Take Your Children Hiking

Monday, April 2nd, 2012

Not sure what to do on your next vacation?  Why not take your children hiking!  Hiking can be an enjoyable experience for the entire family. There are many benefits to hiking as a family. Whether you’re going out for a day, a weekend, or for a whole week, this article will outline a few reasons why you should take your children hiking!

Exercise. These days it’s hard enough to get your children to eat right, let alone get enough exercise. Taking your children hiking can make exercise fun instead of a chore. There are many different types of trails to choose from. You can choose between paths around your local park and the longer trails in the state parks. Pace yourself and find the right trails to suit the abilities of yourself and of your children.

Education. There’s no better place to learn about nature than in nature. While you take your children to enjoy the great outdoors you can teach them many things. Teaching them to be responsible outdoorsmen can provide skills to serve them all through life, and show them how to enjoy hiking even more. In addition to these skills you can teach them about the different plants and animals that they can encounter while hiking. You can show them that hiking is not just a long walk, but a wonderful adventure.

Conservation. There’s more concern now about nature than there has ever been. Just talking about conservation can have an impact, but what does it all mean without perspective? By taking your children out and hiking with them you show them why they should be concerned about nature. Your kids will gain an understanding about why conservation is important that’s more than just words. By teaching your children how to care for the outdoors you’ll be doing much more than what words could possible accomplish.

Ultimately hiking can be so much more than just a trek in the woods. It can help keep you and you children healthy. You can teach them about nature and how to navigate with a map and compass. Hiking gives you a way to spend time with your kids and teach them to love the outdoors and give them reason to want to take care of it. So the next time you’re stumped for what to do with your family, take them hiking!

Photo credits: Jonf728

Hiking Speed vs Walking Speed

Monday, August 1st, 2011

When many aspiring hikers are interested in learning how to get into “hiking shape” for the summer, a frequent question that comes up is the issue of pace, or speed. While many people don’t care to measure their hiking speed, so long as they work up a sweat, others like to know their speed for navigational and even physical purposes – it helps them measure their progress and calories burnt. If you want to understand your hiking speed, however, you’ll also want to know how it measures against your normal walking speed.

That’s why many people are so interested in the speed at which they hike. To them, their speed reflects their results – if they can make it up a hill in an hour when they used to take an hour and a half, they know that they’ve made tangible progress in their development. So let’s take a look at how hiking speed and walking speed can tell you about the kind of shape you’re in.

A Rule of Thumb

Generally, for every hundred pounds you weigh, you’ll burn about 45 calories per hour going at a speed of two miles per hour – but that’s just on a smooth level surface. The energy output required will approximately double for every mile per hour you increase, meaning you’ll burn about 90 calories per hundred pounds at three miles an hour, and so on.

The reason so many people enjoy hiking is that the incline adds a significantly greater energy requirement to your workout routine, increasing the amount of calories you’ll need to burn in order to go the same distance or the same speed as you would on a level surface. Because an increase in speed requires a similar increase in energy on a smooth level surface, you can expect the same to happen when you’re hiking up an incline.

Don’t Measure Against Walking Speeds

A mile hike is quite different than a mile walk, so don’t try to compare your speed going up a hill with the kind of speed you can expect to see when you walk on an incline. Anyone who’s used the incline feature on a treadmill knows what kind of power requirement gravity can add to any exercise. If you find that you were hiking at two miles an hour but you still feel like you had a decent workout, it’s safe to say that you should judge the quality of your workout by how challenging it felt, not by what the numbers always say.

A good hiking speed will rival a pretty calm walk. Avoid the beginner’s mistake of hiking too fast so that you can build endurance – intermittently include periods of greater intensity.

Photo Credits: justinjohnsen