Jeremy Laurance: If you want to get fit, nothing beats the great outdoors

Medical Life

The new cure-all for 2010 is, apparently, to be fresh air. Tear up those gym memberships and take to the hills, the health gurus advise.

For once, I can wholeheartedly agree. I have never seen the point of gyms – except as a cover for infidelity ("just popping out for a couple of hours, love, be back soon, pink cheeked, newly showered and wearing a self-satisfied smile") – when the great outdoors beckons.

Pumping iron may be just the thing if you are actually planning to become an Olympic champion. But for the average Joe, gyms have definite drawbacks. Exercising indoors is about as appealing as sex with your clothes on – fun on the odd occasion, but dispiriting on a regular basis. Exercise is about the outdoors, about space and energy and filling your lungs with, yes, fresh air.

The outdoors has another advantage over these palaces of the leotard-clad body – it is free. The missing factor in most gym members is the discipline to keep attending. The companies' continued survival is testimony to the triumph of hope over experience and the triumph is never greater than at the start of a new year.

One answer is to combine exercise with something else – such as commuting. The technical term for this is "utility exercise". By cycling to the office I get my weekly quota and avoid the stress-induced heart attack another delay on the Underground's Northen Line will ultimately bring. But avoiding 40-ton lorries – and their noxious fumes – will not appeal to everyone.

Another solution is to get off the bus or tube, or park the car, one or two stops short of your destination and walk. Brisk walking for three to four hours a week (half an hour a day) is one of the most effective ways of boosting fitness and warding off heart disease.

The search for fresh air can reach obsessive levels. I have been reading Robert Macfarlane's book 'The Wild Places' – the young Cambridge English lecturer's riveting account of his search for the most challenging spot in the British Isles in which to sleep out under the stars – when not obscured by hail, snow or horizontal rain.

Having travelled north in December to Cape Wrath, Scotland's most northerly point, regularly lashed by Atlantic gales, he left the cover of the bothy in which he had been sheltering as dusk was falling in order to spend the night sleeping in the dunes behind the beach in his bivouac bag – in a raging storm.

Having survived that night – with little sleep, by his own admission – he climbed Ben Hope, the most northerly mountain in Scotland, and spent a freezing night on the summit. He was so cold he had to get up at 2am and pace back and forth to stay alive. At first light, as soon as he could see where he was going, he climbed down – with another mind-expanding adventure for his book.

Reading it under the duvet, I felt chilled to the core – and eager to follow in his footsteps.