Welcome to the Get Fit Guys' quick and dirty tips to get moving and shape up.

My name is Brock Armstrong and I'm the Get Fit Guy.

Research has shown that simply being exposed to the elements of the great outdoors can

lower our levels of stress and lower our pulse rates and even lower our blood pressure.

But what happens when we exercise in green space?

That's where something called green exercise comes in, and that's what I want to talk about today.

I was at the beach the other day with some friends, and after a rousing game of what I'd like to call

apprehend the frisbee before it nails some poor unsuspecting stranger,

we all settled down into the sand and had a little chat and observed our fellow beachgoers.

Now, being that I'm such a movement and fitness nerd, and I also happen to be at the beach with a biomechanist,

well, I started doing a mental tally of how many people

were either frolicking, i.e. moving their bodies, or napping, i.e. recovering their bodies. And it was

basically a 70-30 split in favor of frolicing. And of those 70% of frolicers, easily 99% of them were smiling and laughing

and completely unaware of their current rating of perceived exertion. I told you I'm a nerd.

But observing this got me wondering about the direct or indirect effect of simply being outdoors,

in the sunshine, flanked by trees on one side and the ocean on the other, with mountains off in the distance, and how much happier these folks

appeared when I compared them to the determined and somewhat dower in contrast faces that I'd

seen earlier at the gym. Not only did this setting make me grateful

to live where I do, but it also inspired me to dig into some research on how green spaces and

exercise can have a synergistic effect on us humans. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors coexisted with this natural outdoor environment

for, well, tens of thousands of years, and it is hypothesized that this provides us present-day

humans with our innate desire to be in and around nature. And you know what? You don't even have to get in the way back machine to see this.

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