recreation

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Beaches are popular places to relax
... as well as forests

As recovery , regeneration or recreation refers to the recovery of spent forces and restore the performance.

On the concept of recreation

The term originates from medicine and means "again healthy are." With recovery is the process in general, when a biological organism after strenuous activity, after physical fatigue and mental exhaustion , but also by injuries or diseases regenerated by a resting phase and forces accumulated ( restitution ) . Recovery in the biological-medical sense therefore mainly includes sleep , rest breaks (relaxation, refection) and convalescence in the real sense.

Recovery as an economic factor

In sociology, however, the expression has gained an independent meaning, here relaxation is understood to mean the periods of time that serve to restore social performance. In this form recreation originally comes from the military sector, and in the time of industrialization it was determined by the context of labor as an economic resource. In production management , restitution is one of the types of processes to be taken into account for humans.

Recovery as a basic need

The realization that recreation is not in the service of the ability to work but a basic need is more recent. According to Article 24 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights , the “right to rest and leisure and, in particular, to reasonable limitation of working hours and regular paid leave ” is a fundamental human right .


Breaks are the oldest remedy for exhaustion during prolonged strenuous activities. Regular short breaks are already being practiced in numerous professions, from air traffic controllers to call center agents. Breaks during an operation have so far not been an issue in surgery. A study published in 2011 by the Hannover Medical School (MHH) found:

Surgeons are less stressed, more productive and make far fewer mistakes. The breaks do not increase the overall operating time. The surgical team stays with the patient during the short breaks in the operating room.

The MHH study examined around 60 complex minimally invasive surgical interventions in the abdominal cavity (keyhole technique) in children. For the study, the doctors chose a break schedule of 25 to five, which means that the surgical team took a five-minute break every 25 minutes. The control group consisted of conventional operations without breaks. Various parameters were examined; among other things, the emission of the stress hormones cortisone, adrenaline and testosterone. In addition, the surgeons had to undergo concentration and performance tests before and after the operation and make statements about how they themselves rate their performance and fatigue. Her heart rate was also recorded during the operation.

“The study shows that short breaks have consistently positive effects: surgeons who take breaks release significantly fewer stress hormones; the amount of cortisone, for example, is 22 percent less than those who do not take breaks. The performance is also retained. This also corresponds to the impression the surgeons have of themselves. They said they felt less tired after surgery if they took short breaks during the procedure. The balanced heart rate, which was measured by the pausing surgeons, also indicates consistent performance. Surgeons who regularly interrupt their work also make fewer mistakes. The susceptibility to errors is three times less than that of colleagues who “operate through”.

Despite the initial skepticism among colleagues, the short break scheme has largely prevailed in children's surgery at the MHH. "

Recreation company in the leisure and tourism industry

Since the middle of the 20th century, recreation has developed into an independent factor in leisure activities. A distinction must be made between the terms leisure and recreation :

  • Free time is the entire time outside of work or training hours and the time that is available for life support (such as sleeping, eating, health care).
  • Rest are the activities of relaxation, they may or may not include activities

Leisure time also includes non-recreational activities such as further education , training , household chores and DIY , voluntary activities and the like. Recreation also includes, for example, the times financed from the occupational social system or medically prescribed measures for recovery or the cure that do not take place in leisure time but are subject to obligations of the world of work.

Tourism in the narrower sense always includes travel activities, leisure and recreation activities also take place at the place of residence or the closer living environment ( local recreation ) . In terms of tourism, a distinction is therefore made between the sectors of tourism, leisure and recreation, albeit largely overlapping. For example, the following reasons for travel are given (worldwide):

  • Free time, relaxation and vacation: 50%
  • Visiting friends and relatives, health and religion: 26%
  • Business reasons, training and further education: 16%
  • Others: 8%

In tourism marketing has been shown that "recreational operation" and "recovery operation" two in the reception of the clientele - is certainly also contradictory - are concepts: During leisure operations in particular, the sports and cultural events encompassed ( active vacation ) , recovery is at rest focused ( wellness ) . Therefore, brands of the destination have developed that correspond to the recreation profile . These include, for example:

Recreational space and recreational value in spatial planning and nature conservation

In modern spatial planning, recreation has developed into one of the most important demands on space resources . Both modern concepts of leisure activities, active design and sport, and relaxation through finding peace, turn out to be space-consuming, landscape-intensive needs. Recreation in urban areas as well as in the country requires a distance to the settlement, traffic and commercial areas, but also connections to the same, and own infrastructure (sports facilities and facilities, bathing areas, parking lots and the like), but also open space . In addition to the areas of tourist development (classic tourist areas ) that have emerged since the 1970s, the local recreation area , which takes account of the increased prosperity and the non- tourist need for recreation , is increasingly becoming the focus of spatial planning.

The need for play, sport and exercise definitely conflict with the need for rest. And both types of leisure activities are also increasingly putting pressure on nature conservation concerns : it is precisely the areas of great natural value that are also attractive for relaxation. As much as the natural landscape is of high recreational value, recreation and leisure activities of all kinds become a disruptive factor in the sense of the wilderness idea . Here, nature management becomes the central tool of both nature conservation and spatial planning, which develops suitable usage concepts for the individual landscape areas - whether close to the city or in the hinterland - which meet people's need for recreation as well as that of nature. While in the later 20th century the use of nature by humans - both for economic and recreational purposes - was seen as landscape protection alongside nature conservation, the modern biosphere concept begins with the space requirements of humans and the "rest of" nature not as opposition, but to one another to understand.

See also

literature

For recreation in work sociology:

  • Max Weber: On the psychophysics of industrial work , chapter “Fatigue” and “Recovery” ( Zeno.org )

For recreational activities in environmental protection:

  • Klaus Stadler: Nature conservation and recreation: Legal problems in the area of ​​tension between nature conservation and recreation with special consideration of the Bavarian legal situation . Volume 72 of writings on environmental law . Duncker & Humblot, 1996, ISBN 3-428-08837-9 .
  • Wilrich: Commentary on Section 6 of the Federal Nature Conservation Act - Recreation in nature ( pdf 536 kB)

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ recovery . In: dtv Brockhaus Lexikon . 5 Eit – Fle , 1988, p. 124 .
  2. ↑ see refectory
  3. ↑ see recovery, f.. In: Jacob Grimm , Wilhelm Grimm (Hrsg.): German dictionary . 16 volumes in 32 sub-volumes, 1854–1960. S. Hirzel, Leipzig ( woerterbuchnetz.de ).
  4. ↑ Thomas S. Yukic: Fundamentals of Recreation, 2nd edition . Ed .: Harpers & Row. 1970 (English, Library of Congress 70-88646).
  5. ↑ see Holger Luczak: Arbeitswissenschaft . 2nd Edition. Springer, 1998, ISBN 3-540-59138-9 , stress and recovery , p. 235 ff . (The author for the recovery A function of the time t the relationship with A 0 as the initial state of fatigue and k as restitution constant according to Simonson 1935 an empirical value. It follows an analysis of recreational and duty cycles.).
  6. ↑ Universal Declaration of Human Rights # Article 24 on Wikisource
  7. ↑ www.mh-hannover.de ( Memento of the original from November 5, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.mh-hannover.de
  8. ↑ a b Definition according to Claude Kaspar: The tourism theory in plan . In: St. Gallen articles on tourism and economics . 5th edition. Hauptverlag, Bern 1996. Quoted in Giovanni Danielli, Norman Backhaus, Patrick Laube: Economic geography and globalized living space: learning text, tasks with solutions and short theory . 3. Edition. Compendio Bildungsmedien AG, 2009, ISBN 978-3-7155-9367-8 , 13.1 Leisure, recreation and tourism, p. 150 ff . ( limited preview in Google Book search).
  9. ↑ World - Arrivals by purpose of visit / Tourist Arrivals by Purpose of visit (2005). (= Link to viewer in section International Tourist Arrivals ) (Data as collected by UNWTO for TMT 2005 Edition). (No longer available online.) In: unwto.org → Facts & Figures → Tourism Indicators → Inbound Tourism. World Tourism Organization (UNWTO), archived from the original on July 16, 2007 ; accessed on June 5, 2011 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.unwto.org