14 Health Benefit of Trekking and Hiking
When we talk about trekking or hiking, we picture nature, the vast mountain ranges. The peace and calm it can bring to us and the adrenaline rush that makes us want to trek.
Trekking is one of the best options that people around the world acknowledge to restore their mental peace and harmony and bring out that life within them.
Finding a way to proliferate our health both physically and mentally can be truly helping. In the world that we live in today, encompassing uncertain risks like declining health, increasing mental complexities, global warming, and other human vices. Trekking helps us to free our minds and gives us mental peace to fight the various complexities in our day-to-day life.
If you are feeling full of emotions or are just bored, then trekking is a fantastic option to escape all these. To enter into a world of the beauty of nature, the wonders of terrain, and the eye-catching sights that would surely give your mind the needed break. Exploring the beauty of the earth is the utmost therapy to heal yourself and be happy.
Benefits of trekking
Opting to trek to keep your physical and mental status in balance is the most recommended and one of the best ways to train your heart. Being involved in activities like hiking and trekking often help us benefit physically, mentally as well as emotionally.
Sometimes it is healing to take a break from our monotonous life and often do something that isn’t planned but adds to our life value. Trekking and travelling have got far more value than just being in the laps of nature.
Below mentioned are some of the significant benefits of trekking on health and mind that surely will lure you towards giving a shot to it.
1.Proliferate Environmental Awareness:
During your trekking expedition, you would come across a variety of plants and animals in their natural habitat. This would help you know a wide variety of their species as well as uplift your environmental knowledge.
Many plant species are known for their healing and medicinal purposes. Knowing about nature can help you truly understand and value its importance. As a cherry on the cake, the sight of nature’s beauty is an added bonus for you.
2.Improves Cardiovascular and Respiratory Strength:
Trekking takes you away from the polluted cities and gives you a moment to gather freshness of the air. Trekking involves excessive motor activities leading to more oxygen intake, cleansing blood, and increased pumping of blood in the body, thus improving heart efficiency. This adds to the reduction of cholesterol and blood pressure, thus stating the importance of trekking.
According to a Meta-Analysis, walking itself helps reduces the risk of coronary heart diseases by 19%, this obviously depends on the walking pace, distance covered, energy expenditure, etc. While trekking all these factors are covered.
3.Improves Fitness:
Trekking involves great physical input which often ends up training our quadriceps, hamstrings, glutes, lower hip muscles, and bones to a great extent. Carrying out activities like mountain biking, trail running, climbing slopes, covering rough terrain builds our fitness. This helps in increasing our health, strength, physical fitness, and endurance.
Research states that, if you walk at a casual pace for an hour you can burn 200-350 calories, for most people. If you are trekking with a backpack you tend to burn more calories. Thus, helping us to stay fit and burn bad calories in a good way.
4.Improves Metabolism:
Trekking and hiking constitute the rigorous use of our legs to carry out the thrilling treks. This helps us in gaining muscle mass in our legs. In a wider picture we tend to burn calories even while resting, this resting metabolic rate is higher in people with more muscle than fat.
Thereby increases our average metabolic rate. Therefore making trekking or any outdoor activity an important part of our life. Staying hydrated and snacking healthy throughout the trek becomes very necessary.
5.Mental Benefits:
Hiking is the most suitable way to replenish our minds with positive thoughts and peace and throw away stress, anxiety, depression, etc. Being in the laps of nature helps us to cooperate with our life tensions and gives us a boost of positive hormones like endorphin which brings us bliss.
According to a study, exercising releases the hormone Endorphin that helps to have an impact on our physiological functions. It helps reduce the perception of pain while working out thus triggering a positive feeling in the body.
6.Helps to attain perseverance and discipline:
Trekking activities involve extreme focus and perseverance to reach our goals. Disciplined chores like early walk, timely meals, assembling hiking equipment, working in teams, setting up camps, and juggling rigid and uncertain situations while hiking. Therefore, it helps us to push ourselves in achieving our goal and in building our mind stronger for challenges. It brings the needed discipline in our life.
7.Boosts our mood and reduces Stress:
Doesn’t the thought of watching waterfalls, seeing sunrise and sunsets, exploring landscapes, witnessing nature at its best bring peace to you? Well, trekking helps us in attaining that peace and hikes our mood to reduce our worries.
Serotonin, the happy hormone is released in the brain that regulated our mood. Regular physical activities or exercise impacts the serotonin level in the brain thus impacting the level of mood, anxiety, and happiness.
8.Strong bones:
Trekking involves walking, using your legs the most for covering tracks up and down, crossing rivers, hurdling boulders which eventually helps in developing your muscles and make your bones stronger.
Hiking and trekking have proved to be beneficial for people with arthritis or osteoarthritis as it helps to keep the joints mobile and muscles & bones around the joints strong. All you have to do is choose the right comfy shoe and have a right trekking pole that supports you and absorbs the landing impact.
9.Improves Balance:
Trekking and travel help in maintaining the balance of our mind and body. It helps us attain mental agility and provides strength to our core. Carrying out daily physical activities like walking and running helps to expand lower-body strength.
10. Gives us a chance to experience local food, culture, and life:
The treasure of trekking involves the inclusion of delicious and mouth-watering local food that will surely make you experience heaven.
Besides, mingling with local people in the mountains would help you understand deep about their culture and give a sight of their lives. Getting to know folks there and understanding their culture is also a great benefit to add.
11. Helps in gaining new Friends:
Trekking and travel involve meeting with new people, sharing our thoughts and ideas, finding similarities in thought, and often ending up becoming companions for life. This brings people of similar interests together..
12. Inculcate empathy and generosity:
Wandering to different places of the world and mingling with people from all walks of life cultivates values like empathy and generosity within ourselves. This helps in inculcating positive thoughts and values in our heart and help us in understanding others to a deeper level.
13. Grow our softer skills:
Trekking also helps in building our personality. It involves meeting and engaging with people from different walks of life. This results in flourishing the strength of our soft skills or nontechnical skills. These include listening, time management, communication, and interpersonal skills. These are a huge part of our personality today.
14. Detach from technology:
With the current modernization and tech-savvy world, we have become too obsessed with our phones and laptops.
Spending most of the time online with no time for health makes us all mere social zombies. Trekking gives us a break to experience the sights of nature and lets us escape from our small world of gadgets.
Reading the article would have given you an idea about the benefits of trekking or hiking. Our life is full of challenges and we should find a way to escape in nature every now and then. As it is rightly said, ”Nature is a great teacher and a healer” and we can learn everything from it. The importance of trekking includes the wonders of nature, benefits in our health, rejuvenating our mind, helping us cure our illness, and connecting with new people. Believe me, it is recommended by doctors as well as trainers to carrying out physical activities to contempt our mind and soul. Trekking gives us that benefit with incomparable thrill, bliss, and adventure. If you are feeling low from your monotonous life and want a change, I would surely recommend trekking and travelling as a healing aid to your woes.