How to Motivate Young People to Embrace Outdoor Activities

For many young people, free time is increasingly connected to screens, social media, gaming, and other indoor activities. Encouraging them to spend more time outdoors can therefore feel challenging. Yet outdoor activities such as hiking offer much more than physical exercise: they create opportunities to explore, socialise, develop independence, connect with nature, and build healthier habits.

The key is not simply telling young people that hiking is “good for them”. To make outdoor activity part of their lifestyle, the experience needs to be enjoyable, social, meaningful, and relevant to their interests.

Here are some practical ways educators, families, and youth organisations can help make that happen.

1. Turn Hiking into an Experience, Not Just Exercise

A hike does not have to be presented as a long walk from point A to point B. Adding a purpose can completely change how young people experience it.

A hiking activity could include a photography challenge, nature scavenger hunt, orientation task, wildlife observation, geocaching activity, or team mission. Students might be asked to identify signs of biodiversity, photograph interesting landscapes, find checkpoints, or solve challenges along the route.

When the activity becomes an adventure, young people focus less on the distance they are walking and more on what they are discovering.

2. Make It Social

For many teenagers, being with friends is one of the strongest motivations for participating in an activity.

Hiking can create an ideal environment for conversation, cooperation, and shared experiences. Instead of organising every activity individually, educators can introduce small-team challenges, partner activities, collaborative navigation tasks, or group goals.

Young people can also take different roles during the hike, such as navigator, photographer, environmental observer, team leader, or route recorder.

This transforms outdoor activity into something they experience with others rather than simply being instructed to do.

3. Give Young People a Choice

Motivation increases when young people feel that they have some control over the experience.

Whenever possible, involve them in planning. Let students choose between routes, suggest activities, select a theme for the excursion, create a playlist for appropriate moments, or decide which environmental topic they want to investigate.

Older students can even help design hiking activities for younger groups.

Giving participants responsibility encourages ownership. Hiking gradually becomes something they help create rather than something organised entirely for them.

4. Add Challenges and Goals

A small challenge can make an outdoor activity far more engaging.

Instead of focusing only on kilometres, challenges can include:

• reaching a viewpoint as a team;

• completing an orientation route;

• identifying plants or natural features;

• completing a certain number of outdoor activities during a month;

• creating the best photographic story of the hike;

• carrying out a “leave no trace” challenge;

• designing a sustainable hiking route.

The objective should not always be competition. Personal improvement, cooperation, discovery, and environmental responsibility can be equally motivating.

5. Connect Outdoor Activities with Technology

Technology does not necessarily need to disappear when young people go outdoors. It can be used differently.

Phones and digital tools can support navigation, photography, identification of plants and animals, route tracking, digital storytelling, or environmental observation.

Students could record their route, create a short video diary, document biodiversity, or prepare a digital map after returning to school.

The objective is to make technology a tool for exploring the environment rather than something that replaces interaction with it.

6. Give Hiking a Bigger Purpose

Young people are more likely to engage when an activity connects with something meaningful.

Outdoor activities provide a natural opportunity to discuss environmental responsibility. During a hike, students can observe the consequences of littering, learn about local ecosystems, discuss biodiversity, investigate human impact on landscapes, or participate in simple conservation activities.

Educators can introduce practical principles such as respecting wildlife, remaining on designated trails, reducing waste, and leaving natural areas as they found them.

Environmental education becomes much more powerful when students experience the environment directly rather than only learning about it in a classroom.

7. Start Small

Not every outdoor experience needs to involve mountains, specialised equipment, or an entire day.

A local park, coastal path, woodland, rural trail, or green space near a school can provide an excellent starting point.

Short activities help young people who are less physically active develop confidence gradually. Once outdoor experiences become familiar and positive, longer or more challenging activities can be introduced.

The aim is to create positive associations with being active outdoors rather than making the first experience feel overwhelming.

8. Make Activities Inclusive

Young people have different physical abilities, experiences, interests, and educational needs. A successful outdoor programme should recognise these differences.

Routes and activities can be adapted in terms of distance, pace, difficulty, responsibilities, and learning tasks. Not everyone needs to complete the same challenge in exactly the same way.

Providing different roles and levels of participation can help ensure that students with different abilities, including students with special educational needs, can contribute meaningfully to the experience.

Outdoor activity should create a sense of belonging rather than become another environment in which some students feel excluded.

9. Celebrate the Experience

Completing a hiking challenge deserves recognition.

Schools and youth organisations can create hiking passports, certificates, digital badges, photo boards, classroom maps showing completed routes, or short videos celebrating participants' experiences.

Recognition does not need to focus on who walked fastest or travelled furthest. It can reward teamwork, curiosity, environmental responsibility, perseverance, leadership, or improvement.

These memories and achievements help strengthen positive attitudes towards outdoor activity.

10. Make Outdoor Activity Part of Everyday Life

One successful excursion is valuable, but lasting change happens when outdoor activity becomes normal.

Schools can organise regular walking activities, outdoor PE lessons, nature challenges, hiking clubs, or extracurricular excursions. Families can support the same habits by choosing occasional walks or outdoor activities as part of their leisure time.

The more frequently young people experience enjoyable outdoor activities, the more likely they are to see movement and contact with nature as a normal part of life.

From “We Have to Go Hiking” to “When Are We Going Again?”

Motivating young people to embrace outdoor activities is ultimately about creating the right experiences.

Hiking offers a particularly accessible way to combine physical activity, social interaction, discovery, environmental learning, and personal development. When young people are given opportunities to explore, participate, make choices, overcome challenges, and enjoy nature together, outdoor activity becomes much more than another PE exercise.

This is also at the heart of HIKEWISE: supporting educators in using hiking and other outdoor activities to encourage healthier, more active lifestyles while helping young people develop a stronger connection with and respect for the natural environment.

The goal is not simply to convince young people to go hiking once.

It is to help them discover reasons to want to go outdoors again.

© 2025. All rights reserved.

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The project “HikeWise” is co-funded by the Erasmus+ Programme of the European Union. The views expressed in the working papers, deliverables and reports are those of the project consortium partners. These views have not been adopted or approved by the Commission and should not be relied upon as a statement of the Commission’s or its services’ views. The European Commission does not guarantee the accuracy of the data included in the working papers and reports, nor does it accept responsibility for any use made thereof.

Project Number: 2024-1-ES01-KA220-SCH-000246218

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