Exercise

Anyone who pedals regularly strengthens their heart and immune system. Pedaling has a positive effect on the muscles, intervertebral discs, blood circulation and joints. Those who manage to get to 40 minutes will lose weight, because the fat will start to melt. If we cycle through a lovely landscape, we will also do something good for the soul.

The long winter is over. The awakening nature also lures us out from behind the stove. The body craves movement. Not everyone feels like jogging or walking. That’s where the bike comes in handy. Whether it’s the old bike or the high-tech bike, it doesn’t matter. The important thing is that we swing into the saddle and drive off. It’s again the time for cycling.

Bicycle – an Ideal Fitness Device

Whether in everyday life, for leisure or holiday activities, we can always fit in the bike. We don’t even have to bring our own, because many locations already offer rental bikes.

Almost everyone can ride a bike, whether young or old, athletic or overweight. The body weight is carried by the saddle, the joints are relieved, the intervertebral discs activated and the muscles trained. Blood pressure is stabilized. Breathing is deepened and oxygen uptake is significantly increased.

Twenty minutes of cycling has a positive effect on the immune system. This is caused by the climatic stimulus provided by wind, air and sun.

Starting from 30 minutes we strengthen the heart and circulation. If you can even manage 40 minutes, you boost your fat metabolism. The pounds will start to tumble.

The soul doesn’t miss out either. It is a pleasure to experience the landscape at a slower pace than from a car. The headwind caresses not only the body but also the soul, if we allow it. This improves the quality of life all around.

It’s the Dose that Counts

If you haven’t been in the saddle for months, you should take it easy. Otherwise, the body’s revenge will follow: the breath runs out, pain in the neck, shoulders and sore muscles set in and the joy is gone. This can be avoided if we prepare the body for the unfamiliar movement. Belly-leg-butt and shoulder exercises prepare the muscles.

Stretching exercises for the back muscles are important because the spine muscle called erector spinae tend to be overstretched when cycling. Practicing on the home trainer during the long winter months would have been ideal.

The feel-good pace is a moderate speed, individually adjusted to the training condition. You should still be able to have a good conversation while cycling. The cycling trips are to be gradually extended. Don’t start too fast, rather ride more often. You should be tired when you reach your destination, but not exhausted.

Some Technique

It is important that horse and rider fit together. The saddle should be set high enough so that you can put your heel on the pedal with your leg stretched out. If you sit correctly on the saddle, then you stand with the ball of your foot on the pedal. In this way, the power when pedaling is used optimally. If the saddle is set too low, the knee joint is forced too much. This can lead to injuries and you also tire more quickly. However, if the saddle is too high, the legs are forced to fully straighten. This can also be problematic for the joints.

The saddle should be leveled out flat, and the handlebars should be level with the saddle. In this position, the spine is not bent too far forward, but also not so upright that bumps in the road would cause damage. A variable handlebar allows the grip position to be changed frequently, so you can always adopt a new sitting position.

Of course, the bike must also comply with the road traffic regulations. Two good brakes, bell, rear and front lighting and reflectors should be mandatory, reflectors also belong between the spokes and on the pedals. By the way, if you are smart, you ride with a helmet.

The Round Treadle

The treadle should not be angular and hacky from top to bottom, but round and loose. The pedal should not only be pushed down, but also pulled back in the down position and pushed forward in the up position. Even professional cyclists practice again and again on this round treadle.

The upper body should not swing back and forth when pedaling, but should be almost immobile. The legs are kept parallel to the frame so the knees are not spread apart.

A common mistake made by amateur cyclists is the number of revolutions per minute, the frequency. Many ride in a gear that is too high. You don’t get to your destination so exhausted if you drive at 70 to 90 revolutions per minute. Proper shifting and braking need practice.

When going uphill, you can stand up and pedal out of the saddle. The whole body is trained in this way. There is tension and relaxation. This is how women achieve slender hips and firmly trained butts.

Clothing and Shoes

Jerseys and cycling shorts made of modern, breathable materials are comfortable, but not essential. You can also wear comfortable, loose sportswear or a tracksuit. It is important that nothing is constricting, and that you dress in layers that you can take off and put on again, depending on the weather and heat development. The shoes should have a non-slip sole. Loose slippers that cannot be tied are taboo. They can lead to accidents.

Don’t forget the thirst quencher, the water bottle. One tenth of a gallon of water is drunk for every half hour of cycling. This increases endurance.

Cycling in Daily Life

Let’s incorporate cycling into everyday life. Why not cycle to work? You can catch two birds with one stone. Admittedly, you have to overcome ingrained habits and comforts, fight your inner couch potato. If you often use your bike to run errands or just drive to work, you can save yourself a trip to the gym in your free time. Regular cycling has many health benefits. You also protect the environment, because the bicycle has no polluting emissions.

Bike Touring

One of my best vacations was cycling along the Danube River from Passau to Vienna with my family. There are wonderful cycling routes in every country. You can take your bike on the train or ship and choose the easier routes if you don’t want it to be too strenuous. But you can also face challenges and plan a mountain bike tour. The main thing is that you start and enjoy it. With this in mind, let’s enjoy cycling. As a result, one can really say: bike tour instead of pill cure.

Exercise doesn’t just mean chasing the ball. Everything that lives moves. People, animals, even plants move. Movement is a characteristic of life. We can explore our environment through movement. Movement shapes us. But our way of moving also shapes our environment. Let’s just think of the car. Where do you come across a car? Let’s imagine a city without cars. Unimaginable? Or would that be heaven on earth for pedestrians?

Anyone who tries to define “life” will quickly notice that it is not that easy. What does it take to be able to call something really “life”! Reproduction? Then a person would be dead alone, because it takes two to reproduce. But it is certainly part of the principle of life, just like the constant renewal of cells, the ability to adapt, improvisation and most certainly the energy and the resulting movement. When a climbing plant twists and turns around a climbing aid, that is movement. Granted, it’s extremely slow. Snails also literally move slowly, but they move forward. They are often far too fast for garden owners in eating their lettuce. A leopard can run as fast as a car.

Even a top athlete can lay down a remarkable pace. If you convert Asafa Powell’s 100m run to miles per hour, that’s 23 miles per hour (37 km/h). This is the result of years of training. Discipline and a strong will are also part of it.

The brain is the control center for muscle movement in the entire body. Nerve pathways pass on the commands from the brain to the muscles. Electrical impulses are alternately converted into chemical ones and vice versa. A true miracle of creation, if you consider the speed at which everything happens. Such reactions take place in thousands of muscle fibers in a thousandth of a second. Movement is and remains a miracle that we no longer think about in everyday life when we move. Should we unexpectedly find ourselves in a wheelchair, we would appreciate the miracle again.

Sedentary Lifestyle

But our modern way of life has made us sluggish. Ship, train, car and plane have made long walks for us. Machines help us with our physical work. So we have to provide more and more a balance so that we don’t become “couch potatos”. Movement is still a principle of life. And everything we don’t practice, what we don’t use, we lose.

Churchill is reported to have said: “No Sports” when he was asked how he has reached his old age drinking whiskey and smoking cigarettes. Yet when he was a young officer, he was actually an extremely athletic person. Fencing, horse riding, swimming and polo were his sports. He also undertook a very strenuous escape on foot from a Boer prison camp in 1899. This escape was rated as a great physical achievement. The first marathon runner in ancient Greece is said to have collapsed dead after his run. There are occasionally reports in the press that athletes collapsed dead after their performance or at least suffered a collapse. According to relevant studies, however, the risk of death after exercise is very low. It mostly affects people who have challenged themselves to top performance without being trained. Well, we don’t need to become football players or top athletes.

Health Benefits

Endurance sports reduce cardiovascular deaths from 70 to 30 per 10,000 people. The heart is trained through sport or simply through persistent exercise. Movement lowers the resting heart rate. If we can reduce the resting heart rate by 10 beats per minute, the heart is saving 5,256,000 beats per year. What a gain! Exercise lowers blood pressure and cholesterol levels. The heart can only benefit from this. The supply of oxygen throughout the body is improved. All of these are factors that prevent heart attacks and strokes. Exercise of course cannot prevent aging entirely, but it can do well in delaying it. When used correctly, it increases performance, cerebral blood flow, resistance and vitality.

Exercise lowers the insulin requirements and helps stabilize blood sugar levels. It strengthens bones and muscles. Calcium and minerals can only be stored thanks to movement. Who does not remember the thin limbs when the cast can be removed after six weeks? This is due to a lack of exercise. For those for whom the word “sport” is sounding like torture, it can be replaced by walking, swimming, or strolling. These types of movement also improve our quality of life considerably if they are exercised regularly and for at least half an hour a day.

Exercise is not only responsible for our physical well-being. Our soul benefits from it as well. You can literally run away from depression. Anyone who has tried this before can confirm that. Endorphins, happiness hormones, are released when you move. They lift our mood. The increased blood supply to the brain allows us to think more clearly again. When I’m at the computer and make no progress, I go out into the garden. After a while of gardening or a brisk walk with the dog, everything goes much better again.

No Excuses!

The biggest obstacles to moving are the lazy excuses: No time, too old, too cold, not today, tomorrow I’ll start, alone, too boring. There is a solution to all excuses. Movement can be incorporated into everyday life. As soon as you wake up in bed you do some exercises under the warm blanket. It continues with putting on the clothes. With a little imagination, you can incorporate a whole exercise program. Something like this: Hop on one leg while putting on your socks. When you pull the t-shirt over your head, you complete a stretching program followed by hip circles. Who can think of anything else?

On the way to work or school, you walk a portion of the way. On the escalators we can save time and walk forward instead of staying still. Even in old age you can find an appropriate type of exercise. It can be a bit more relaxed. Even in nursing homes with a few minutes of fitness program a day, progress can be achieved. There are appropriate clothing to protect against the cold and you will warm up quickly anyways. Even today I can decide to do more exercise, on my own, when I’m more of a loner. It’s more fun with friends, however. You can always find like-minded people with a little effort. So: From today on, get a kick out of life through more exercise!

With over 50 million American adults practicing chronic inactivity, this habit could be “the biggest public health problem of the 21st century.”(( Blair, S., PED, Speaking at the American Psychological Association’s 117th Annual Convention.))

 A well-known health educator, Ellen White, once wrote, “Perfect health depends upon perfect circulation.”(( White, E., Healthful Living, p. 30.)) The scientific validation of this profound statement is becoming increasingly clearer. Researchers are now understanding that inactivity decreases the circulation of the blood and causes the body to begin shutting down. The Australian journal Circulation found that a person’s risk of dying increases as much as 11 percent for every hour of television watched per day—even when researchers controlled for age, sex, education, smoking, BMI (body mass index), and leisure-time exercise. Pennington Medical Research Center has shown that inactivity gives us a 54-percent increased risk of heart disease, so it is no surprise that the sedentary lifestyle of Americans is partly responsible for heart disease being the number-1 cause of death. People who spent more than four hours a day sitting in front of the T.V. had an 80-percent greater likelihood of dying from cardiovascular-related disease than those who watched less than 2 hours per day.(( Dunstan, D., et al., Television Viewing Time and Mortality: The Australian Diabetes, Obesity and Lifestyle Study. Circulation: JAHA, 121:384-391, 2010.))

Today’s Trend

 In the 1950s, roughly 75 percent of the workforce was engaged in manual labor, while the other 25 percent was comprised of clerical or managerial jobs that were chiefly sedentary. However, in the last 50 years, this ratio has completely reversed. At present, about 80 percent of the workforce are in sedentary positions or positions that require only light activity. We are now living in a generation that will “RUST OUT” rather than “WEAR OUT,” in spite of the fact that the pressures of modern society may be in certain respects more stressful and demanding than those of previous generations.

Who’s the Slowest?

 Are you curious to know what regions have the highest level of inactivity? It appears that parts of Appalachia and the South are the most inactive, according to research findings in which more than 29 percent of adults in those areas indicated that they get no exercise or physical activity outside of their work. Areas of the West Coast, Colorado, and Minnesota are among the regions demonstrating the highest activity levels.(( CDC (Center for Disease Control).))Not only are states affected, but ethnic and racial groups as well. Hispanic women who did not complete high school are at the greatest risk of inactivity, at 32.3 percent. Black men with a college education had the lowest prevalence of inactivity, at four percent. Hispanics and non-Hispanic Blacks reported similar levels of inactivity, but both groups were more inactive than their Caucasian counterparts. Women tended to report being less physically active than men.(( Marshall, S., et al., Study Links Social Class and Physical Inactivity. JACSM, 39(1):44-51, 2007.))

 Why Sitting Still Can Kill

 Although we don’t need to be told by the experts that sitting around too long can lead to a potbelly or backache, we may be imbibing false concepts of the benefits that can be gained by exercise done to offset these sedentary habits. Do you think that going to the gym three to four times a week can make up for sitting down most of the day? Marc Hamilton, an inactivity researcher at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center, states, “Exercise is not a perfect antidote for sitting.” Useful work, however, offers many benefits, including an increased tendency to resist disease. It is interesting how exercise (or lack of it) has played a role in the escalation of diabetes. Inactivity researchers (yes, there is such a thing) at Mayo Clinic have confirmed that being sedentary is disastrous to one’s metabolism: just 24 hours of being sedentary can result in a 40-percent reduction in insulin’s ability to uptake glucose. This makes sitting around an especial no-no for anyone with diabetes.

 Exercise is very important to the powerhouses of the cells, called mitochondria. These little organelles help convert ATP (adenosinetriphosphate) into the energy required for our bodily functions. Significantly, the amount of physical activity in which we engage determines to a great degree, the number, size, and efficiency of our mitochondria. This generally means that the more physically active you are, the more energy you will have. The old saying “Use it or lose it!” holds true— not only for the muscles but on a cellular level as well! Sitting burns a mere one calorie per minute— which correlates to a 67-percent decrease in caloric expenditure, compared to walking. At this lowered metabolic rate, the breakdown of lipids and triglycerides slows significantly, the helpful HDL cholesterol is depleted, and insulin effectiveness rapidly decreases. Although poor posture has a definite effect on our health, it is not the only ill of sedentary behavior. The amount of time that we spend sitting, as well as the activity in which we are engaged while sitting, are also problematic. For example, the physiological effects of watching an intense game of football for two hours is not going to be the same as that of having a meaningful conversation with a good friend for the same length of time.

 Inactivity and Longevity

 Alpa Patel, an epidemiologist at the American Cancer Society, tracked the health of 123,000 Americans between the years 1992 and 2006. Patel estimated that on average, people who sit too much shave a few years off their lives. The men in the study who spent 6 hours or more per day of their leisure time sitting had an overall death rate that was about 20 percent higher than men who sat for 3 hours or less per day. What was interesting is that the same statistics did not apply to women: those who sat for more than 6 hours a day had about a 40 percent higher overall death rate, or twice that of men.(( Vlahos, J., New York Times,  April 14, 2011.))

 Exercise and Calories

 Dr. Levine, a professor of medicine from Mayo Clinic and considered to be one of the most authoritative researchers of inactivity, was interested in finding out why eating an extra 3,500 calories didn’t necessarily put on an extra pound of fat. He discovered that the small movements of daily activity that would not technically be considered as exercise also play a role in the utilization of calories by the body. He coined the acronym NEAT, which stands for non-exercise activity thermogenesis, a name for the concept of reaping large benefits from thousands of minor movements each day. Although it doesn’t account for all the aspects of caloric expenditure, we have to admit that it is a NEAT part of the equation!

 Effects on the Mind

 Exercise is not just an activity to improve heart function, weight or blood-sugar control; it also has a profound effect upon one of the most important organs of the human body, the brain. “Continued inactivity is one of the greatest causes of debility of body and feebleness of mind. Many are sick who ought to be in very good health and thus in possession of one of the richest blessings they could enjoy.”(( White, E., Counsels on Health, p. 95.)) Mental workers and students, would you like your mind to be more efficient and vitalized? Get adequate physical activity! “The time spent in physical exercise is not lost. A proportionate exercise of all the organs and faculties of the body is essential to the best work of each. When the brain is constantly taxed while the other organs of the living machinery are inactive, there is a loss of strength, physical and mental. The physical system is robbed of its healthful tone, the mind loses its freshness and vigor, and a morbid excitability is the result.”(( White, E., Counsels for the Church, p. 160.))

 Not only is bodily activity necessary for a healthy mind, but also for a victorious spiritual life. Useful labor increases the strength and force of the will so that we can choose the right and shun the wrong. It is no surprise that our Savior, who conquered and vanquished sin at every step, spent a life of prayer coupled with one of constant activity, working, walking from village to village healing, and teaching.

 As we contemplate His life of active service, maybe the Lord is calling you to walk more closely with Him. Why not take the next step of faith, be it ever so small or great, and journey on in the “path of life” that leads to “fullness of joy” in His presence forevermore?(( The Bible, Psalm 16:11.)) It will be sure to be a move worth making! 

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This article was published originally in the Journal of Health and Healing, a publication of Wildwood Institute.