5 Reasons to Start Orienteering
Orienteering has one special ingredient: thinking.
Two demanding processes happen at the same time — physical effort and high-level cognitive work.
In today’s world, many of us are slightly lost all the time. We use digital navigation even to find a café 500 meters away. But what does this digital dependence do to our brains? Orienteering is an excellent antidote.
1. Strengthen Your Hippocampus
The hippocampus is the part of the brain responsible for memory and learning. It also plays a key role in spatial awareness.
Studies of London taxi drivers, who spend years mastering the city’s layout and evaluating optimal routes, have shown that they have significantly more gray matter in their hippocampus.
This area of the brain naturally shrinks with age. Orienteering helps slow that process, potentially reducing the risk of diseases such as Alzheimer’s.
2. Digital Dementia
With the rise of GPS systems, we have outsourced our natural navigation skills. When you use GPS, you are not truly navigating. You are following instructions.
Orienteering forces you to build a mental map. You must transform a 2D map into a 3D understanding of the world around you. This keeps your spatial awareness sharp and active.
3. Decision-Making Under Stress
During a local event, you can set your own pace. Still, your heart rate will likely be higher than usual.
Under physical load, you must make important decisions. Do you take the narrow street or the longer but safer route?
In these moments, you train your executive functions. You practice staying calm and making calculated decisions while your body is under stress.
This skill extends far beyond orienteering. In any high-pressure situation, the ability to pause, assess, and decide wisely becomes invaluable.
4. Spatial Awareness
Spatial awareness is the ability to visualize shapes and distances in your mind. Research has shown positive connections between strong spatial skills and performance in STEM subjects.
But it also transfers to everyday life. Parking a car, planning a small home renovation project, organizing space — all require spatial thinking.
A local orienteering event is a surprisingly powerful training ground for this.
5. The Urban Jungle
In the city, we tend to stick to familiar streets and routines. We visit the same places and rarely wander just for the sake of exploration.
Orienteering leads you through places you may never have noticed — streets you would not normally walk down. You are in your own city, yet it suddenly feels like a small adventure.
Navigation does not happen only in physical space. In our minds, we constantly navigate future plans and imagined scenarios.
Everyone makes mistakes while orienteering. You miss a turn. You misread the map. Then you must stop, assess, and find your way back.
That ability — to pause, reorient, and continue — is a life skill that applies everywhere.
We begin on March 11.
