Full Description
Exercise interactions with green and blue spaces offer low-cost, non-invasive solutions to public health challenges—particularly around mental health and obesity—and issues around environmental sustainability. Physical Activity in Natural Settings brings together multi-disciplinary, international research on physical activity, health and the natural environment, offering evidence-based guidance on implementing nature-based solutions at individual, patient and population levels.
Divided over four sections, the book assesses the current research landscape, explores the underlying psychological and physiological mechanisms of the benefits of green exercise, details applied examples of physical activity in natural settings, and suggests future directions for research and practice. It features contributions from experts from around the world and covers topics including:
Self-determination, nature and wellbeing
Visual cognition and multisensory stimuli
Nature's role in growing resilience
Physical education and nature
Mindfulness and green exercise
Positive psychology and pro-environmental behaviour
Timely and prescient, and showcasing real-life examples of green exercise prescription, Physical Activity in Natural Settings is fascinating and important reading for any students or researchers in the psychology or physiology of physical activity and health, physical education or outdoor studies, and policy-makers and health professionals.
Contents
PART I: The Research Landscape
1. Friend or Foe: Salutogenic Possibilities of the Environment
2. Societal Challenges, Methodological Issues and Transdisciplinary Approaches
3. Known knowns: a systematic review of the effects of green exercise compared with exercising indoors
4. The green exercise concept: Two intertwining pathways to health and well-being
5. Meaning, Nature, And Well-Being
Part II: Possible Mechanisms
6. The Cognitive Neuroscience of Nature: From Motor Cognition to Grounded Cognition
7. Affective responses to natural environments: From Everyday Engagement to Therapeutic Impact
8. A Remedy for Boredom: Natural Environments as a Psychological Resource
9. Growing Resilience through Connecting with Nature
Part III: Case Studies
10. From Tracks to Trails: Case Studies in Green Exercise
11. Immersion, Watersports and Blueways and the Blue Mind: Case Studies in Blue Exercise
12. Why outdoors? A systematic approach to examine and value the social benefits of outdoor sports
13. 'Doing' Adventure: The Mental Health Benefits of using Occupational Therapy Approaches in Adventure Therapy Settings
14. Greening education: Education outside the classroom in natural settings as a school-based health promotion approach for children and young people
Part IV: Future Pathways
15. Future-Thinking through Technological Nature: Connecting or Disconnecting
16. "Dreadmills": Is there such a thing as sustainable exercise
17. Mindfulness and Green Exercise: Enhancing Our Relationship with Physical Activity and the Natural World
18. Nature-based Interventions Cities: A Look Ahead
