Riding a bike means practicing sport even if it is a relaxing pedaling. Although most of bikers are not considered professional ones like those who participate in the Tour of France, the Giro of Italy or the Vuelta of Spain, we should consider suitable food to eat before starting pedaling. Cycling, as well as every aerobic exercise, causes a reduction in the simple carbohydrates content of your body and it can diminish your fat proportion. This fact appears after sugars provide energy to your muscles. Thus, if you want to reduce brown fat, practice aerobic exercises.

Eaten food before pedaling can produce two effects in your body. First, eating energy-rich food (with lots of complex carbohydrates or fats) helps you exercising at least until this extra energy is burned. In fact, bikers who practice high-intensive, competitive exercises such as riding in the Tour, Giro o Vuelta, eat within stages to re-energize them. It is important that food provides complex carbohydrates. This way, body takes longer time to absorb it, so energy levels are higher when starting pedaling. Otherwise cyclers who eat simple carbohydrates would have much less energy because they eat one or more hours before starting exercising.

Second, eating too much can cause problems when cycling since body needs energy and blood to digest food. In other words, if you eat too much then your muscles and digestive tract compete with each other. The more energy and blood to muscle, the worse digestion. And the better digestion, the worse cycling.

Hence, take into account that food is an important issue to ride your bike.

Continuing with the series about health impacts and cycling, this time I am going to show additional body benefits different from the ones exposed here and here.

When comparing cycling with some other sports, is considered low impact. A lot of research has been carried out in the last years comparing perhaps the two most practiced sports: cycling vs running. The fact of running being weight bearing makes injury rates to be higher in comparison to cycling (which is not weight bearing). This point was demonstrated even with long distance runners and cyclists. When researchers compared both groups, they discovered runners suffered 133-144 per cent more muscle damage, 256 per cent more inflammation, and 87 per cent higher DOMS (delayed onset muscle soreness) compared to the cyclists group. Overall, riding a bike is specially indicated for those who have osteoarthritis since it is a low-impact exercise that places little stress on joints.

Moreover, cycling allows reaching further places compared to other sports in the same time. As a result, it improves your navigation skills no matter where you practice it. You need to remember a route or determine where is the North when riding. Orientation and addresses should be in your memory or you would need to earn your daily bread with your own resources, no matter whether you are cycling in a city, mountain or countryside.

Furthermore, cycling improves your sexual life. Yes, you have read it right. Why is so? Doctors said the muscles developed on the bike are used during intercourse. The better developed these muscles, the longer and more athletic intercourse will be. And it works for women and men.

Next, it is not rocket science that tiring yourself out on a bike will improve your sleep. Researchers determined sleep problems to those people who drop between 2-4 per cent in cardiorespiratory exercise practice, no matter the people gender. Looking for the causes, they suggested it could be a reduction in anxiety brought by exercise than improves the ability to sleep. Bike exercise also protects against weight gain with age, which is another cause of sleep dysfunction.

Finally, riding a bike also increases handling and spacial awareness. Climbing, descending and cornering, among others technical elements, teach you how to use your body weight to get the bike to go where you want it to. Gaining the skills to manage these technical elements can provide an increase in your muscles and a massive confidence boost, specially when you start to see improvements. Posture and coordination are also improved. And it only takes two to four hours a week to achieve a general improvement to your health.