Leisure innovation theory holds that taking up new leisure activities by older people may facilitate healthy aging. To examine this theory in an urban Asian context, I conducted a case study of older adults in Guangzhou, China. I undertook in-depth interviews with 27 adults aged 50–80 years; I analyzed the data with open, axial, and selective coding using NVivo 8.0. I obtained the following findings. First, the participants practiced four main types of leisure activities: cultural and physical activities; digital leisure; artistic creation; and intellectual games. Second, those activities led to positive outcomes with respect to health, self-development, place identity, and social interaction. Finally, the main factors influencing leisure innovation comprised internal factors (values of life and leisure) and external factors (availability of time, money, institution, and space; institution and space were the most important).

Forest parks are important for ecological conservation, recreation, and the health and well-being of the people who use them. However, forest parks located in urban areas often face the problem of crowding. To better understand perceived crowding in urban forest parks and to improve tourists’ recreation experiences and satisfaction, we constructed a conceptual model of the relationships between perceived crowding, emotion, and satisfaction with mechanisms of adjustment based on survey data from Dafu Mountain Forest Park in China. The results indicate that, in urban forest parks, perceived crowding significantly and negatively affects tourists’ satisfaction, but there is no significant difference in satisfaction between different activity types. Both positive and negative emotions have partially mediating effects on the relationship between perceived crowding and satisfaction. Crucially, our modeled mechanisms of adjustment play a moderating role in the effect of crowding on tourist satisfaction, and the choice of adjustment behaviors varies according to the activity type. This work enriches the research related to perceived crowding, mechanisms of adjustment, and satisfaction in tourist destinations and provides a theoretical basis for the future management of urban forest parks.

Urban parks, one of the most significant outdoor leisure areas, are particularly important for the physical and mental health of older adults. In order to investigate the benefits and constraints of leisure activities that older adults perceived in urban parks, as well as their negotiation mechanisms, this study was conducted using a qualitative method, interviewing 102 retired older adults aged 55 or older in Guangzhou, China, and using Rost CM 6.0 for word frequency analysis. The study findings indicated that due to the lack of age-friendly public leisure facilities in Guangzhou, Chinese older adults expressed multiple expectations regarding the benefits of urban parks, mainly in terms of physical, psychological, and social interaction, with physical benefits being their primary drivers. Leisure constraints can be intrapersonal, interpersonal, or structural. Older adults who visited parks and those who did not were affected by different levels of limitations, with the oldest people experiencing the most pronounced constraints. Older adults were able to access leisure opportunities through a variety of constraint negotiation strategies, including cognitive adaptability, spatiotemporal adaptation, interpersonal coordination, skill acquisition, and alternative leisure activities. The results of this study might assist related management departments in building more age-friendly parks based on the framework of the benefits and constraints of park recreation for older adults, in terms such as institutional design and planning to enhance the role of urban parks in healthy aging.

A single subjective bodily experience is at the core of sports tourism activities, but the current literature on sports tourism largely ignores both the continuous and ephemeral experiential processes of individuals in mobile sports activities from a bodily perspective. In this study, we developed a “context–body–perception” framework and selected a sample of tourists from Hainan Island, China, in order to explore the embodied experience of cycling tourists, using a qualitative approach. We found that the contexts encountered by island cyclists could be divided into a human context and nonhuman context. The human context included the companion context, pan-companion context, and host context, and the nonhuman context comprised the natural context, mediated facility context, and digital technology context. The cyclists’ physical experiences and perceptions in multiple different contexts were inseparable from each other, and both were embedded in a specific context through the five senses, through the state of body and activity, through emotions and memories, and through interaction with a specific context, all of which formed a dynamic feedback system. Through bodily practices in different contexts, cyclists acquired meaningful representations of their bodies, social relationships, and self-worth. The findings of this study can enrich the study of embodiment in sports and recreation areas, as well as provide an initial foray into bodily research in island-based cycling.