I'm Ashley Power and I am currently work for British Military Fitness, the UK’s largest outdoor fitness provider.
I’m the Park Manager for BMF Preston and also an Engineer/Physical Training Instructor in the TA and Head Fitness Coach for Preston North End Women’s Football Club.
Prior to this I served in the Army as a Combat Medical Technician and Physical Training Instructor for 5 ½ years, during this time and since then, I have gained lots of experience and education in the world of health, fitness and sport. The aim of my blogs are to pass on my experiences and knowledge in order to give you a better understanding of how to become fitter, healthier or stronger, whatever your personal motivations may be.
Three times a week at Moor Park in Preston, I and the other instructors at BMF, provide a unique service of taking our members into the park for a fitness class. During these fitness classes, we travel round the park using the parks lovely features i.e. open grassed spaces, trees, hills, benches, in order to complete our training.
The benefits of training Al Fresco are well known but regularly overlooked by many people that would prefer to train indoors. I won’t sit here and say that training indoors isn’t good, training indoors has its place i.e. if your goal is to become bigger, Johnny bravo style, then indoor gyms are for you as you can only get so big training outdoors. On the other hand when it come to cardio-vascular equipment (treadmills, bikes, cross trainers etc) compared to training outdoors in my opinion and I’m sure others would agree, that outdoor training wins hands down.
Outdoor training is usually overlooked due to stigmas attached; “it’s too cold to train outdoor” “it’s raining” this is 2 of a thousand possible excuses and reasons why people choose not to train outside. There is a lot of academic research that has gone into training outdoors and its benefits. Each study finds that training outdoors has lots of great benefits.
American Council on Exercise Chief Physiologist Cedric Bryant PHD says “One major benefit to outdoor training is that it tends to be more engaging and mentally stimulating due to the changing scenery and terrain — not to mention the mood boost that comes from being outside in the sunshine.”
Training outdoors has a big benefit on your musculoskeletal system too, using natural terrain like open fields, hills and off road trails can help strengthen the ligaments and tendons in the knees and ankles. However, running on concrete roads over a prolonged period of time can potentially weaken your knees; anyone who has ever run on concrete roads will understand this. I’m not saying don’t run on roads, I’m saying that if you are going running then try, occasionally, going off roads and using grass areas.
If you’re thinking… how can I start training outdoors? Well it’s as easy as getting a friend or two and simply going up to a park to have a nice walk, jog or run.
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