Taking up riding a bike can be one of the best decisions you make, whether for your health, fitness, environmental reasons, or boosting your bank balance. Riding a bike can help you improve your relationships, overall happiness, and health and make you more fit. If you are still wondering what positive changes riding a bike can bring to your lifestyle, here are a few compelling reasons to convince you.
Increases The Power Of Your Brain
If you want your grey matter to sparkle, taking up biking is a great idea. Research has found a five percent increase in cardio-respiratory fitness can be achieved through cycling. This leads to up to fifteen percent improvement in mental tests. Cycling is known to build new brain cells in the region responsible for memory. Pedaling boosts the flow of blood and oxygen to the brain. This fires the regeneration of receptors and is directly known to aid in keeping diseases like Alzheimer’s away.
Keeps You From Getting Sick
Pedaling away is one of the best ways to keep the doctors at bay. A good way to keep your immune cells active is by doing moderate exercise. This way, your body can fight off infection better. Medical research has proven that people who cycle for thirty minutes at least five days a week have taken fifty percent fewer sick days than those who are less active.
Enables You To Live Longer
Exercises such as pedaling regularly significantly lower the risk of type 2 diabetes, cancer, heart disease, obesity, and blood pressure. Riding a bike is a regular exercise that makes your body more efficient at regenerating new cells and defending itself against illnesses. This enables you to have a longer, disease-free, healthy life.
Helps To Make The Planet A Better Place
You can park as many as twenty bicycles in the space of a single car. Only five percent of the energy and materials used to build a car are needed to make a bike. And the best part is, bikes do not produce any pollution. A good road bike, such as the bikes from Specialized, is more efficient than cars. If you compare walking to riding a bike, you can go around three times faster by spending the same energy as walking. Biking does not require fuel as it does for any car, so you save on energy costs. So it’s a win-win for the planet all around.
Cycling Is Good For Your Heart
According to research, you can cut the risk of heart disease by half if you cycle regularly. Other studies have shown that as many as 10,000 heart attacks that may be fatal can be avoided annually if people are more fit by exercising, such as riding a bike. If you cycle for just about 20 miles per week, you will be able to halve the risk of heart disease compared to those who don’t exercise.
Better At Work
Studies have shown that employees could improve their workload and time management by exercising before work or during lunchtime. This also boosted their ability to deal with stress and their motivation. Working out makes the employees feel more adept at interpersonal performance, can finish work within time, and take fewer breaks. Hence, exercise such as cycling is a great way to improve at work.
Helps You To Lose Weight
Many people think that taking up jogging is the best way to lose weight. It is easy to lose weight by jogging; however, if you are a little on the heavy side, jogging alone might not cut it. This is because about two to three times your weight crashes through your body each strike your foot makes on the ground. That is a lot of force if you are heavy.
So it is better to start on a bike. The saddle takes most of your weight, which is why your frame isn’t taking a beating. By cycling, you can put off running until you shed a few pounds first.
Cycling Helps To Avoid Pollution
One might think that a person riding a bike will ingest more polluted air than someone traveling in a car or a bus. But research has revealed that passengers on taxis, buses, and cars took in a lot more polluted air than pedestrians and cyclists. Passengers traveling by taxi got exposed to over 100,000 ultrafine particles. These can damage the cells of your lungs by settling there. On the other hand, people commuting by bus ingested just under 100,000, and people traveling in cars inhaled around 40,000 ultrafine particles.
People commuting by bikes only got exposed to around 8,000 ultrafine particles per cubic centimeter. The reason for this, according to most, is that cyclists are riding at the edge of the road, causing them to not be directly in the smoke exhaust line, breathing in fewer polluted fumes.
Get More Creative
Musicians, writers, top executives, and artists can use exercise to clear mental blocks and make more creative decisions. Studies have shown that as much as 25 minutes of aerobic exercise, such as cycling, can boost your creative thinking by at least one measure. This is due to the flow of oxygen to your gray matter when it is most required, enabling you to take more breathing space away from the pressures of daily life and sparking your neurons.
Summing Up
The ways mentioned above are just a few points of how cycling can benefit your everyday lifestyle. There are many other ways cycling can aid you to have a healthier lifestyle, a fitter body, and overall better mental health. So what are you waiting for? Get a bike and start pedaling away today.