Behavior Change and Health News
National Bike Month and Bike-to-Work Day
May is National Bike Month. To raise awareness of the many benefits of bicycling, the League of American Bicyclists promotes Bike-to-Work Week from May 15 to 19 and Bike-to-Work Day on Friday, May 19.Why Bicycling?
Bicycling is a great way to enjoy a physically active lifestyle. As we learn in Active Living Every Day, physical activity can be fun for people of all ages. Bicycling is suitable for kids, parents, commuters, students, older adults, and everyone in between. Week 4 of the Active Living Every Day online study guide contains several links related to bicycling. You can read about purchasing a bike, finding a bike event in your area, riding tips, and safety guidelines if you use your bicycle to commute to work.
Bike-to-Work Week provides a way for us to combat several national problems: the obesity epidemic, traffic congestion, and air pollution. Over 60% of adults and 15% of children in the United States are overweight, so lots of people can benefit from being more active. Among people who work, about half travel five miles or less to work each day, a distance most people could easily travel by bike. And if we each biked to work or while running errands twice a month instead of driving, we could prevent the pollution of almost one billion gallons of gasoline from entering the atmosphere each year.
Benefits of Bicycling
Like other forms of physical activity, bicycling has multiple benefits. Here are some examples.
- Lower risk of cancer. Bicycling can help you maintain a healthy weight and prevent obesity, which a new study links to more than 90,000 deaths from cancer each year in the United States.
- Reduced stress and enhanced sense of well-being. Physical activity increases the release of endorphins, which create a feeling of heightened well-being.
- Reduced impact of aging on the brain. A study at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign shows that physically fit adults exhibit less brain shrinkage than less fit adults do.
- Reduced risk of premature death. The Cooper Institute found that men with high blood pressure who participated in physical activity were much less likely to die prematurely than men with high blood pressure who were not active.
Drag your bike out of the garage this month and take it for a spin. If you would like more details on choosing a bike, safe bicycling in your community, or bicycle commuting, check out the following links. To learn more about how Active Living Every Day can help you increase your physical activity, or how you can help others to become more active, contact Michelle Maloney at 217-351-5076 ext 2522 or by e-mail at michellem@hkusa.com.
Sources
League of American Bicyclists. Bike to work. www.bikeleague.org.
League of American Bicyclists. May is National Bike Month. www.bikeleague.org.
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