To be in the best possible health, it’s vital that you get regular exercise. Not only is exercising on a consistent basis great for your physical body, but it can have great mental and emotional benefits as well. However, not many people enjoy spending hours at the gym each week doing repetitive workouts. Rather, spending time outside being active and enjoying nature can be a great break from a mundane gym routine.

To help you see just why you should be doing more of your exercise while outside in the mountains, here are three ways that hiking regularly can improve your health. 

Give Your Mood A Boost

Being outside and in the natural world is a great way to get an immediate boost to your mood and your overall mental and emotional health.

According to Kiera Carter and Mary Anderson, contributors to Shape.com, hiking in particular can be a great way to reduce stress in your life. With the combination of exercise and being out in the wild, the mental and emotional benefits grow exponentially. So if you’ve been stressed out about working out, hiking is a great way to relieve that stress, and any other stress that you’ve built up during the day, as well as giving your body a great workout.  

Strengthen Muscles And Bones

While a lot of exercises will help make your body stronger, hiking can do wonders for strengthening your muscles and your bones. 

The American Hiking Society shares that hiking can help to reverse the impacts of osteoporosis. This means that if you’re worried about losing bone density, hiking can have a huge benefit to making your bones stronger and more dense. Especially if you’re using tools like trekking poles to help you maintain good posture, you can see a huge difference in how your body looks and feels after hiking regularly. And since every step you hike is a workout for your legs and core, many of the muscles in your body will be strengthened as well. 

Improve Your Cardiovascular Health

Hiking is an aerobic exercise. As a result, the time that you spend hiking will serve to improve your cardiovascular health. What this means, according to Kara Mayer Robinson, a contributor to WedMD.com, is that people who hike tend to have a lower risk for heart disease in addition to having better blood pressures and blood sugar levels. So if you have been struggling with these areas of your health, hiking on a more regular basis can help you see improvement in all of these measurements of health. 

If you’ve wondered just how hiking could be helpful to your body and mind, consider how the benefits mentioned above could improve your health and make you a more well-balanced person.