Statement: Have we really done our best to increase the physical activity of Finnish population?
The situation is familiar to many experienced hikers too: you decide to walk through a new hiking trail. The location of the route can be found in one service and additional information about toilets and campfire sites in another. The second service also has a link to the third service, which says that a certain section of the route is currently being renovated, so the route cannot be used as a ring route. However, you decide to go and hike the available portion of the trail back and forth. You arrive at the general starting point of the route, but you are not quite sure where exactly the route starts. You also won’t find a parking space, although another site mentioned that the parking area is right next to the starting point of the route. The ingredients for frustration are there.
Information about different forms of exercise and places is still very fragmented.
It is a fact that we Finns move too little. Although there is a lot of talk about increasing physical activity, and it has been named as an important strategic goal even at the national level, the measures taken to achieve this can sometimes seem insufficient to the average citizen. Information about different forms of exercise and places is still very fragmented, if information can be found in the first place. This is not likely to lower the threshold to start exercising.
“The construction, development and maintenance of conditions for exercise and outdoor recreation are the basis of municipal sports activities”, states the joint bulletin of municipalities’ sports divisions, which was published on June 3, 2024. The joint statement has been signed by 48 officials responsible for sports services from different parts of Finland.
The annual economic and investment expenditure of sports sectors of the Finnish municipalities announced in the bulletin is about one billion euros, but despite this, the population’s immobility is increasing and leisure pursuits are polarizing. The release points out that one of the tasks of the municipalities is to make sports facilities accessible to everyone and serving different target groups equally.
The question is: Have we really done everything we can in Finland to make physical activity and exercise easily accessible to as many people as possible?
When an ordinary user searches, for example, for hiking or mountain biking routes in his own place of residence, the information cannot be found within one, two, or perhaps even ten clicks away – and the information should be at least a few clicks away these days, because paper maps found only at municipal information points or physical map boards standing in the terrain are no longer enough to meet the definition of accessibility in the 2020s.
Paper maps found only at municipal information points are no longer enough to meet the definition of accessibility in the 2020s.
On a practical level, of course, a lot has been done to address the issue: local sports facilities have been renovated and maintained with devotion, and more have been built, and among the options there is often something for everyone even in a smaller town. However, judging by the statistics, this is still not enough to fix the problem. The core solution would be to remove all possible obstacles that reduce physical activity: for example, too often when searching for information, users have to jump from one site to another and browse different PDF maps to find what they want, which suggests that the service path has not been thought through from the user’s point of view. The available information should be up-to-date, reliable and, above all, easy to find.
Municipalities and other entities should have an active dialogue about the area’s exercise and sports activities, so that instead of overlapping activities, the exercise services, events and frameworks organized by different entities support and complement each other. This would also make sense from the user’s point of view: if a tourist interested in exercise and recreation arrives, for example, in North Karelia or Kainuu on a nature trip, it is likely that they will want to visit several destinations in the province and engage in several different activities. The promotion of recreational use of nature and nature tourism has now also been included in the Get Finland moving programme of the government programme, so complementing each other’s services would also promote this goal.
The available information should be up-to-date, reliable and, above all, easy to find.
In the joint announcement of the municipalities’ sports divisions, it is mentioned that in order to respond to the challenges of immobility, in addition to the municipalities, other actors at the local level are also needed, such as sports clubs, other associations and companies. With the help of financial incentives, important innovations have been achieved in, for example, the research pharmaceutical industry and environmental protection, so perhaps it would also be important to get involved in the promotion of physical activity by those who promote activities on a market basis – after all, the 3D printer, for example, was not originally invented out of goodness of heart, but nowadays the method has a huge importance in health care, for example.
At the Paris Olympics, Finland missed out on medals, and there are undoubtedly several reasons for this; the root causes are probably deep in the structures of our sports and exercise culture. However, making sports venue information more accessible would certainly not harm future medal balances.
We have the keys to the solution in our hands, so we only need the right state of will to succeed in increasing exercise. With the power of cooperation, we could make Finland a pioneer and an example in increasing the physical activity of population for other countries as well.