Here’s how exercising outdoors can improve your health and wellbeing.

You burn more calories and blast more fat outside

Taking exercise outside, with its wind resistance, more demanding trails and soft or uneven surfaces such as grass, really does add to the energy demand. Six weeks of running outdoors, when compared with running on the predictable conveyor belt of a treadmill, was found to improve leg muscle strength by researchers reporting in the journal PeerJ, and “induce greater physical fitness improvements”, including a bigger reduction in body fat.

Take strength training outdoors to get stronger quicker

Most studies comparing indoor and outdoor exercise have looked at aerobic activity such as running, swimming and cycling, but last year Henrique Brito, a human performance researcher at the University of Lisbon, examined whether environment makes a difference when it comes to resistance training. Brito and his colleagues tracked 53 adults as they did a body-weight circuit indoors, and another 51 adults who did the same strength workout in a park surrounded by trees. The results, published in Psychology of Sport and Exercise, show that the outdoor exercisers achieved “better performance output”, demonstrated by the fact they typically completed a higher number of repetitions of each exercise — about two more crunches, squats and lunges — in a set time than the indoor group. Brito concluded that this could make a real difference to fitness and strength over time.

Outdoor workouts can reduce anxiety

Wood describes one study conducted by her colleagues at the University of Essex which showed that huge “psychological gains are experienced during physical activity in nature”. Published in the Applied Psychology of Health and Wellbeing journal, the team found that outdoor workouts reduced anxiety, anger and hostility and boosted energy. “Aspects of nature have a huge influence on our mental state,” Woods says. “Taking your workouts outside provides additional benefits for the mind and has therapeutic effects for low mood.”

Researchers from Norway and Florida asked participants to walk 500m twice: first along a tree-lined track, then on a treadmill facing a blank wall. On each occasion they were asked to wear a device that measures brain activity. The results, in the International Journal of Psychophysiology, show a dramatic difference in brain responses and activity outdoors, with participants displaying increased connectivity between brain regions involved in reasoning and attention as well as brainwaves that indicated they were feeling more relaxed.

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You are more likely to stick with exercise if you do it outdoors

A recent OnePoll survey conducted by Ordnance Survey revealed that 46 per cent of the 2,000 British adults questioned said they feel more motivated to exercise outdoors, compared with just 22 per cent who felt the same about using a gym regularly. A review of evidence by Wood’s colleagues at the University of Essex found the mood-boosting effects of exercising in nature to be the reason for better engagement and sticking at it in the longer term. “People find they enjoy exercising outside and because of that are more likely to keep it up,” Wood says.

Running indoors really does take more effort for the same fitness gains

Staring at a treadmill screen rather than absorbing the sights and sounds of nature can make running and walking feel like harder work, but a review of 55 studies involving 1,005 participants in the Journal of Sports Sciences last year found that indoor running and walking really does take more effort for the same fitness outcome. On a treadmill people inadvertently tweak their technique, chopping their stride when running and shortening their step length when walking, which results in an increase in the amount of oxygen they use to complete the activity. “Even if the intensity of exercise is comparable, people tend to find it easier outdoors than inside,” Wood says.

There’s another reason to hop off the treadmill and on to the trails: it could reduce injury risk. A study in the journal PLoS One shows that too much treadmill running at too high an incline stresses the body in a way that could lead to injury.

Forget spin classes — for real muscle gains you need to cycle outside

You might think your spin class pushes you to physical limits, but research suggests that you actually work harder cycling outside. When scientists at the University of Nebraska compared physiological and psychological responses to stationary biking in a lab environment and outdoor cycling for a paper in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, it was the outdoor workout that won, with cyclists able to pedal at a higher intensity. Others reporting in the International Journal of Sports Physiology and Performance have shown that elite cyclists produce much higher levels of muscle power when cycling outdoors compared with performance on an indoor bike.

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Open water swimming can boost mood and reduce hot flushes

Swimming anywhere is a great whole body workout, but taking a dip in rivers and lakes has a proven effect on mood. Dr Heather Massey is a senior lecturer in sport, health and exercise science and a member of the extreme environments laboratory and clinical, health and rehabilitation research team at the University of Portsmouth. Her research found that novice outdoor swimmers who took part in a ten-week introductory course had acute and chronic reductions in negative mood as well as a boost to wellbeing.

Meanwhile, Joyce Harper, a professor of reproductive science at University College London, surveyed 1,114 women, all of them regular cold water swimmers and 785 of whom were going through the menopause for a paper in Post Reproductive Health. Harper and her colleagues discovered that 46.9 per cent of the women reported a significant improvement in anxiety, 34.5 per cent in mood swings, and 30.3 per cent in hot flushes as a result of regular swims outside. “Women said they felt it was mainly the physical and mental effects of cold water that helped their symptoms,” Harper says. “For many the effects are lessened if water is too warm, as it would be indoors, and it is both the outdoor environment and the water temperature that has particular benefits.”

Just a 15-minute session outdoors will boost your vitamin D stores

Exercise outdoors from spring to autumn and you get exposure to natural daylight that boosts your mood and vitamin D stores — exposure that you simply don’t get with artificially lit exercise studios. Vitamin D helps to regulate the amount of calcium and phosphate in the body, which is vital for healthy bones, teeth and muscles. Schedule a walk for between 11am and 3pm when the sun’s rays are at their strongest, exposing some skin such as the forearms, face and legs. According to dermatologists at the British Skin Foundation, a daily 10-15 minutes outdoors for lighter skin types and 25-40 minutes for darker skin types from April onwards tops up your vitamin D supplies while also minimising the risks of sunburn and skin cancer.

It’s leg day and you can’t wait to hit squats. But when you get up to the barbell and begin your warm-up set, you can’t squat down very far. Your ankles feel stiff, preventing you from going down all the way and hitting your normal full range of motion. (Oof.) It may be time to introduce some ankle mobility exercises into your routine.

“Ankle mobility is the ability to move your joints properly, not stiffly, and to have full range of motion,” says certified personal trainer Ari Cobb, CPT. This means you’re able to rotate your ankles in a circular motion, and flex and extend them fully, adds Ashley Nicole, CPT, a certified personal trainer.

Meet the experts: Ari Cobb, CPT, is a trainer and MMA athlete based in Houston, Texas. Ashley Nicole, CPT, is a certified personal trainer and the founder and coach behind RA Warrior Fitness.

We all know that exercise is good for us. But research is increasingly reporting that it can be more beneficial at specific times of the day — from morning workouts helping you to burn fat to evening exercises that help to lower blood pressure.

The University of Regensburg in Germany found recently that being more active in the mornings and evenings could reduce your risk of bowel cancer by 11 per cent. The researchers looked at data from more than 86,000 adults and identified four types of exercisers: those who were more active in the morning; those in the evening; midday movers; and those who were continually active all day.

The study found that those whose exercise levels peaked at either 8am or 6pm had