Outdoor sports, in all of their variety, have one thing in common - The effect of engaging in them on a regular basis has a huge positive impact on your life. Whether you start hiking regularly, rock climbing, mountain biking, canyoning, or whatever other outdoor sport - and where regularly can be as little as once a month or as often as a couple of times a week - the numerous benefits of doing anything in outdoor sports become obvious to participants very quickly.

For those who haven’t ever regularly participated in any outdoor sports though, it is worth looking at some of the best reasons for doing so. So here I have attempted to put together 10 specific benefits from engaging in outdoor sports - there are no doubt more, and some of them are actually several reasons wrapped up into one point, but the overall point remains the same >> Enjoy outdoor sports : Improve your life.

10. Improve Your Fitness/Physique

Outdoor sports, all of them, are just unbelievably good for your fitness and overall physique. Whether you are walking up and down hills, climbing vertical rock faces, or paddling downstream, you are giving your body the best sort of all round natural work out - a workout which works your entire body in natural proportions. No muscle groups to worry about, no repetitious straining exercises, no unbalanced exercises - outdoor sports involve natural motions, natural exertions, and usually involve whole body exercise. Gyms use 10 different machines (or more) to achieve the same result as doing a single canyon - and even then you have to be directed by a professional to know how to use those 10 different machines to get a balanced workout.

Our bodies evolved in this outdoors landscape - we are built to walk, run, jump and explore wilderness areas - what better way to improve our natural body capabilities but to use them for what they were designed to do? What better way to make our bodies feel useful again, but to apply them to the situation they were designed for?

Get out into the outdoors every weekend for a few months, and the improvement in your fitness will blow you away. Not only will you have better endurance, better fitness, and increasing strength, but you will find other improvements not usually experienced by gym junkies; things like better balance and flexibility - Even the side effects are positive!

9. A Break From It All…

Outdoor Sports provide a very healthy ‘break from it all’ for when life just gets to be too much. Whether you need to have a break from your stressful job, or you simply need some time away from your daily life, losing yourself (figuratively) in the wilderness or in a challenging sport is a great way of providing some temporary stress-relief.

Take up a sport like Rock Climbing, and it doesn’t matter how much pressure you are under at work, get yourself 20m up a vertical cliff, and suddenly all of your daily worries fall away from you as you focus your whole mind and body on the single problem right in front of you. If that idea itself is too stressful for you, then try heading out into the bush for a bushwalk - the beauty around you, the views, the isolation from the real world all provide a way out of your normal thought processes, habits and stresses alike. Moments of serenity and mental clarity are often found on mountain tops…

8. Cheap Entertainment

At it’s cheapest, outdoor sports is nothing more than a water bottle, the clothes on your back, and some shoes… and with just those few items you can be entertained for hours. For most other outdoor sports there is some technical equipment which is required - but once that gear is purchased, borrowed, rented, or received as a gift, the sport becomes almost free, costing nothing more than the transport and food bills while doing it - and it isn’t like you don’t have to pay for that in your daily life anyway! Cheaper than the movies, cheaper than a night out drinking or clubbing, and far more entertaining than either.

Even better than the single day trips, outdoor sports can provide you with cheap holidays. Why spend thousands of dollars to travel overseas for a holiday, when chances are you haven’t even explored some of the most beautiful parts of Australia? I don’t mean visiting the well known tourist hot spots - I mean going to the out of the way places, the not so well known places, the places which are just as - or more - spectacular than any of the easily accessed tourist destinations. Why spend thousands of dollars flying and staying in hotels in order to have a break, when you can have a relaxing, enjoyable, entertaining break in your own backyard.

It is almost perverse that some of the most active people in the Australian outdoors are foreign exchange students - why don’t more Australians take advantage of the great country we have? Why go to so much trouble to travel the world, only to see things which you have completely ignored at home? Entertainment, adventure, relaxation, exploration…all without the price tag. Cheap Entertainment - great value entertainment.

7. Solitude AND Social Interaction

These two opposing options are encountered in every outdoor trip. For most outdoor sports you need at least one other person with you, often a group for safety - so from that aspect you get the ability to socialise. By involving yourself in an outdoor sport community you will meet great people who are usually the most easygoing happy go lucky you people you will ever meet (once you finish reading this list you will understand why) and you will usually have heaps of time to get to know them while walking, paddling, climbing etc.

Yet at the same time it is easy to find the most peaceful solitude while outdoors. If you feel like some time alone it is really easy to just walk ahead of the pack a few hundred meters (or behind). Many people also enjoy bushwalking alone, so if you really need some time alone, then getting out onto a walking track is a great way to achieve that - if you go to the right areas, you could spend days walking and not see another person.

So whether you want to meet new people or escape from people altogether - outdoor sports provides the means.

6. Perspective

I’m sure I am not alone in thinking that our lifestyle here in Australia is designed to make us lose perspective. It is designed to make us think designer clothes and shoes matter. It is designed to make us think that our vote on Big Brother means something. It is designed to make us worry about what Britney Spears did last week. It is designed to make us stress over what is going to happen next in Neighbours - who’s going to die? Who’s going to get married? It is designed to make us buy the junk food that has the better advertising campaign over the food which is better for us and better tasting… And we all get lost in this world - get caught up in its dramas, in its advertising, in its pointless distractions because it surrounds us all the time.

The only way out of it is to simply extract yourself from it - but like most people I actually like the world I live in enough that I don’t want to become a hermit and live in the middle of nowhere with no electricity and no money. That being said, I do like to remember occasionally that money, electronic gadgets, and television dramas are not what life is all about. Putting yourself into the wilderness for a period of time can really help you realise how irrelevant so many of your stresses at home are, and how much more important certain things are - like bringing enough food for the trip!

Better still, it helps you put your daily comforts into perspective. Nothing reminds you how comfortable our beds are than lying on pointy rocks every night for a week. Nothing reminds you how easy microwaves are to use, or stoves for that matter when you have to cook everything over an open flame with limited tools. Running water earns the respect it truly deserves when you are out bush.

Better perspective again is gained with things don’t go as planned. Never to wish ill fortune on anyone, but if you do enough outdoor sports you will encounter problems one time or another eventually. Hopefully nothing too serious, but missing a path can make a 3 hour walk turn into a 6 hour walk. Twisting an ankle is easy to do and if done in bad circumstances can leave you stranded in awkward positions. No one goes into outdoor sports planning to encounter these sorts of hardhsips, but if - when - they happen, I guarantee your perspectives on life will change as you fight to correct the situation.
I think these changes in perspective can really make a positive difference in your daily life when you return to ‘the matrix’.

5. Lose Weight

Backed by a multi-bazillion dollar industry I figure weight loss is a reasonably important thing to many people. I don’t find many “Lose weight by doing outdoor sports” ads around the place - I wonder if that is simply because no one knows how to make money from it? (See reason The fact is that if you do outdoor sports regularly - you will lose weight. End of story. No fad, no gimmick, no sales pitch, no special meetings - just find a sport you enjoy and do it regularly. Once a week is enough - go find a different walking track every week - Explore Australia one four hour walking track at a time! You will lose weight.

Want to lose weight fast? Get a hiking pack, grab a tent, sleeping bag, bedroll, water purifier, portable stove and whatever food you can carry - then go for a week long hike. When you are walking all day everyday and can only eat the food you can carry on your back - I guarantee weight loss will result. Plus, for most people the swap from soft drinks, beer, and all of the other mass marketed drinks to nothing but water for a week is probably the healthiest thing you can do for yourself.

I should probably mention that I am not a dietician, doctor, or anything like that, so I have no statistically backed medical proof of this claim, but how many overweight hikers have you ever seen? Get out into the outdoors and one of the first things you will notice is that everyone who does this stuff regularly is a very healthy weight - and I guarantee it isn’t because they pay Jenny Craig to help them keep it.

4. Improve Self Esteem

The ways in which outdoor sports improve the self esteem of those doing them is innumerable. If you lose weight while doing it, won’t that improve your self esteem? If you improve your fitness, your physique, your balance and coordination, won’t that improve your self esteem? If you feel a zen-like sense of perspective about the world, a sort of ‘enlightenment’, won’t that improve your self esteem?

Again, you don’t take up outdoor sports with the goal of ‘Improving my self esteem’…but it is just what happens when you do it. Sometimes it comes from something as simple as bragging rights - you spend the weekend rock climbing and feel like a colossus when you return to work on Monday and tell everyone that you climbed up several 20m high vertical cliffs on the weekend…I wonder what they did?

It doesn’t even have to be bragging to be effective, sometimes just the excitement of having done something interesting. Having spent your weekend walking through the bush to find this incredible waterfall, pristine clear water, no people around for miles…just you and the nature around you…that’s what you did with your time. Something productive. Something profound. Something which was healthy, challenging, and worth it. Better than wasting your life away in front of the television.

3. Challenge Yourself

Directly following on from the previous point, the ability to challenge yourself is something which I personally believe is largely lacking in our society. It is hard to feel good about yourself when everything you do is designed for the lowest common denominator - all challenge has been removed from our life for fear of offending someone or causing a lawsuit.

Outdoor sports inherently involve a degree of challenge in them. At the most basic level the challenge is as simple as walking to the top of the hill (more challenging than you would think on some hills!), on a more difficult level it may be learning to keep your kayak upright on rapids, or staying on your mountain bike on a downhill course. At the most extreme, it is surviving a challenging environment or situation. No matter what level you may find yourself at you can do something which will challenge your preconceived notions of what you can achieve. Our super-comfortable world has all of us drastically under-rating our abilities - constantly keeping us in a state of not trying to hard, or pushing ourselves. Push past a boundary once in a while and find out what you are actually capable of. It will blow you away.

2. The Beauty of it All…

If you think this, or this, or this, or this or any of these are incredible to look at…you should try being there yourself. There are some scenes, some places, some tricks of light which simply cannot be caught on film. Nor can the feeling of being in a place of such beauty be captured on film. These photos should act as inspiration for you to go out there yourself - see it for yourself, feel it for yourself. Envelop yourself in the beauty of the outdoors because the narrow perspective of a single scene provided by a camera never does justice to the reality of the experience.

Go and experience it.

1. It Is Good For Your Soul

And finally, the number one reason to get involved in Outdoor sports is actually the culmination of all of the other reasons. This is not a cop out, this is about what happens when numerous individual benefits interact with each other to create a sum greater than their individual parts. Sure, improving your fitness is good, sure adding perspective to your life is good, and allowing yourself the occasional stress free, inexpensive break from life helps out, plus challenging yourself and seeing an improvement in your self esteem is a great consequence to have from doing outdoor sports…but what do you think would happen if you felt all of these things happening to you - in your life? You feel your body improving - you are losing weight, you are losing your breath less easily, you feel your body gaining strength, shape, form. You start to find yourself able to do things you never expected to be able to do, your self esteem improves and you find yourself generally happier with life as all of the irrelevancies fall away and you focus more on what actually matters… Your whole life improves.

You feel physically great, mentally together, and happier in all regards.

In a world where depression affects 1 in 5 people and as many as 4 out of 5 people are overweight, what better advice can someone be given but “Start bushwalking”? Start Mountain biking, start canoeing, start rock climbing, start surfing, horse riding, road cycling, snowboarding, canyoning, whitewater rafting, caving…. Find your sport - find something YOU enjoy, and do it. Its fun, its cheap, and it will improve your life in ways you can’t imagine.

Wrap Up

If you would like to start doing more outdoor activities but are unsure where to start or what to do, then drop into our Outdoor Sports forums and ask there. You will find plenty of support, help and advice. Outdoor Sports all have an element of risk with them, so make sure you understand what you are doing before starting!

I hope to see you out on the tracks one day.

Here is the Geronimo Canyon video, followed by a trip report written by Rob Luikens:

Having wasted days and nights eating and drinking with family and friends to usher in the new year, it was high time we grabbed our gear and went off to do something fun. We hadn’t heard any first hand feedback on this canyon, but the book described Geronimo Canyon as a great canyon, and that’s more than enough for us.

We left our cars at the fire shed at about 10:30 and walked down to the Wollangambe. We missed our turn off and ended up a bit far downstream. Thankfully, it was fairly easy to find our way back to where we were meant to be. A short walk over a saddle and we were on the correct ridge. At 1:30, we made it to the first abseil. We stopped for a sandwich, and Shane made friends with an exceptionally inquisitive skink, who seemed to love tuna in sweet chilli sauce and was willing to risk life and limb to get some.

Then came the first abseil. I wasn’t anything too difficult, but you have to be careful recovering the rope. The start of the canyon is quite pretty, and has lots of little fish swimming in it. Excited, the group continued on. After about 10 minutes of high canyon walls and Lost World type scenery, we reached the jump in that gives the canyon its name. I abseiled down and checked it out. Once I’d cleared it Shane and Jake jumped down. Both came out screaming about how cold the water was. Even at this time of year it’s pretty chilly in there. A couple more minutes of swimming and scrambling and we were at the next abseil. It wasn’t what I’d call a difficult abseil, more like irritating. The rope got covered in mud making it slow going. The ground was mossy making it hard to get a good footing. After that, it was another fairly short walk and scramble until we hit the Wollangambe. We had a well earned soak in the river, got out of our wetsuits, and began the 2 hour odd stroll back to the car.

Not a bad day all in all. The canyon gets its grade 4 more from being slippery and sometimes tricky that extremely physically demanding. It’s nowhere near as demanding as say Claustral. I wouldn’t call it one of my all time greats, but it was a good, albeit rather short day.

Rob Luikens

 

See Also:

• Geronimo Canyon Guide Article
• Geronimo Canyon Photo Gallery

Open my book of favourite canyons ever, and stick Whungee-Wheengee straight on top of the list. I had such a great time doing Whungee-Wheengee that I am sure I will be back many times in the near future, and will probably even do a Serendipity-Whungee-Wheengee double day of awesomeness sometime too, just to cram as much incredible canyoning into one day as possible.

Stewart from the UNSW Outdoors Club ran this trip, and he took Su Li and myself on this adventure through one of the most interesting, and sustained canyons I have ever done. From start to finish, you are having a good time. The canyon stays narrow, stays beautiful, and stays interesting the whole way down to the ‘gambe. And then when its over, you get to bask in the sun as you float down the ‘gambe, reflecting on all of the cool stuff you just did!

For example, the first thing we did in the canyon, was climb down into a pool, swim 5m, then swim UNDER a chockstone, pop up on the other side where things were getting darker, then swim a few more meters in a very very narrow section only to find another chockstone which we had to swim under. Because we couldn’t see any light on the other side of the chockstone, we weren’t certain that we were in the right spot, so Stewart pulled out his headlamp and went under first (luckily there was a bit of a gap between the water and the chockstone, so we could get light through.) It looked like there was room on the other side of the chockstone, so we swam under. Boy am I glad we did - you duck under this rock, swim a meter, then come back up for air only to find yourself in a pitch black cave with a roof covered in glow worms. It felt like I had just stumbled into a planetarium and I was meant to be looking up at the starry night sky… A hint of light up ahead then turned into dim beams of light pouring in through a tunne, creating another incredible light/dark effect which I only wish I could capture on film somehow to show everyone.

And that was the first thing we did in the canyon. I was immediately blown away by it. And while there were no more super cool duck under glow worm caves, the canyon still continued to impress simply because it stayed to perfect the whole time. There was no boring creek walking bits, and no ‘connecting’ bits as you find in most canyons, Whungee-Wheengee was canyon from top to bottom. No filler. Lots of great swims, often through ridiculously narrow slots, several duck unders, lots of great light beams filtering down through the narrow canyon walls, illuminating ferns that bright green.

Even the hard bits were good fun. Graded at a 5, I expect that simply comes from the difficulty and regularity of the climb downs, overs and arounds. Rock climbing experience definitely helps in this canyon, the ability to jump onto small slippery surfaces without falling off the edge, and a reasonable ability to not be too scared by heights are all highly recommended traits. Even with those, you won’t find the going through Whungee-Wheengee ‘easy’ - you have to pay attention the whole way through the canyon.

That said, the abseils aren’t very difficult. There was an initial one to get down into the creek, then shortly after the duck unders we did a second abseil which I think you can avoid by climbing down a difficult bit. The last two abseils are unavoidable and follow rapidly one after the other. Once at the bottom of the last abseil, it is only a short walk to Wollangambe Two, but even that short walk is incredible - it is walking through this 1m wide slot with 50m vertical walls straight up either side of you. It is quite a surreal place to be. And then suddenly it goes around a corner and we found ourselves stepping into the bathwater temperature of the Wollangambe. Well maybe it wasn’t bathwater temperature, but it sure was a *lot* warmer than the frigid waters of the Whungee-Wheengee.

We had a second lunch on the side of the Wollangambe as the group behind us through Whungee-Wheengee overtook us, then we caught up to them again around the corner where they had all started jumping in from a side cliff. Stewart and I had a jump each, then we meandered our way down to the end of the canyon, then up the long and slow climb out.

Awesome canyon, everything about it is perfect. Just make sure you are physically capable and with someone who has done it before if you want to try it. And never try to do it in high water or with a threat of a thunderstorm. Those duck unders could be quite dangerous if the water was any higher.

See Also:

• Whungee-Wheengee Photo Gallery
• Whungee-Wheengee Guide Article

Finally, the Arethusa mis-adventure trip in video format! Sorry for taking so long, but I’ve been hectic since New Years and been doing a few trips which stop me from being able to do my computer based work! Damn those outdoor experiences getting in the way of me working on my computer!

Anyway, here it is…

See Also:

• Arethusa Canyon Guide Article
• Arethusa Canyon Photo Gallery
• Arethusa Canyon Trip Report