What Are The Most Important Health Benefits Of Cycling?
If you desire for the fit and healthy body, then you have to do much more than just desiring for it. You have to make some efforts to gain it. You must be asking what kind of efforts? Here I am not talking about taking pills of multi-vitamins but about staying active.
Our body is a machine, a good diet, and physical activity can keep it away from the disease, or I would say keep it away from a breakdown. Same like other machines, diet work as fuel for body whereas physical activities keep it going.

Photo Credit: http://mervjay.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/benefits-of-riding-a-bike.png
We may need to spend some bucks for a healthy diet but for a physical workout, the most affordable and cheapest exercise it is cycling. Yes, you heard it right. Cycling is the easiest type of workout, which can be done by a person of any age without fearing about the injuries.
Bicycling is one of the cheapest form of workouts and yet very impactful. It has a lot of benefits from health benefits to environmental and social benefits. But here we are only concerned with your health, so we share some most important health benefits of cycling.
Health Benefits of Bicycling that You Must Consider
1. Health Heart
If you are inactive or living a sedentary life, then you will be shocked to know that a sedentary life affects the health in a similar way as smoking of 20 cigarettes in a day. Now thing if you are a smoker who is living sedentary life than how badly you at the risk of heart disease.
It has been seen that cycling greatly cut the risk of coronary heart disease, so choosing cycling on sedentary life can help you to keep your heart healthy.
2. Powerful Brain
Till date, we were considering cycling as the only activity, which gives us good muscles and stamina but according to new research, cycling makes you brain more active and healthy. It improves your memory, helps you to take quicker action and improve co-ordination.
Cycling considerably affects the density of white matter and BDNF protein of brain, which ultimately helps to make faster connections and regulate mood.
3. Shed Extra Kilos
Shedding extra kilos can be a very hectic task for many. Cycling is one exercise, which with so many benefits also helps to improve the metabolism and burn the extra fat. But don’t expect that you will lose weight just by cycling while having your pizzas and burgers.
So, healthy diet with cycling can do a miracle for your body. According to research, you can burn approximately 650 calories per hour with cycling. So take your bicycle out of the garage and start riding today.
4. Healthy Joints
As you lose oodles of weight with cycling, the pressure on your joints automatically decreases, which in turn helps to keep joints healthy. The other thing is cycling improve your balance and co-ordination, which decrease the chances of fall and fractures.
5. Improve Immunity
We all know that immune system fight against all the bacteria and viruses, which attack our body and cause infections and diseases. Studies have shown that cycling considerably strengthens body immune system and keep us healthy from many diseases.
6. Stay Positive and Feel Stress-Free
According to studies, any kind of physical activity may it walking or cycling, it increase the release of a feel-good hormone in the body and make you feel more happy and positive. If you feel happy and positive, then stress and depression will stay at a distance from you.
7. Healthy Spine
The spine is the most important bony structure of the body, so keeping it fit is as necessary as breathing. Why am I saying this? This is because an injury in the spine can make a person just like living vegetable on the bed with no movements. So spine health is very important.
When you do cycling, you legs extend and fold in the cyclic movement, which strengthens the muscle of lower back, the most critical part of the spine where slip disc occurs. Cycling strengthens every small muscle of back, which cannot be taken care with other exercises.
If you don’t believe, then try it today and the first things you will notice is decreased in you back pain.
8. Increase Muscle Power
Cycling is low impact exercise but keeps almost every muscle of your body in action but most importantly to your lower body muscles such as calve muscles, thigh muscles, etc. So to tone your leg muscles add cycling today in your workout routine.
9. Fight Cancer
It is evident that adding physical workout like walking, running and cycling in your routine daily decrease the chances of different types of cancer such as breast cancer, prostate cancer, colon cancer, etc. So what you are waiting for? Start cycling today and cut the risk of cancer from your life.
10. Stay Beautiful
Cycling helps in improving the blood circulation. Better the blood circulation, more will be the oxygen and nutrients transported to your skin cells, which will make your skin healthy and young. As according to studies, exercise helps to improve the collagen production, which keeps your skin wrinkle-free.
11. Healthy Sex Life
Cycling or any kind of physical activity helps to improve the health of the vascular system, which is directly linked to sexual drive. So opt for cycling today and have a healthy sex life.
12. Stay Energetic
As cycling help to release happy hormones in the brain and increase your stamina, it ultimately helps you to stay energetic every time. High energy means high enthusiasm and, which means happy and healthy life.
13. Control Diabetes
No doubt diabetes is a deadly disease, which can cause other diseases like skin diseases, kidney problems, heart problems, etc. Type 2 diabetes is mostly caused by the low physical activity in life. By adding just 30 minutes of cycling, you can decrease the chance of diabetes to a considerable level.
14. Boosts Stamina
Do you always feel tired? Then start cycling today. If you ride cycling daily, then this cardiovascular exercise can help to improve your stamina. Good stamina means, less fatigue and less fatigue means happy and more enjoyable life.
15. Longer Lifespan
With so many health benefits what else you can expect? Yes, a definite, longer and happy life is what you get from cycling. It fights against all the deadly diseases such as:
- Cancer
- Heart problems
- Diabetes
- Obesity
- High blood pressure
- Depression
Thereby, adding cycling to your daily workout will be a wise decision for you.
Cycling V/s. Gym

Photo Credit: http://magazine.foxnews.com/food-wellness/better-workout-spinning-vs-outdoor-cycling
You must be thinking, why we have just focused on the health benefits of the bicycle and not of other exercises or gym. The reason behind it is that:
- Bicycling is something for, which you do not need to have a trainer and spend money.
- This activity is meant for every age-group.
- Just by embracing bicycling for 15-20 minutes in a day, you can do wonder for your body health.
- You can also do it just for 3-4 days in a week for half an hour and take full benefits of it.
- Additionally, the best thing about cycling is you can adjust a number of spins according to requirement.
Our Thoughts on Cycling
It is low impact exercise, which also does not cause any kind of injury, but you need to take care of certain things such as never forget to wear helmet while cycling, always looks for a comfortable seat, wear good sports shoes, choose bicycle according to your height, etc.
So keep cycling and stay healthy!