The Surprising Benefits of Nature on Physical Health
Everyday life can be very stressful. All the hustle and bustle of work or school, added onto the constant presence of technology, can be very overwhelming.
I’m not saying that any of this is bad, but sometimes it can be very refreshing to just take a break from it all. Here in Colorado, especially, that might look like spending some time in the great outdoors. Personally, I enjoy a good bike ride now and then to help clear my head.
Natural immune-boosting benefits
Plenty of research points to the ways in which exposure to nature can have positive effects for both your mental and physical health. This can also play into helping with recovery from sports, including martial arts.
First, let’s look at some of the ways that nature can improve your overall health. According to an article from UCLA Health, going outside means exposure to vitamin D, which boosts your immune system.
Another outdoor immune booster? Spending time among the trees. Immersing yourself in a forest means you are breathing in anti-fungal chemicals produced by trees (called phytoncides) that help decrease the risk of tumors and infections.
[Mental Benefits of Walking for Martial Arts]
Calm your mind
Beyond immune benefits, the solitude and escape from normal life that nature offers improves cognitive function and reduces stress. I’m not anti-technology, but sometimes, it’s definitely better to put the phone down and step outside for a little bit. It provides something like a factory reset for your brain, allowing you to come back feeling a lot sharper.
This has many positive implications for athletes. Not only can you reap the above benefits, but studies also show that exposure to nature helps specifically with recovery from sports. Researchers conducted a study on soccer players suffering from mental fatigue. They found that exposure to nature helped players rebuild focus and help with self regulation, including controlling their emotions and mental state.
This finding is especially useful for martial arts practitioners. Martial arts isn’t just a physical sport, it’s a mental one.
You need to be able to regulate your mind and stay calm enough to focus on your opponent, and when you’re mentally fatigued, this is obviously much harder. I’ve certainly felt my performance get worse when I have brain fog, and the mental reset triggered by nature helps clear that fog aside.
Cold plunges for faster recovery
That’s all on the mental side, but exposure to nature and adjacent activities can also help with physical recovery. You may have heard of cold plunging, which has a range of health benefits, including a few that specifically help with recovery from exercise and sports.
The cold water constricts your blood vessels, which triggers increased metabolism and alleviates swelling and muscle damage that comes from exercise, which in turn decreases soreness, allowing for a quicker recovery.
Cold plunging can be done indoors as well as outdoors, but it’s frankly more fun in an outdoor body of water. Plus, when you do it outdoors, you’re getting the other benefits of nature as well as the ones from cold plunging.
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Put your body in repair mode
Nature can also improve rest. When your body’s circadian rhythm is in sync with natural cycles, you get better quality sleep, and you can achieve this simply by exposing yourself to some natural light early in the morning.
Add this to the fact that spending time outside also drops cortisol, the stress hormone. Cortisol clears faster outside than indoors, and lower cortisol puts your body into rest and repair mode, giving you time to recover.
Your heart rate variation, or HRV, increases with time spent outside. High HRV is a marker of good health. It means your body is better able to downshift into that “rest and repair” gear, where you’re actively healing and much less stressed out. Not only can the outdoors actively help you calm down, it has effects that compound into giving you better sleep.
[Recovery: Knowing When It’s Time to Rest]
Enjoy nature’s free medicine
These benefits are not hard to achieve, especially here in Colorado. Even just going for a walk or a run once-daily can help activate some of them.
Every once in a while, it’s a good idea to go up to the mountains and go on a hike or spend some time surrounded by trees. I know that sounds very boring, and it can be hard to just sit still sometimes, but trust me, it’s definitely worth it.
On top of all of this, nature can be a joy to just look at, and it is proven that taking in beauty by itself has mental benefits of its own. In fact, you can reap some of the mental benefits of nature exposure without even going outside. You gain some passive benefits just from looking at footage of nature.
So the next time you’re feeling a bit run down, remember that nature might hold the answers. Take advantage of the many health benefits of the great outdoors, while recovering from sports fatigue brought on by martial arts and other physical activities.
