Outdoors and on the Move – Good Medicine for Everyone
In recent years we’ve been going home to the U.S. for summer holidays. This year we are staying in Switzerland and I couldn’t be more excited. As a nature buff and movement enthusiast, I can’t wait to get outside with the whole family and enjoy the wealth of activities and beautiful landscapes on offer here in my adopted country. Before long my two boys will have forgotten all about playing video games and my husband and I will have each dropped a couple of kilos!
Switzerland offers a host of exciting, exotic outdoor activities such river rafting, rock climbing, and even paragliding, to mention just few. If you’re up for this sort of fun, a quick visit to the Swiss tourism website will get you started identifying your next adventure. Perhaps even more valuable, however, is the selection and availability of health-enhancing outdoor activities available right outside your front door.
For you gym enthusiasts, I invite you to escape the artificial confines, machines and boring repetitious movements in favor of a more holistic, full-bodied and functional way of moving and staying in shape.
Mother Nature will mix up your workout for you, offering varying terrain and wind resistance that’ll have you working harder while strengthening your stabilizers as well as your prime movers! Not only is Mother Nature’s gym a whole lot more fun, it offer a host of benefits not available at stuffy indoor fitness studios.
A plethora of recent studies highlight the physical, emotional and mental benefits of spending time in the great outdoors. Getting your daily dose of vitamin D needed for strong bones is just the beginning. Time in nature has been proven to increase immunity, reduce stress levels, and lower blood pressure, as well as to promote general feelings of wellbeing. That great-smelling forest air is literally good medicine – many trees, particularly conifers, give off compounds known as “phytoncides” proven to enhance immune system.
No one knows this better than the Japanese, who are responsible for many of these studies and have developed a wonderful practice of spending time in nature they call shinrin–yoku which translates as “forest bathing.” The practice entails taking leisurely, meditative walks in nature while soaking in its goodness and beauty with all your senses. In Japan, doctors even write prescriptions for a regular course of forest bathing to their stressed-out patients. It’s now being proven scientifically what we’ve known intuitively all along. Well over a century ago American Naturalist John Muir wrote, “Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home. Wilderness is a necessity.”
To read more about shrinrin–yoku visit natureandforesttherapy.org.
Whether you’re interested in running intervals, cultivating mindfulness outdoors through a little healthy forest bathing, or simply spending quality time with your family, summer in Switzerland couldn’t be more inviting. And if, like me, you’re not made of money, there is no shortage of low-cost activities close to home to enjoy. Here are a few ideas to get you and your family moving and thriving.
Hiking and biking can be really fun! Switzerland boasts a nation-wide network of beautifully maintained and marked walking and biking trails. You can almost surely pick one up not far from where you live, as nearly every community borders on a natural landscape – even in the city! Wherever you roam, make sure to have water and a snack with you and don’t forget to dress according to the weather, and to apply sunscreen and tick spray,
Your local town hall (Gemeindehaus) will have maps for local hiking and biking trails and information about points of interest along the way. Many school-age kids are resistant to walking or hiking and find it boring. Here are a couple of ways to spice it up and get the kids excited and moving:
Have a goal – an interesting destination, a cave or a ruin, even the promise of an ice cream cone at the end of the trail will do wonders to keep your kids motivated. Google maps can help you locate points of interest near you.
Seek out one of the many public fire pits and have a picnic and grill sausages and veggies. With proper supervision, the kids can gather wood and light and tend the fire themselves. Older children can sharpen the roasting sticks with their Swiss Army knives.
Take your time and don’t be afraid to stop and engage the local terrain. The journey should be as much fun as getting there. Along the way, encourage the kids to stop and climb a tree, or help them build a bridge over a babbling brook or a fort among the leaves. Don’t worry; they’ll have their own ideas, and so will you.
Organize a scavenger hunt, identifying and collecting interesting items along the way. Don’t forget to use all your senses. Here is a list to get you started: a prickly pinecone, a striped rock, a soft feather, a mossy twig, a fragrant leaf, a nut shell, three different kinds of grass, an empty snail shell, etc.
Go geocaching, the ultimate in hiking with a purpose for the whole family. Geocaching is a worldwide treasure hunting game. How to play: first visit the geocaching website and find a list of treasures, or “caches” hidden near you. You start with a set GPS coordinates and with the help of a few clues, you will have a great time looking for and ultimately finding the treasure. A cache can be found hidden under a rock, or in a hole in a tree, for instance. Once we found one under a waterfall – now that was exciting!
Don’t worry; each cache has a difficulty rating, so you can choose an easy one that your three-year-old can help to find. A cache usually consists of a small waterproof container, inside of which is a logbook where you write your name and the date. Many caches contain a little treasure such as a little toy or trinket. You are free to keep it as long as you replace it with a new one for the next seeker to find. Sometimes not-finding can be as much fun as finding. We never did find the cache called the Red Swan hidden at the lake in Meilen, but we sure had fun looking. You can make a real hobby of geocaching and it could literally have you traveling the world! On drizzly wet weekends we often get together with good friends and make a day of it.
Running, Nordic walking and exercise trails – If you’re looking to get that heart rate up, a run through the forest is ideal. Or pick up a pair of walking sticks and give Nordic walking a try. It’s easy to learn and easier on the joints than running. Before you know it you’ll be breaking a sweat. Check out the established network of Helsana running trails. If you are traveling on one of the many Zurich vitaparcours exercise trails, your walk or run will be augmented with various exercises performed at a number of stations along the way. The instructions are simple and complete with pictures. Most trails are built as a loop, so you start and end in the same place.
Summer is fast approaching and the forest is calling! Go have fun, enjoy the scenery, and take in all that good “medicine.”
Text and photos by Jane Greis
Originally from the U.S., Jane and her husband Peter settled in the Zurich area 16 years ago. Mother to two boys, Jane is a trained massage therapist, movement enthusiast and nature educator. She combines her varied passions, offering creative nature connection playgroups and workshops for children and adults through her project www.natureplay.ch. She and her husband offer massage therapy at their practice Wellspring Massage.
