Why is camping good for you? The health benefits of camping are plentiful for both adults and young people. When you’re spending time at home in your usual routine, you may not realize just how much you’re missing away from nature.
Camping has a great number of benefirts for everyone old and young that you and your family can enjoy while spending time in the great outdoors:
- Stress reduction: Leave the overbooked scheduling at home. When you're camping, there's no place to be at a certain time, and there's nothing interrupting you or competing for your attention. The natural outcome of this type of setting is stress reduction and relaxation like you can't find anywhere else.
- Fresh air: You may not realize how scarce fresh air is in your day to day life. When you go camping, you get the wondrous scents of the outdoors, as well as the smell of dinner cooking over an open fire.
- Relationship building: One of the best and most important aspects of camping is how it helps you build and strengthen relationships. When you go camping with friends or family, you get a chance to talk and visit without distraction, even late into the night.
- Physical fitness: Time spent camping is physical time. You set up a tent, gather firewood, go for a hike. At home, we often lead sedentary lives that do not promote physical fitness. When you're camping, you can't help but engage in physical activity and get your heart rate up.
- Lack of alarm clocks: When was the last time you slept late without an alarm clock to wake you up? When you're camping, the only alarm clocks you have are the sun and the chirping of birds. Waking up with nature rather than an alarm clock is an experience everyone should have regularly.
- Unplugging: Camping is a great chance for everyone to unplug and get away from their screens. In the great outdoors, you don't find computers, tablets or televisions and there's so much else to do that does not require electronics.
- Great food: Food just tastes better when prepared in the outdoors. There's something about cooking food over a campfire, a campsite grill or in a Deluxe Cabin kitchen that just can't be replicated when you're eating at home. Plus, nothing beats s'mores made over an open fire. Dream big and plan a great menu before you head out on your next camping trip.
- Connection with nature: When you're camping, you get a chance to get in touch with nature, encounter wildlife and see the stars away from the bright lights of the big city. There's nothing quite like it. Make sure you and your family have the chance to connect with nature when you explore the many benefits of camping.
- Development of new skills: You can't help but develop new skills while camping. Everyone on the trip will contribute and it's a great chance to learn new things. You may learn how to set up tents, tie knots, start fires, cook a new meal and more. These skills are important to have, and yet we don't often get a chance to develop them during the course of our regular busy schedules.
While the benefits of camping for adults also apply to young people, there are a number of benefits specific to younger campers.
- Educational opportunities: For kids, time spent camping is time spent learning, which is one of the reasons scouting programs are so valuable. They facilitate camping experiences that are built around kids learning new things, including fishing, cooking, hiking, tying knots, fire-starting, safety, first aid and much more.
- Growth of confidence: It's important for children to gradually become more independent and confident in their own capabilities. One of the benefits of camping for youth is that it allows them to learn independence in a safe and controlled environment. Children become more confident as they learn new things and have first-time experiences.
- Family connections: Camping is beneficial for children and their families because it can help strengthen bonds between family members — brothers and sisters, parents and children and the list goes on. You will all return home feeling much stronger as a group.