5 Reasons Riding a Bike is Good Exercise
It’s pretty much a given that physical activity is good for you. Why? A basic reason is that you’ll feel better.
You’ll also look better – your body will be more sculpted, your posture will improve, even the shine of your hair and the condition of your skin will improve.
You’ll be much stronger, and that will lead to more energy. When you look and feel this good, you’ll feel less stress and have a happier disposition.
In decades past, physical activity was a main component to our work. Working in the fields and manual labor in the factories gave us a good daily workout.
Today, however, with our computer-oriented sedentary lifestyle, we have to find a more planned way of exercising.
In fact, the definition of exercise is that it is physical activity that is planned for the express purpose of improving and maintaining good health, fitness and body condition.
To meet that purpose, your exercise modality should include conditioning for cardiovascular health, training for strength and resistance, and a method for improving flexibility.
And it should be fun. It doesn’t take scientific studies to prove that if exercise isn’t fun in some way, we tend to not do it regularly, up to the point of quitting it all together.
Here’s where bike riding comes in. As we’ll see, riding a bicycle is a very effective workout, meeting all of the above requirements. And it is fun.
Why is bike riding great exercise?
1. Toning
The muscles of your legs and your buttocks receive a great toning with bike riding. The constant motion of your legs as you propel the bike, and the flexing and gripping of the muscles in your buttocks as they power your legs especially tone your thigh muscle, called the quadriceps muscle, and your buttock cheeks, the gluteus maximus, the largest muscle in the body. Your calves also get in on this toning session.
A bonus is that cycling also tones the upper body, sculpting it as you work the handlebars.
2. Calorie Burning
If you want a great machine specially made for burning calories, look no further than your bike. Using a 150-pound man as the example of an average person – he will burn 270 calories/hour while leisurely cycling. Picking up the pace and riding a bike at 12-14 miles per hour, the calories he burns per hour will be 595. And if he bikes at 14-16 miles per hour he will burn about 720 calories/ hour. Mountain biking will burn about 575 calories/hour.
3. Working the Muscles
Bicycling is great for working your core muscles. Find a hill that would take 5 to 10 minutes to climb, and ride up and down it several times. While doing that, pedal out of the seat (or saddle) half the time.
When you are “standing” in the pedals like that you have to use all of your core muscles to stabilize your body weight over the bike. This also works the biceps and triceps muscles of the arm.
4. Improving the Cardiovascular System
The benefits to your cardiovascular system, including your heart, is a given with bicycling. Biking is an aerobic activity whether you are on a leisure ride or in a race.
What makes all aerobic exercise modalities beneficial is keeping up the exercise at a steady rate for a minimum of thirty minutes. When biking for this purpose, find a path or a road where you can stay to a constant rate for this time period.
Of course, your aerobic workout will strengthen and benefit the cardiovascular system best the faster your speed is but still at a pace you can maintain.
5. Energy Boosting
Riding a bicycle as been shown in scientific studies to actually decrease fatigue by a factor of 65%. The level of energy itself has been found to actually increase by 20-25%.
The scientific reason for this energy boost from cycling is that this type of exercise stimulates the brain to release dopamine, which is a neurotransmitter that is associated with energy in the body.
You might be happy to know that these same studies found that riding a bike at a moderate pace every 2 to 3 days eliminated the sense of fatigue better than did riding fast and hard.
Biking is easy to do. Your bike is portable and can be taken on your car or even on a public bus to parks and outdoor recreational areas. You might even live where you can bike to work. And every time you are riding your bike, you are having a great exercise workout, and having fun while you do it.