Bike to Work Day 2009: Health Benefits of Biking to Work

According to the 2005-2006 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES)¹, "an estimated 32.7 percent of U.S. adults 20 years and older are overweight, 34.3 percent are obese and 5.9 percent are extremely obese." Biking to Work Day is a great opportunity to try out biking to work or just biking for your health.

Biking is a great way to improve your overall health. Even if you are slim, biking offers benefits since it is excellent for your cardiovascular health. Biking for just 30 minutes gets your blood flowing through your body and air circulating through your respiratory system beneficially. According to the League of American Bicyclists, 80% of people who switch from sedentary commuting to cycling improve their heart, lungs and blood vessels greatly in 6-8 weeks, so they get sick much less often." So you benefit immediately from the cardiovascular workout biking offers, and over the long haul, the cardiovascular improvements will lead to a boast in your natural immunity so that you get sick less often. That is quite a benefit.

Biking regularly burns calories which translates into the potential to lose weight or maintain a healthy weight through the benefit of regular physical activity. According to the Bike League National Bike Month Guide, commuting 10 miles burns 400 calories for a 180 pound man and 300 calories for a 130 pound woman. If you weigh a little more, the good news is that you actually burn more calories for the same commuting distance.

Biking can allow you to have your cake and eat it too. Why? Because 300 calories is the equivalent of 2 cups of whole vitamin A and D milk, 2 servings of Breyer's Ice Cream, or 1 and 1/2 whole Hershey's Chocolate Bars for instance. So, if you are at a weight that you are happy with, this means that you could eat a dessert each day that you bike and not increase your weight. In fact, if you opt for only 1 serving of ice cream, then you could eat a small cup of ice cream each day you bike, yet lose weight. Since a commute for a man is 400 calories, this leaves an extra 250 additional calories burned for the day after enjoying a small ice cream dessert. Or for the woman whose commute burns 300 calories, she burns an additional 150 calories for the day after she eats 1 serving of ice cream.

The physical act of biking provides great exercise for your legs, more so if you are traveling up or down hills. This will benefit the muscles in your legs by increasing tone, muscular strength, endurance, and improving the overall look and definition of your legs. Bicycling gets your hips and joints moving which is a great way to improve or maintain flexibility in your hip joints which will become more important and beneficial as you age so that you do not lose your full range of motion in your hip joints which can be painful. For many people who sit in an office all day, biking provides the spine some additional range of motion. This range of motion is extremely important for the fluids in the spine, spinal flexibility, and the core muscles surrounding the spine. Sitting all day long, whether at a desk, at a computer, at a table, in a recliner, or driving a vehicle is not very good for the overall health of the spine and the core muscles of the body. Biking daily, whether to work or for exercise after work, provides your spine a much needed change in motion from the normal position that it gets stuck in from the average person sitting most of the day.

Bicycling outdoors, versus in a gym or at a home machine, provides several other health benefits. The extra exposure to the sun from being outdoors can increase your vitamin D intake. This is especially important to those living in Northern environments but also to those who simply spend most of their day indoors. Vitamin D is essential to good health. Many indoor environments contain indoor air pollution from carpets, office furniture, pesticides, and dust to list a few offenders, so bicycling provides your lungs a much needed break from indoor air pollution especially if your commute passes through some green spaces.

Additionally, exercise in general, increases the production of good hormones and chemicals in the brain and reduces the production or decreases the negative effects of hormones and chemicals that your brain produces when engaged in or exposed to stressful situations or through negative thinking, chemicals like cortisol and adrenaline. With that said, if you have a hard day at work or in the classroom or a spat with a loved one, bicycling can be a natural way to influence your brain to shut off processes that release hormones which increase the aging processes and contribute to disease. Bicycling or exercise will cause your brain to turn on the production of chemicals and hormones that can boast the mood, improve the memory, promote good health, and feelings of overall well being. These beneficial hormones can also increase the body's healing capabilities, increase the pain tolerance threshold, and decrease the aging process.

There are so many health benefits to biking and exercise, it makes one wonder why more people aren't making the choice to exercise regularly. These health benefits also translate into mental health benefits, emotional health benefits, and financial benefits when you avoid the consequences of lack of exercise which can include ill health, cancer, diabetes, heart problems, and many more illnesses and diseases that are expensive to treat and even less fun to live with, yet some of which are completely preventable. Biking can actually help prevent an untimely death. For instance, in 2000, obesity due to lack of physical activity and poor diet caused 400,000 deaths which was a total of 16.6 percent of all deaths recorded². Biking and other regular physical exercise benefits your health and can even increase your life span. If you don't bike, give it a try for National Bike Month.

¹LiveScience Staff, Obese Now Outweigh the Overweight, LiveScience

The League of American Bicyclists, National Bike Month Guide p12 Health and Productivity,www.bikeleague.org

² Exercise and Your Heart -- A Guide to Physical Activity. National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute / American Heart Association, DHHS, PHS, NIH Publication No. 93-1677