BICYCLE & CYCLING: A healthy heart the fun way

A healthy heart the fun way: bicycling

André Jute

All exercise taken intentionally, whether to improve your health and longevity or to prepare you for an athletic contest, aims to raise your respiration rate for a given period of time into a band carefully chosen by age and existing fitness. Everything else is a refinement. Bicycling makes the main purposes easy and the refinements a pleasure. Perhaps less obvious until you try bicycling are the long-term health benefits of the way cycling helps in keeping up the exercise. The only other form of exertion to share these extremely valuable derived health advantages of bicycling is hillwalking, which is much, much more time-consuming than cycling.

•The bicycle fits exercise into the modern lifestyle more smoothly than either swimming or jogging, the other two exertions which can approach the health returns of cycling for the same time invested. That makes it easier to keep up a schedule. I no longer have a schedule, merely a routine that is part of my life: I bicycle whenever I can.

•Even fun bicycle rides with the family most often naturally fall into the most beneficial exercise pattern of warmup, an interval of hard exercise, and wind-down, followed by a break, in as many periods as are required. The longterm benefit of making properly structured exercise seem an entertainment rather than a grim necessity is inesteemable.

•The bicycle helps to turn exercise into an social occasion. Serious swimmers do not swim together, and jogging appears to have become a grimly determined, silent activity even when joggers run in pairs for road safety. Bicyclists talk to each other. Bicycling is the golf of people who are more serious about keeping their hearts healthy than golfers are!

•That the bicycle makes all these gains seem easy, rather than a hardship, is a definite if immeasurable psychological advantage which translates into a health advantage by making regular exercise inviting.