The Effects of Forest Walking on Physical and Mental Health Based on Exercise Prescription

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

I would like to thank for the opportunity to review this manuscript. Overall, this manuscript is written on an important topic of forest walking on physical and mental health. I have only some suggestions to further improve the quality of this manuscript.

Title

Overall, the title of the manuscript reads well. My only concern is that Authors could replace this word “prescription”.

Abstract

Please add more information about participants, for example more information about their age.

Please add more information about the results of this study.

Please add some more meaningful conclusions.

Main text

Introduction could be improved. Currently it is too short. Please elaborate on different possible correlates of forest walking. What about different forms of motivation from the self-determination theory. How could these affect the level of forest walking?

Materials and methods

Please provide more information about study participants.

Please provide more description of physiological measurements.

Results

Please check the journal guidelines and tables and figures.

Table 5 – not sure why it was necessary to define p-value with * here if you don’t use it?

Table 6 and Table 7 – not sure why you use * sign if there is a specific p value?

Discussion

Authors are recommended to elaborate the discussion and provide more comparisons with previous studies. Currently, the discussion if clearly too short.

Please provide practical implications of this study.

Please provide more limitations and future suggestions.

 

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The study under consideration investigated how individually prescribed 3 times forest walking affected several parameters of physical health, as well as psychological symptoms in Korean adults, and whether the degree of achievement mattered. I have several comments to this overall well-conducted study:

Introduction is focused entirely on safety of forest walking, while the main focus should be on how and why forest walking may be beneficial for health. Intro should be re-written.

L65-67 should be split into 2 sentences.

L67-69: So, how many participants were excluded? In general, a flowchart would be useful.

L91-94: An explanation is needed on those 30 to 60% of exercise intensity. The meaning of it is absolutely unclear for an uninitiated reader.

Footnotes are needed for Figure 2 to explain abbreviations.

All psychological measurements (section 2.6) should be described in more details, including min-max and Cronbach’s alphas.

Comments on the Quality of English Language

Quality of English is good, I detected only one issue.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The manuscript titled "The Effects of Forest Walking on Physical and Mental Health Based on Exercise Prescription" contributes to the understanding of prescribed forest walking effects on human health. In this article, the authors extend the scope of forest therapy in a significant way. Even though no exercise prescription control was missed, comparison between pre- and post-exercise could provide useful data. The methods are well described, and the results are clearly interpreted. Overall, the article is suitable for this journal, but there are a few minor issues that need to be addressed.

1. Please check the data “Changes (Post-Pre)”, e.g., In Table 7, 1.0 (0.5) or -1.0 (0.5)?

2. This article pertains strongly to forest therapy, however, it is only mentioned in the keywords. It would be beneficial to emphasize forest therapy in the introduction and conclusion. This study contributes both to theory and practice of forest therapy, so authors are encouraged to emphasize this.

3. For each analysis, different statistics tests were performed, such as the t test and the Wilcoxon signed-rank test. The statistical tests should be described in detail so that it is easy for the reader to understand why different tests are used by authors.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 4 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The article deals with psychological and physiological effects of the prescribed  exercises assalking along a forest trail.

The study is original and novel, the experiments were well designed, except for the missing control group - a limitation that is clearly stated. Despite such limitation, the idea of the partition of the study group into those who succeeded in maintaining the target hearth rate and those that didn't succeed is intriguing and leads to important consequences.

However, besides the stated limitations, there are few other important missing or uncertain points.

Lines 78-79: It would be useful to specify the distance of participants to the forest trail, especially beacuse they had to reach the experimental site three times a week. Did the participants came from the same village/town? Different travel distance could be a confounding variable. A map showing the site of forest trail and residence of participants would be useful too.

Lines 126-127: As far as I understand, participants walked (performed the exercises) in the forest in different days and/or different times of the day. A further limitation that should be mentioned is related to the missing information about monoterpenes (phytoncides) concentration in the forest atmosphere (exposure or, even better, total inhaled dose), because recently it has been proven that such exposure distinctly, significantly and intensively affects both psychological and physiological functions, such as anxiety symptoms (doi:10.3390/IJERPH20042773), and respiratory functions, at least in asthmatic patients (doi:10.3390/f14102012). After such proofs, it is no longer possible to neglect the distinct effect of the exposure to monoterpenes in the forest atmosphere. Thus, this subject would be worth mentioning both in the Discussion (as a limitation) and also in the Introduction.

Lines 130-131: Different times of the day for measurements do not allow excluding possible circadian effects (confounding factor). If correct, this should be mentioned as a further limitation.

Lines 286: "such as arterioles and arterioles". This is a repetition.

Comments on the Quality of English Language

English Language is very good.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Overall, Authors have done well job on revising the manuscript, I have only some concerns left. One important issue is that based on the self-determination theory, there are intrinsic and extrinsic forms of motivation. This is important because previous research has clearly shown that it is specifically intrinsic motivation (and not other forms of motivation) which is related to objectively measured physical activity.

Additionally, I would like to see more convincing suggestions for future research on how to get more people involved in forest walking. As previously mentioned, one central aspect is to support humans’ intrinsic motivation. Humans’ intrinsic motivation can be supported by providing them autonomy, competence, and relatedness support. In a recent study by Ahmadi et al., (2023) a classification system of motivational behaviours was proposed that could be highly useful in such future studies with the aim to support humans’ intrinsic motivation towards forest walk.

Ahmadi, A., Noetel, M., Parker, P., Ryan, R. M., Ntoumanis, N., Reeve, J., Beauchamp, M., Dicke, T., Yeung, A., Ahmadi, M., Bartholomew, K., Chiu, T. K. F., Curran, T., Erturan, G., Flunger, B., Frederick, C., Froiland, J. M., González-Cutre, D., Haerens, L., . . . Lonsdale, C. (2023). A classification system for teachers’ motivational behaviors recommended in self-determination theory interventions. Journal of Educational Psychology. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1037/edu0000783

 

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 4 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Congratulations to the Authors, who succeeded to perform a very good revision. The manuscript can be published in present form.

Comments on the Quality of English Language

English language is generally fine, no major issues detected. Possible minor errors could be corrected at the proofs stage.

Author Response

We really appreciated your insightful review. We think the manuscript has improved a lot thanks to the valuable comments of the reviewer.