How to Exercise Outside Every Day: The Crucial Tactics Series
Monte Fitz Roy, Argentina
There's no grand secret required to unlock the ability to exercise outside every day. On the contrary, we've literally evolved to be efficient hiking and running machines, with our anatomy perfectly adapted for covering long distances and carrying heavy weights.
Yet somehow, billions of humans today have allowed the torpid nature of our modern lives and our blatant disregard for the natural world to root us in one place: firmly on our couches staring at the small boxes mounted to our walls. It seems that, somehow, many of us have forgotten how to move our bodies. We have forgotten how to go outside. We have forgotten how to face and overcome challenges.
In moments such as these, a few guiding lights and ideas can have a profound impact on our ability to overcome the obstacles and challenges inherent in exercising outside every single day for 365 days straight. Even if you're accustomed to regularly embarking on big adventures in the mountains as I was, making the move from adventuring a few times a week to going outside every single day can require a substantial mental shift, as you're suddenly playing an entirely different game governed by a different set of rules.
To help you out, I've assembled a list of crucial tactics that can help you complete the Outside 365 goal. This list has been carefully ordered, starting with the basic and most elemental tactics (such as "Start Small") and the most critical (such as "Diversifying Your Sports to Move Every Single Day"). The list then progresses to tactics that you don't need to get started but will help you out long-term (such as "Get the Right Gear"). And finally, the list culminates with self-actualization in mimicry of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, with "Reaching Flow."
Get ready for your crash course on how to complete Outside 365.
Start Small
Crested Butte, Colorado
For many people who may not be athletes (currently) but are drawn to the idea of physically reconnecting with nature every day, the idea of riding a bike for an hour or running a mile may seem overwhelming. It may seem physically impossible at this point. It might actually be physically impossible for you to run a mile every day, much less climb a mountain. Don't let that reality defeat you, but instead, simply acknowledge your current situation accurately, but without any shame or blame attached to it.
If you find yourself in this situation, I have this to say: just go for a walk. Walking is enough, and it can even change your life.
Identify Your Values
Mount Hood, Oregon
This might actually be the most crucial tactic on this entire list, but it's so foundational that I believe it's required for living a life of meaning, no matter which area of life you apply it to.
I personally believe that this vital step isn't as much a matter of creating your values as it is identifying what you already value. So instead of envisioning this as a phony exercise where you come up with a list of artificial values that you think you should live by (but you really don't believe in), instead view this as a method of more accurately determining what it is you already assign value to.
If you find that going outside and connecting with nature are among those values, then read on.
Diversify Your Sports to Move Every Single Day
Mount Ashland, Oregon
I found this tactic to be the most crucial of all the tactics in my own personal Outside 365 journey. This is the one major paradigm shift that helped me make the leap to exercising outside every single day for 365 days straight and now, at the time of this writing, 1,703+ days. When you have a wide array of sports to choose from, not only do you work different muscle groups in different ways, keeping your body strong and healthy and avoiding overuse injuries, but your mental motivation stays fresh and engaged as well.
Schedule Your Week in Advance
Mount Rainier National Park, Washington
Time management is critical if you're to make a 365-day streak a reality, and this article shares one method for planning out your week so that you can actualize this goal. Scheduling the major chunks of your week in advance will help you avoid overtraining, work around major scheduling challenges, and ensure that your Outside 365 goal is one of your top priorities.
Don't Wait for the Perfect Moment
Tucson, Arizona
While planning ahead will help you find the best times to exercise outside, if you're going to complete this goal every single day, it's of paramount importance that you stop waiting for the perfect moment to come along. You'll need to embrace inclement weather. You'll need to go outside when it's dark and cold. You'll need to squeeze in your mile minimum between your many other time commitments. You'll have to do all this and more to cover one human-powered mile outside for 365 days in a row.
Embrace Discomfort
Lajitas, Texas
There's no way around it: the Outside 365 challenge is hard. Going outside and covering one human-powered mile every day might sound easy on the surface, and it is... until the hard days come and it isn't so easy anymore.
The greatest obstacle that stands in your way when you set out to complete Outside 365, or really, do anything of great difficulty, isn't the lack of time, as people most often immediately retort. Rather, it is our collective American addiction to being comfortable. To overcome this addiction, you'd better learn how to embrace discomfort.
Discover Your Own Backyard
Las Vegas, Nevada
Contrary to popular belief, you don't need to travel far to have an adventure. In fact, I've found through my 4+ years of full-time travel that many people don't have a clue about the many wonders and beautiful greenspaces located right around the corner from their house. Instead of thinking that you need to road trip to Alaska to find adventure, start by looking for adventure in your own neighborhood—you might be astonished at what you find!
Transform Your Relationship with Time, Part 1: Breaking the Tyranny of the Urgent
Timberline, Mount Hood, Oregon
It's no wonder that millions of Americans feel out of control of their own lives. So many people feel like they can't control how they choose to spend the vast majority of their time day in and day out, year in and year out. If we bow to the tyrannical mandates of the urgent and unimportant things in our lives, or the supposedly urgent things that aren't actually urgent at all, of course we won't have time for ourselves. Of course we won't have time for our healthy habits. When we bow to the tyranny of the urgent, we're constantly running on someone else's hamster wheel, dodging the crack of the overlord's whip.
But if we can break free from the dictator's power, we can regain our autonomy and control over our lives.
Transform Your Relationship with Time, Part 2: How Smartphones and TV Destroy More of Our Time than We Spend Working
Tucson, Arizona
The 24-hour news cycle and social media both create a sense of urgency, calling and beckoning us to spend our precious few hours answering the call and ding of the seemingly-urgent. These things are generally delivered to us via television and smartphones. Based on the best data available, and even comparing that data to a 50-hour workweek, the average American still wastes more time on TV and cell phones per year than they spend working per year. With a few simple tweaks, you can easily create enough margin in your life to spend hours per week exploring nature.
Tell Your Excuses to Fuck Off
Tucson, Arizona
It's always possible to justify failure. If, for some reason, you miss a day and break your streak, I have no doubt that your brain can manufacture a seemingly reasonable and downright-convincing excuse for why you failed, why you didn't accomplish the ONE Thing that you said you would do.
At some point, though, if you want to reach a venerable 365-day streak, you're just going to have to tell your excuses to fuck off. You can always come up with another excuse, but are you going to spend your entire life caving to weakness? Fuck no!
Tell those excuses to go fuck themselves.
In many ways, this is the mac daddy of all the crucial tactics. If you can master this one, you don't need to worry about scheduling your week, transforming your relationship with time, embracing discomfort etc. etc. You'll just overcome the resistance and do the thing.
Get the Right Gear
Aviemore, Scotland
I've hesitated to write about technical gear topics here on Outside 365. Despite all of the many major psychological barriers that you need to overcome to accomplish Outside 365, so many people still tend to focus on the gear. They seem to think that they can't go outside or be active until they have the perfect shoes, the attractive-looking athletic clothing, the perfectly-fitted backpack, the premier $10,000 mountain bike... the list goes on and on.
This is why I've focused on embracing discomfort, not waiting for the perfect moment, starting small, and so many more topics. Because you don't need to buy a single thing to complete the Outside 365 challenge. You can go outside and be active every single day with the shoes and the clothes that you're wearing right now.
Yet even so, at a certain point, getting the right gear will help you stand the test of time. It will help make it easier—and in some cases, safer— to get out the door and be active. Dig into this article for my one-hit take on critical gear for accomplishing Outside 365.
The Purpose of Life: Reaching Flow
Hayward, Wisconsin
I am no longer deluded into thinking that there is any sort of grand purpose to life. I used to spend days—years, even—searching for my "purpose," the thing that I thought I was "put on this earth to do." But if nobody is there to put you down on the earth, there isn't any sort of grand purpose to be imparted from on high, now is there?
Instead, I think we each get to choose what our purpose in life is. We get to choose what "success" means to us.
Or sometimes, our life purpose might reach out and choose us instead.
One day, it struck me that I might actually have a purpose in life after all. Before, I didn't have words to describe it, and I didn't make a conscious effort to pursue it. Yet when I stepped back and thought about my values, thought about what my day-to-day life seemed to indicate that my purpose might be, I realized that perhaps my overarching, grand purpose in life is simply to achieve a flow state as often as possible.
Parting Thoughts
I have so many more thoughts to share about niche tactics for accomplishing Outside 365, common arguments and objections from readers, and hot takes on the true challenges that modernity poses to our connection with nature. While this topic might seem basic on the surface, the deeper you dive, the more interesting it becomes—and that's exactly what this blog is here to explore!
Stay tuned—the journey is far from over!
