Why Hiking Is the Ultimate Full-Body Workout
Daily · Published 1/10/2023 ·
Hiking is a fantastic workout.
Cardio, strength — you name it, it’s a full-body workout!!
Let me break down just how good a workout it really is.
Hiking usually means walking long distances.
You end up covering a whole day’s worth of walking in a short stretch of time, and you often loop back to your starting point, so the mileage really adds up. From Seongsamjae, one of the trailheads into Jirisan, to the Seseok shelter is 25.24 km, and it takes well over 13 hours to get there. So at its core, it’s genuinely great cardio.
A forest bath is one of the best baths you can take.
It varies a bit by season, but since you’re walking deep in the mountains, you naturally end up forest bathing. Even with my bad allergies, my atopic skin calms down after a walk in the woods — I notice a real difference. Somewhere like Jirisan has you walking at elevations above 1,000 m, so it feels like the fine dust kicked up by the ground-level environment gets filtered out way more. For us modern folks who spend so little time outdoors, even once or twice a week — or just once a month — you get some sun exposure, and both body and mind come away feeling wonderfully refreshed.
Hiking burns fat. And I mean seriously.
Anyone who’s tried to lose weight knows: how much do you have to move to burn 100 kcal? At least 15–20 minutes of walking. Here’s the data from my trek from Seongsamjae to the Seseok shelter on Jirisan. The calories burned came to over 4,000 kcal. The estimated water loss was around 8 liters too, and I averaged a kilometer every 30 minutes. That’s the average regardless of elevation gain or loss. It’s a genuinely great way to lose weight. I recorded the data above wearing a Garmin Fenix 7X. It all gets uploaded to the cloud and kept safe.
Hiking is healing.
There’s no describing how much fun it is to walk while taking in scenery that gorgeous with your own eyes. As you climb and climb, the everyday worries fade — you get so absorbed in the present moment that they slip out of your head, at least for a while. Even psychiatrists recommend hiking. When you walk while quietly checking in with your own body, your mind clears and settles.
Hiking gives you the experience of success.
We live in a truly complicated world, all of us competing. You have to compete whether you want to or not, and you have to deliver results, deliver performance. The stress of that is honestly insane. You can’t win every time. But carrying around the memory of every loss, unable to wipe it from your mind, is genuinely miserable. With hiking, if you just keep climbing, you reach the summit. Anyone who’s done it knows what a joyful payoff that moment of arrival is — most people get hooked. I sure did. And it’s fine if you don’t make it. The mountain isn’t going anywhere. It always gives you another chance. Even Jirisan, with its reputation for a brutal traverse, I tackled only after building up experience over several trips, and I finally pulled it off on my second attempt. If you can’t make it this time, you make it next time. If the reason you failed this time was a heavy pack and too much gear, you just work out a different strategy next time and give it another go. Of course, the season isn’t always on my side, mind you ^^;
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