It’s safe to say that cycling is a popular exercising activity which quite a lot of people are into. Maybe you’re also into cycling as a form of exercise or you’re just about starting your own cycling journey with your cycling gloves so you need to know what cycling can do for you.
You need to understand that there’s so much more to cycling (in terms of health benefits) than you probably think.
Benefits of Cycling
Cycling does so much more to your body than just getting it physically worked up. Read on to find out exactly what these other health benefits associated with cycling are.
1. Helps with Weight Loss
To effectively lose weight, you need to consistently burn more calories than you consume. Engaging in cycling can help burn about 400 to 1,000cal per hour. This calculation depends on the cycler’s weight and how much work is put into the cycling per hour.
Take note that it’s important for you to enjoy the exercise that you have chosen to do and wear proper gear such as quality cycling shoes. If you enjoy cycling, you will efficiently lose weight. If you don’t enjoy it, you will have a hard time losing any weight.
Obviously, your diet is also a key factor on your journey to lose weight. You should strictly follow through with diets that facilitate weight loss and not the other way around.
2. Improves Posture and Balance
Cycling involves keeping your body stabilized for your bike to remain upright. While you’re doing this, you get to improve your overall balance, posture, and coordination.
There’s a tendency for your balance to reduce as you get older, hence try as much as possible to keep working on it. There’s a reduced risk of injury resulting from falling if your ability to maintain good balance is on point.
3. Boosts Self-Confidence
Engaging in exercise with a bike can increase your confidence. It has been discovered that an increase in confidence can also lead to a tendency to self-report sexual desirability at a rate above the normal average. This happens more in men than in women.
The reason this happens is related to the fact that exercise has been proven to increase sexual drive and consequently reduce sexual dysfunction to a certain level.
A woman can become more sexually responsive after engaging in exercise for about 20 minutes, while too much of a good thing can reduce testosterone levels in men.
4. Improves Mental Health
A research by YMCA has shown that individuals who lead a physically active life, on the average, have a well-being score that’s 32 percent more than individuals who lead physically inactive lives.
There’s usually a release of adrenaline and endorphins when doing exercise. These chemicals can generally boost your mood as they are being released in the body. There’s also a feeling of heightened confidence associated with achieving a sportive goal.
You can choose to go cycling on your own if you need your personal space to do some thinking or clear your head while on your bike, and you can also go cycling with a bunch of other cyclers. The latter could help you increase your circle of friends but the important thing is to get one of the Garmin GPS computers to track your progress.
5. Builds Muscle
Yes, cycling builds your muscles. Mainly muscles around the hamstrings, quads, calves and glutes. Individuals who have more muscle than fat tend to burn calories even when they are inactive. This is because muscle is leaner than fat.
Cycling won’t give you the kind of muscle build you see on a sprinter if you don’t seriously devote time and energy to it and increase your cycling speed. Regardless, you still get a nice trim and fit look from your average cycling if you get help from cycling gels as well.
6. Improves Sleep Quality
Getting a good night’s rest has become quite difficult these days. This can be associated with the level of engagement we have with our electronic devices on a daily basis, making it hard to disconnect from them and get the right hours of sleep that our bodies need.
A study from the University of Georgia has shown that cardiorespiratory fitness is related to sleep patterns. Over 8,000 subjects ranging from the age 20 to 85 were included in a study. It was discovered that there’s a huge relationship between reduced fitness and the inability to fall asleep and other sleep related problems.
7. Doesn’t Let You Overeat
Exercising regularly helps you to take control over your eating habits and gives you the ability to restrict your eating to the normal required quantity. Hence, if you engage in cycling on a daily basis, there’s a good chance that your tendency to overeat reduces.
From a study conducted by some researchers at the University of Bath, it was discovered that if two separate groups of men who seriously overate were subjected to different levels of exercise, where the first group is totally physically inactive and the other group exercised daily, the group that exercised daily wouldn’t suffer ill effects related to overeating, such as unhealthy metabolic changes or blood sugar spikes.
8. Increases Life Expectancy
Engaging in cycling daily can increase the length of your life regardless of the fact that you might already be getting quite old.
A study conducted in Norway which was focused on a group of elderly men in their 70s and 80s discovered that 30 minutes of exercise each day added about five years to their life expectancy when compared to men who were physically inactive.
So, why not get on that cycle and do a couple of rides daily? You have nothing to lose, just more life to gain my dear friend.
Conclusion
Now that you know what biking does for you and you know more about the health benefits that are associated with cycling; I advise that you diligently continue with it if you had been doing it before. You can also begin the journey if you were considering starting.
Cycling is a fun exercise that also improves your health greatly while you’re at it!