Camping is a great way for our children to develop an appreciation for the outdoors

Coming to you this morning from Australia is an article by Adele Horin in The Sydney Morning Herald about an American professor of family science at the University of Maryland, Sandra Hofferth, who gave a talk there about how our children’s lack of outdoor activity is leading to obesity at younger ages.

“There’s been a quadrupling of the number of overweight children in the US since the 1960s,” she said. “A big part of the problem is that play has become more sedentary.”

Continue reading →

Proper layering techniques allow us to control our body temperature across various outdoor activities

The term “layering” gets bantered about with regularity when it comes to dressing for cold weather, but the mechanics of layering is often misunderstood and implemented improperly, resulting in frigid discomfort.

In order to understand how layering is supposed to work, you must first dispel with notion that clothes can make you warm. They can’t. The body actually generates the heat needed to keep itself warm, placing a particular emphasis on the heart and the brain. That is, if the heart or the brain starts cooling, the body will attempt to correct this by pulling heat away from the extremities. Our mothers knew exactly what they were doing, when they made us wear hats to go outside and play in cold weather!

Continue reading →