Depending on where you live, exercising outside is a seasonal activity. I sorely miss taking my workouts outside during the horrid winter months and I plan to maximize my outdoor activity before it gets too cold. While I was on holiday in Europe with my sister, if we were not in yoga class, using a hotel weight room or my cousins living room floor for exercise, we took our workouts outside. I prefer to exercise in the morning, the air is fresh and the streets are empty. The morning quiet before each city awoke always set the stage for a perfect run or workout. We got to sightsee and "people watch" while running, to enhance our workouts we always sought out stairs, inclines or hills.
While in Italy, the Spanish Steps were a great landmark for a workout, in Barcelona we found a few small inclines that served as hills for our workout. Typically when doing a hill workout I use a very long and steep hill in which 5 - 8 hill repeats suffice a good workout. Since the hills we found in Barcelona were small, we had to do twice as many repeats, this meant running up the hill, then jogging or walking down as we took an active recovery before turning around and doing it again 20 times!
Hill workouts are a great way to mix up your routine. If you usually run on flat surfaces, your body will appreciate the challenge of an incline. If you are not a runner and find long distances hard, doing hill repeats is a great cardio choice - the short, fast bursts of movement followed by a recovery don't require the endurance and stamina of long distance runs. Also, if you do enough hill repeats you will burn more calories in 30 minutes of hills than you would in 30 minutes of running on a flat surface.
Exercise to stimulate, not to annihilate. The world wasn't formed in a day, and neither were we. Set small goals and build upon them. - Lee Hanney
