— by Jeff Jurmain, MA
The need to discuss the health benefits of bicycling is not strong. Exercise is exercise and cycling is one of the best ways to build your body’s aerobic capacity and whip your heart into shape.
But it’s always fun to have a gander at some great results out of a new study. This one is about cycling and shedding pounds, and being a woman. Researchers found that only five minutes of biking a day (an extremely short amount of time) could help a premenopausal woman keep the pounds off. This tiny finding could have big implications: every one of us can get on a bike and fight the battle of the bulge. And all it takes is a measly five minutes.
The more time spent biking in the new study, the better, according to Harvard University researchers. It is those women who have the most excess weight who will benefit the most from flipping up the kickstand and heading out for a bike ride. It’s encouraging as well, because bicycling is a form of commuting and can replace driving a car in this way. It can also replace walking for leisurely exercise, with a great deal more benefit.
The study appears recently in the much-respected “Archives of Internal Medicine.”
The obesity epidemic has been a major focus of research for some time. A staggering two-thirds of adults in the United States are either obese or overweight. Just as important is the fact that 16% of children and adolescents are overweight. They are the ones who will continue this epidemic long into the future.
Obesity is just the beginning of the long trail of health problems after it. Heart disease, osteoporosis, arthritis and type 2 diabetes lead the list of major illnesses that directly result from having more pounds on a body than it can manage. The federal government is currently very invested in attempting to figure out how to stem the tide.
How do we make it easier for everyone to exercise? Well, bicycling is both simple and inexpensive. It is definitely one of the optimal ways to burn calories and fat. And studies like the new one are important, as they show people that it can work. People can drop numbers from the bathroom scale. And it just takes a little bit of commitment.
In the study, researchers studied about 18,500 healthy women who were premenopausal, taking part in the long-term Nurses’ Health Study. The women, on average, gained approximately 20 pounds over 16 years. Women who didn’t cycle back in 1989 but had started getting on the bike by 2005 were about 25% less likely to have gained weight. The best part is that this fact held true even if they rode for just five minutes a day.
On the flip side, women who cycled for more than 15 minutes a day in 1989, but didn’t exercise much and let it slip, ended up gaining weight. Women overweight or obese who cycled as little as two hours a week were 56% less likely to put on pounds.
Maybe it’s time to break out the oil and lube the chains on that bike.
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