Want to Exercise? Try it in the Wilderness: Guide to the Adirondack Park, NY

Although the name of this blog implies that it will center on dietary concerns, I wanted to delegate a healthy sector to fitness and generally regaining a healthy lifestyle. I will talk about excessive and energy spent in relation to health later on, but I wanted to touch on the topic with this entry.

When we relocated to North Carolina from Belarus, we quickly adjusted to the sedentary, suburban lifestyle. It is at this point that all four of us began to gain weight and I assume the origin of this bodily change can be traced to a severe cut in energy spent per day without comparably adjusting quantities of food consumed.

In Belarus we walked everywhere, in order to buy food, you would have to walk to each if the different shops and carry everything home. We walked to school, to work, and spent our summers in the woods - hiking, swimming, and scavenging for berries and mushrooms for our daily consumption.

It is a simple concept that if you want to eat more, you have to exercise more, yet, I hate the gym...I go, but I hate every minute until I get to jump off the treadmill with a seance of triumph over my accomplishments. I know I am not alone in suffering from this malicious contempt.

I would like to present another option to those of us just starting out on this journey and looking for a more pleasant entryway into aerobic and cardiovascular activity - Hiking! Whether hiking or paddling, the simple act of propelling your body amongst nature is the easiest way to burn calories. Few of us can tolerate to be at the gym for more than 2 hours a day, and it is a rare feat to burn more than 1500 calories during that time. However, once you start down a trail, you finish it and climbing a mountain feels rather useless if you do not make it to the sweet spot where the world unfolds before your eyes. Thus, while you burn fewer calories per hour, spending an entire day tackling hills, especially with a nice heavy backpack can easily earn you between 2000 and 4000 calories per day.

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Today, I would like to talk about my weeklong trip to the Adirondack lakes with my father. We packed four bags with 100 pounds of camping gear and took a 16 foot canoe out into the wilderness for six nights and seven days. This trip consisted of rowing across and around 13 massive lakes and carrying our gear through the woods and mountainous paths between them.

Hiking and canoeing are two excellent forms of excessive to consider. Canoeing is a great, low impact activity that can strengthen your core and upper body and generally improve health and strength. Since most of the force in propelling a canoe comes from pressing down with your legs and rotating your torso with each movement of the paddle, you glean increased leg muscle and torso strength. You end up building and reinforcing lean muscle in the back, shoulders, chest and arms. My body burns about 525 calories per hour while canoeing with moderate effort.

Hiking, especially with a considerable pack and through hilly or mountainous terrain is one of the best cardiovascular activities - up there with running, competitive swimming, and riding a bike. Propelling your body uphill while carrying a load exercises every part of your body. It improves your muscle tone, strengthens your skeletal system, improves breathing and lung strength, and prepares your body to do the same thing - but faster! Say, running uphill with a 30 pound backpack. At a decent pace uphill, my body burns 540 calories per hour without a bag and upwards of 600 with a decently heavy bag (15-30lbs).

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Our trip to the Adirondacks focused on the St. Regis Wilderness Area, a small wilderness area amidst the largest public park in the continental United States. The canoe wilderness area does not allow for any means of travel other than by canoe or on foot, making for many private, hard to get to areas of natural beauty which we enjoyed without meeting with another human being for days at a time.

Check back in the next few days for an entry of what we experienced along our week of travels.