Fitness
Green exercise: why an outdoor workout will make you fitter and slimmer
Going for a run in the sunshine or doing some stretches under the trees in the park is certainly a more pleasant experience than working out under the strip lights of a windowless gym. And according to scientists it could also be much better for your mind and body.
Dr Carly Wood, a senior lecturer in sport and exercise science at the University of Essex, is a researcher in “green exercise” and says the power of outdoor workouts should not be underestimated. “There is so much evidence that by switching to doing your exercise outside you can boost your body and brain,” she says. “In our research we have found powerful mental health benefits from working out under an open sky, especially when surrounded by nature. But there are additional physical gains too compared to exercising indoors.”
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.
While exercise is known to improve memory, scientists have mostly studied this effect by using behavioral tests or brain imaging methods like MRIs, says Michelle Voss, PhD, one of the study’s authors, a professor, and the director of the Health, Brain, and Cognitive Lab at the University of Iowa in Iowa City.
But she says these approaches can’t precisely identify where “ripples” originate, particularly in the deep brain structures like the hippocampus, a part of the brain strongly connected to memory and learning, she says.
The current study, published in Brain Communications, recorded electrical activity directly, using surgically implanted (intracranial) electrodes. “This allowed us to observe how exercise changes the brain’s memory circuits in real time,” Dr. Voss says.
20-Minute Bursts of Exercise Increase Brain Ripples
The participants performed a 5-minute warm-up and then rode a stationary bike for 20 minutes at a pace they could maintain. Researchers recorded their brain activity before and after the biking session.
The electrodes showed an increased rate of so-called sharp-wave ripples from the hippocampus and connections with cortical regions of the brain, which are involved in learning and memory.
“Sharp-wave ripples have long been known from animal studies to play a central role in memory,” Voss says, adding that recent studies using intracranial recordings in humans also support the importance of ripples for human memory.
“Our findings are the first to show that exercise can modulate these ripple signals in the human brain,” she says.
Researchers also observed that larger increases in heart rate during exercise were associated with larger changes in ripple activity in cortical networks, Voss adds.
What’s Already Known About Exercise, Memory, and Learning
Exercise helps build connections between neurons, which deepens and strengthens brain networks, Franssen says.
Physical activity also improves metabolism, which improves insulin sensitivity, helping blood sugar regulation and giving the brain a “more stable and reliable supply of fuel,” Dr. Perlmutter says.
“This is critically important because the brain is an energy-intensive organ, consuming roughly 20 percent of the body’s energy despite representing only a small fraction of body weight,” he adds.
The Research Has Limitations
Voss says researchers were careful to “exclude signals that contained epileptic activity. However, of course, we can’t statistically control for the accumulated effects of having epilepsy on the brain.”
The exercise-brain ripple patterns observed in the current study also closely match those observed in healthy adults using noninvasive brain imaging, such as MRI, she added.
“That convergence across very different methods is one of the strongest indicators that the effects are not specific to epilepsy, but reflect a more general human brain response to exercise,” Voss said.
Researchers also didn’t directly test memory performance, Voss notes. “While hippocampal ripples are strongly linked to memory processing in decades of neuroscience research, the next step will be to measure how exercise-related changes in ripples relate to memory performance in the same individuals.”
Future studies should also compare exercise with other everyday activities, such as sitting quietly or light movement, to determine how specific these effects are to aerobic exercise at the intensity that was studied, she says.
Satisfy Your Brain’s Exercise Craving
It’s never too early or too late to start exercising for brain health, Franssen says.
People of any age, from grade-school children to people in their nineties, can benefit from increased physical activity, Perlmutter says. “My recommendation is to consider taking advantage of the connection between physical activity and brain health across the entire range of human aging.”
Any type of exercise is great, Franssen says, but especially “repetitive behaviors,” like swimming, jogging, and walking.
“Sometimes we let the hugeness of putting in a huge fitness routine get in our way,” she says. “Having a little exercise snack every so often is also very important to improving cognition.”
Increasing our level of physical fitness leads to a bigger release of brain-boosting proteins following one session of exercise, a new study led by a UCL researcher has found.
The study, published in Brain Research, took a group of inactive unfit participants through a 12-week training programme of cycling three times per week and made them fitter. Researchers found as their fitness increased, so did the amount of brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) released following exercise, resulting in improved brain function.
Just 15 minutes of moderate to vigorous aerobic exercise releases BDNF, a brain protein which is known to support the formation of new neurons and new synapses (connections between brain cells), and maintains the health of existing neurons. This is the first study to show that for unfit people, just 12 weeks of consistent training can boost the brain’s response to a single 15-minute workout.
The study, led by Dr Flaminia Ronca (UCL Surgery & Interventional Science, and the Institute of Sport, Exercise and Health), involved 30 participants – 23 male and seven female – taking part in the 12-week programme. To assess fitness levels throughout the programme, participants completed VO2max tests every six weeks, which measures the maximum rate of oxygen your body can consume and use during intense exercise.
BDNF levels were measured pre- and post-VO2max testing, alongside a series of cognitive and memory tests, while also measuring changes in brain activity in the prefrontal cortex – where executive functions such as decision-making, emotion regulation, attention and impulsivity are controlled.
By the final week of the trial, results showed that baseline levels of BDNF did not change, but participants did show a larger spike of BDNF following intense exercise, compared to how their brains responded to intense exercise before the 12-week programme. This was linked to improvements in VO2max (aerobic fitness).
Higher overall BDNF levels and stronger exercise-induced increases were also associated with changes in activity across key areas of the prefrontal cortex during attention and inhibition tasks, though not during memory tasks.
Overall, the results showed that increasing physical fitness can enhance the brain’s ability to produce BDNF in response to acute bouts of exercise, which can have a strong positive influence on neural activity.
Lead author Dr Flaminia Ronca said: “We’ve known for a while that exercise is good for our brain, but the mechanisms through which this occurs are still being disentangled. The most exciting finding from our study is that if we become fitter, our brains benefit even more from a single session of exercise, and this can change in only six weeks.”
Notes to editors:
For more information or to speak to the researchers involved, please contact: Tom Cramp, UCL Media Relations , T: +447586 711698, E: [email protected]
The research paper: ‘BDNF relates to prefrontal cortex activity in the context of physical exercise’, Flaminia Ronca, Cian Xu, Ellen Kong, Dennis Chan, Antonia Hamilton, Giampietro Schiavo, Ilias Tachtsidis, Paola Pinti, Benjamin Tari, Tom Gurney, Paul W. Burgess, is published in Brain Research, March 2026,
About UCL (University College London)
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Since 1826, we have championed independent thought by attracting and nurturing the world’s best minds. Our community of more than 50,000 students from 150 countries and over 16,000 staff pursues academic excellence, breaks boundaries and makes a positive impact on real world problems.
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Journal
Brain Research
DOI
10.1016/j.brainres.2026.150253
Method of Research
Experimental study
Subject of Research
People
Article Title
BDNF relates to prefrontal cortex activity in the context of physical exercise
Article Publication Date
4-Mar-2026
Media Contact
Tom Cramp
University College London
[email protected]
Journal
Brain Research
DOI
10.1016/j.brainres.2026.150253
Journal
Brain Research
DOI
10.1016/j.brainres.2026.150253
Method of Research
Experimental study
Subject of Research
People
Article Title
BDNF relates to prefrontal cortex activity in the context of physical exercise
Article Publication Date
4-Mar-2026
Tags
/Health and medicine/Human health/Physical exercise
bu içeriği en az 2000 kelime olacak şekilde ve alt başlıklar ve madde içermiyecek şekilde ünlü bir science magazine için İngilizce olarak yeniden yaz. Teknik açıklamalar içersin ve viral olacak şekilde İngilizce yaz. Haber dışında başka bir şey içermesin. Haber içerisinde en az 12 paragraf ve her bir paragrafta da en az 50 kelime olsun. Cevapta sadece haber olsun. Ayrıca haberi yazdıktan sonra içerikten yararlanarak aşağıdaki başlıkların bilgisi var ise haberin altında doldur. Eğer yoksa bilgisi ilgili kısmı yazma.:
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Tags: 12-week cycling training program benefitsbrain plasticity and physical fitnessbrain-derived neurotrophic factor after exerciseeffects of aerobic exercise on BDNFexercise and neuron healthexercise-induced neurogenesisfitness level impact on brain proteinsfitness training for cognitive improvementimproving brain function through fitnessmoderate to vigorous aerobic exercise effectsphysical fitness and brain healthVO2max and brain function correlation
SOLE Fitness announces new additions to its home exercise bike range, with models including built-in screens, resistance systems, and notably, zero monthly subscription fees.
— SOLE Fitness has announced a new range of home exercise bikes aligning with its policy against mandatory monthly subscription fees – addressing a growing concern among cost-conscious fitness enthusiasts.
For more information, visit: https://www.soletreadmills.com/collections/bikes
The announcement comes as subscription fatigue intensifies across the home fitness market – where hidden costs of ongoing memberships have become a significant pain point for buyers. Many consumers now actively seek alternatives that deliver premium features without the financial burden of perpetual fees – and SOLE Fitness offers its range in direct response.
Technical capabilities across the range support the no-subscription experience through innovative design and robust hardware. For instance, SOLE Fitness cites the SB1200 exercise bike as a suitable option for its 10-inch touchscreen – including preloaded entertainment applications.
SOLE’s team notes that this particular model also incorporates 100 levels of adjustable magnetic resistance, offering a broad spectrum of intensity for diverse workout preferences. A 35-pound flywheel contributes to smooth, consistent pedaling motion, while the durable steel frame supports users up to 300 pounds.
Elsewhere in the range, SOLE Fitness offers options across recumbent, upright, and indoor cycling styles to accommodate different fitness goals and space constraints.
The LCR Recumbent Bike is an example of a comfortable seated design with back support, ideal for low-impact cardio sessions, coming with 40 levels of magnetic resistance. The B94 Upright Bike, meanwhile, delivers a traditional bike posture with 20 levels of resistance, suited for users seeking straightforward training without advanced touchscreen features.
Central to the value proposition is the SOLE+ App, which provides zero-cost online fitness classes to customers who own SOLE equipment. The app offers hundreds of home gym video tutorials ranging from basic to advanced routines – standing in contrast to platforms that charge separately for similar content.
As explained by SOLE Fitness, its overall range is engineered for smooth, silent rides through magnetic resistance systems, sturdy steel frames, and precision components that deliver a premium indoor cycling experience. Magnetic resistance eliminates the wear and noise associated with friction pads, while the structural integrity of the frames ensures stability during high-intensity intervals.
“Each treadmill is crafted to provide an unparalleled exercise experience, featuring robust motors, intuitive controls, and cushioned running surfaces for maximum impact absorption,” says a company representative.
Moreover, since the company’s product portfolio is designed to offer entry points at various price levels, customers have readily available access to select models that align with their own budget and training preferences.
Interested parties can browse the full selection at: https://www.soletreadmills.com/
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Email: Send Email
Organization: SOLE Fitness
Address: 56 Exchange Pl., Salt Lake City, UT 84111, United States
Website: https://www.soletreadmills.com/
Release ID: 89185487
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