotic. Although these environments come with their advantages, they severely limit our ability to get the most out of our movement., 

Exercising outdoors is associated with a host of health benefits. Here are just a few:

  1. Sunlight has been proven to kickstart our circadian rhythms and supply Vitamin-D to our bodies, leading to sharper mental focus and higher levels of energy.

  2. Simply being outside can decrease cortisol levels, the leading hormone for stress. 

  3. Moving along inconsistent terrain forces your body to work harder to sustain consistent output and your mind to stay sharp to adapt on the fly. 

  4. Consistently spending time outdoors allows our brain to enter “self-fascination mode”, a mindfulness state that improves our ability to think, perform tasks, and process information on a daily basis. 

  5. Breathing fresh air cleans the lungs and improves overall health.

  6. Exposing our bodies to different temperatures forces us to adapt and increases our resilience towards other stressors.

In the pursuit of extreme performance, it’s clear that we can’t ignore the power of exposure to the outdoors. So for your next workout, get outside and enjoy all of the benefits of exercising in the natural world.

Explore our brand new primal movements collection to reconnect with the way we moved when the natural world was all we had.