About Extreme Sports

Extreme sport (also called action sport and adventure sport) is a media term for certain activities perceived as having a high level of inherent danger or difficulty and often involving speed, height, a high level of physical exertion, and highly specialized gear or spectacular stunts.
Extreme sports are often associated with various youth subcultures. Extreme sports are no more "extreme" than traditional activities played at a high level. The few generalizations that can be made about extreme sports is that they are almost always individual instead of team activities and that they often focus on performing tricks or stunts.

THE ADRENALINE RUSH
A feature of such activities in the view of some is their alleged capacity to induce an adrenaline rush in participants. However, the medical view is that the rush or high associated with the activity is not due to adrenaline being released as a response to fear, but due to increased levels of dopamine, endorphins and serotonin because of the high level of physical exertion.Furthermore, a recent study suggests that the link to adrenaline and 'true' extreme sports is tentative.The study defined 'true' extreme sports as a leisure or recreation activity where the most likely outcome of a mismanaged accident or mistake was death. This definition was designed to separate the marketing hype from the activity. Another characteristic of activities so labeled is they tend to be individual rather than team sports. Extreme sports can include both competitive and non-competitive activities.

REASONS
Some who enjoy extreme sports repudiate the stereotypical "adrenaline junkie" tag. The practitioners would claim they enjoy developing their physical and/or mental skills, seek mastery of inhospitable environments, look to escape from the mundane rigors of day-to-day existence, or simply love the wilderness environment in which many of these sports take place. Bob Drury, a paraglider pilot says, "We do these things not to escape life, but to prevent life escaping us"—even though accidents in these sports could be fatal. Many participants also don't think of their activities as either extreme or sports at all. To the most passionate purists, the sport label doesn't fit because they aren't competing to win anything. Worse, the extreme label has frequently been blamed for stereotyping participants in these activities as stupid, reckless, and even suicidal. Eric Brymer PhD (2005) also found that the potential of various extraordinary human experiences, many of which parallel those found in activities such as meditation, was an important part of the extreme sport experience.

Some of the sports have existed for decades and their proponents span generations, some going on to become well known personalities. Rock climbing and ice climbing have spawned publicly recognizable names such as Edmund Hillary, Chris Bonington, Wolfgang Gullich and more recently Joe Simpson. Another example is surfing, which was originally invented centuries ago by the native inhabitants of Hawaii.