Why a walk in the woods could make your next workout feel easier

Most runners think of endurance as something built through training, but a new study, published in the American Journal of Biological Anthropology, suggests that where you spend the hour or two before a workout may also matter.

Researchers at Loughborough University in the U.K. found that people lasted longer in an endurance test to exhaustion after spending 90 minutes in a woodland setting than they did after spending the same amount of time in an industrial urban environment. The time spent outside pre-workout was enough to improve endurance by 7.5 per cent.

More than just a walk in the woods

The endurance boost showed up even though researchers found little difference in traditional physiological measures, such as oxygen uptake. The participants weren’t exercising harder because their bodies were suddenly processing oxygen more efficiently; something else seemed to be helping them hang on longer when they started to feel tired.

The researchers suspect the answer may be partly psychological. Participants felt better after spending time in the woods, and those effects lasted for hours after they left the natural setting.

Beyond a mental boost

Researchers suggest something called the “environmental mismatch hypothesis” is key to the results. Humans evolved in natural environments for thousands of generations, but cities, traffic, industrial noise and artificial light have arrived relatively recently. The theory suggests our bodies may still function best when exposed to conditions that are closer to the environments we evolved in.

More research needs to be done, and the study doesn’t prove that a quick stroll through a park will make anyone faster; it also doesn’t suggest that every treadmill session should be replaced with a trail run. What it does show is that the environment athletes spend time in before training may influence how long they can sustain a hard effort.