10 Ways Cycling Improves Your Body and Mind

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If you’re looking for a great way to exercise, cycling offers the right kind of variety to get you fit whether you prefer to exercise indoors or want the adrenaline-consuming intensity and challenge of the outdoors.

This makes cycling one of the best forms of exercise, providing all-around fitness for both mind and body. A lot of people get into cycling because they want to lose weight, but many stay for the fun and the multitude of health benefits that directly transform their ways of life.

Here are ten health benefits that should urge you to get up and pedal your way to fitness.

Improves Sleep Quality

In his best-selling book “Why We Sleep,” sleep researcher Matthew Walker reveals just exactly how getting less sleep than recommended could really affect your quality of life. Cycling regularly helps put your circadian rhythm in sync; reduces stress hormones that may prevent regenerative, deep sleep; and affects your brain’s serotonin levels to help you sleep better.

 Tones Muscles

Cycling exercises the muscles in the buttocks, thighs, calves, hamstrings, hips, abdomen, shoulders, and arms. If you cycle regularly, you will work out these muscles. The more they are worked out, the stronger they grow. Your muscles will get toned and sculpted, making you achieve a leaner physique.

A good build also helps you develop high self-esteem.

 Exercises Your Heart

Cycling is considered an aerobic exercise, a kind of exercise that pumps up your heart rate. The intensive alternating power and recovery phases deplete the oxygen in the muscles, which pushes the heart to work faster in order to keep up with the body’s oxygenated blood supply requirements. Doing this regularly protects you from common heart diseases.

 Improves Posture

Did you know that slouching causes fatigue, pain, arthritis, and a host of deleterious issues that can harm your long-term health? The effects of bad posture are not something to take lightly. Fortunately, cycling just thirty minutes every day can help the body slowly ease back to its proper alignment and help improve full body coordination.

 Boosts Brain Power

Cycling has shown to improve multiple brain functions. During cycling, the brain is forced to pay attention to simultaneously occurring stimuli, demanding you to focus, relax, and do away with daily worries. This mental purging results to better decision-making.

Cycling also protects the brain from neurodegenerative diseases by facilitating cell growth in the hippocampus.

 Maintains General Wellness

The physiological impact of cycling enhances flexibility, improves lung strength and capacity, as well as increase bones, muscles, and overall stamina—all of which are signs of optimum health. It will help you will feel more energetic and focused. This translates into your productivity at work and your personal life at home. As your body takes shape, your quality of life also improves.

 Gets Rid of Fat

Perhaps the most well-known benefit of cycling is its potential to reduce body fat. A lot of diet fats advertise sole diet routine as an instrument to reducing body fat levels, but recent studies show that they are only effective if coupled with exercise.

 Slows Down Aging

There are plenty of health problems that accompany the body’s natural aging process. As a result of physical decline, the body is placed at more risk of developing diseases such as stroke, heart disease, and diabetes. Cycling pushes back this process by affecting the cellular processes. Cycling increases your cells’ mitochondrial capacity, which is associated with function. More mitochondria means better cellular function.

 Improves Mental Health

People suffering from depression and anxiety have shown recovery by simply riding their bikes. Cycling is a peaceful exercise that forces the mind to concentrate on one specific task rather than wander on to worries. It slowly eases you to relax and feel good by releasing endorphins, the body’s happy hormones.

 Lessens Stress

Although stress has no direct effect in itself, stress triggers a sequence of physical processes that could render your health vulnerable to many harmful issues like an increase in blood’s cholesterol and sugar levels, diabetes, digestive problems, anxiety, mood swings, heart problems, and Alzheimer’s disease.

Indeed, with its self-esteem boosting and mental-health benefits, cycling naturally makes one of the top stress-busting exercises you can do, as supported by a recent Lancet research.

The Takeaway

This broad spectrum of benefits ensure fitness for the short and long term. Not only can cycling keep you in shape, it also boosts your productivity, makes you sharper and more confident, and helps stave off the most common aging problems.

As a cyclist looking to improve performance, the following are helpful tips:

• Gradually increase your speed. Use a power meter to quantify your power output and challenge your average every once in a while.
• Be sure to ride in total comfort.
• Cycle as much as possible.
• Don’t forget to nourish yourself with good nutrition and a proper diet. Always stay hydrated.
• Ride with friends occasionally. It will make the ride more social and perhaps even more enjoyable.

If you’re someone looking for a practical hobby that’s not only healthy, dynamic, and challenging but also sustainable because of the fun factor, cycling is your best bet.

 

So gear up and set off on your own cycling adventure today.