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It’s so good for your health to replace commuting with exercise!!
by davidjnelson 7y ago
It’s so good for your health to replace commuting with exercise!!
- paulcole 7y agoOne simple trick: I bike to work. Remote-only companies hate me!
- davidjnelson 7y agoSounds like you have a really short commute! That’s a great way to do it.
- paulcole 7y agoI try to live 5 miles or so from work. 10 round-trip a day, plus a little extra for errands (I never learned to drive) is enough cycling for me. I can do it in about half an hour at an easy and relaxed pace and during the winter it’s short enough to just walk if it’s snowy/icy. But I know people who do 25 miles each way by bike for their daily commutes. Just depends how much you care about it and what you’re willing to sacrifice to do it.
- Frost1x 7y agoThis idea always appealed to me in theory but I sweat so easily that it never made sense unless I want to show up covered in sweat and feel sticky all day. Maybe if there's a locker/shower I can use and go directly to work and shower there it could work for me.
- zuttton 7y agoGet an ebike
- mkl 7y agoThat avoids much of the exercise (but has its own benefits).
- loco5niner 7y agoI've heard it makes you more likely to actually bike around since it is easier.
- MattSayar 7y agoExactly. eBiking > not biking
- bayesian_horse 7y agoAvoiding much of the sweat of exercise would be the point, no?
- krageon 7y agoFrom what I've been able to gather, on average you exercise about a third as hard. If it makes you bike three times more often, it's worth it. It also means you will be bothered significantly less by wind or other variability in travel time (maybe you are tired that day, for example).
- giobox 7y agoEven a third might be being generous. I have never once really broken a sweat riding an eBike even in hot summer weather. I've actually had to put jackets/jumpers on to stop the wind chill on hot days - this never happens on normal bikes due to the effort exerted. This however is precisely why I have some ebikes in addition to human steam powered ones - its so nice for commute or journeys when you want to arrive feeling refreshed but not need a shower or change of clothes.
- xur17 7y agoReally depends on the climate - I commuted to my last job via bike, and it never would have worked in the summer without a shower at the job.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- komali2 7y agoI sympathize. My solution is a bit "much" but if you're looking for things to try: I wear my gym shirt while bicycling which I sweat into profusely. I get to work and lock myself in the family bathroom, where I take my gym shirt off. Then, I take out a linen towel I bought that packs super tiny, get it wet, and wipe down. I stand and cool and dry off for a bit, then put on the shirt I packed. The linen towel gets a soapy wash in the sink and then wronged out. Then, towel and gym shirt get hanged on hooks in the office near a window (as far as I can tell there's no bad smell and I have explicitly asked others in the office) and both are dry within a couple hours. Change into gym shirt after work and bike home, take a shower. It's a process but it's worth it, I've lost 7 pounds without much else lifestyle change. The linen towel is fairly critical - packs small, light, dries quick and is odorless (allegedly linen is anti bacterial). They're also great for travel in general.
- paddy_m 7y agoGreat ideas. I also have started bringing in an extra pair of shoes - loafers. I sweat into my hiking shoes that I wear into work, take them and the socks off so they can dry, then wear loafers around the office. At the end of the day I reverse the process.
- davesmith1983 7y agoA lot of people pretend it is the tour de france. I just ride slower and take my time.
- loco5niner 7y agoI would still sweat. I sweat just getting out of the shower or standing in a warm kitchen too long with the oven on.
- lostlogin 7y agoSomething is triggered by there being a bike just in front or (much worse) just behind. The more dressed up and the better the opposing bike (somehow they are in opposition) the greater the effect.
- quickthrower2 7y agoI would bike to work. It's a nice 12km. But I think it would significantly shorten my life expectancy.
- znull 7y agoStatistically, it's the other way around.
- butteroverflow 7y agoGreatly depends on the drivers around you. Here it'll definitely shorten your life expectancy if you're lucky, and will leave you with a nice whole-body paralysis, if you're not. You know how motorists sarcastically refer to cyclists over here? "Crunchies", or something like that.
- crispinb 7y agoAlso depends on the type of infrastructure available. I lived in the city until about 5 years ago and cycled everywhere. Out in the bush where I am now, with only narrow windy unshouldered roads (& many stoned drivers), I'd be dead in a week.
- fsloth 7y agoI don't have to drive on the road. My work trip is 5 km and all the way is bike roads and pedestrian paths. One of the advantages of living in the nordics, I suppose. I don't even wear a helmet in the summer - I just pedal intentionally slow.
- dorgo 7y ago> I just pedal intentionally slow Anecdote: I was with a group of tourists and we were about to rent bikes for a guided tour. We were offered helmets, but only some were taken. Before we even departed, a girl managed to fall of her bike and injur herself. A second offer to use helmets was met with much more acceptance.
- Vinnl 7y agoI bike to a co-working space where I work remotely :)
- ljsocal 7y agoBiked to work for years and loved it until I crashed. No car involved just a stick or rock or something that allowed my front wheel to slip out from under me. If there’s some brilliant MEs out there, build a safer bike! Lower the center of gravity, improve traction, stability, whatever it takes!
- lostlogin 7y agoFor what it’s worth, you get better at falling the more you do it but this seems to be offset by age making falls worse. Slick concrete parking garages and road tyres are a very bad combo.
- chrismorgan 7y agoWhat you desire exists: it’s called a recumbent tricycle. I replaced a pretty good road bike with a Greenspeed GT3 Series II five years ago and have happily used it ever since, including three multi-week trips (two and a half weeks mostly through California, USA in 2014 before the Strange Loop conference; three weeks from St Louis, USA to Philadelphia, USA last year after Strange Loop; and a couple of weeks around this Easter in western Victoria and South Australia). Until I moved from Melbourne out into the country two years ago, cycling was my primary means of getting anywhere, augmented sometimes by public transport. Now I don’t cycle so often because I live in the middle of nowhere, 40km to the nearest town that I go to for church. For the last two long trips, I was essentially not fit beforehand (e.g. not having ridden at all for two months in one of the two cases), and doing something like that immediately on an upright bike would be murder on the buttocks, back and hands, but doing it on a recumbent trike was completely fine. I would not have done any of these solo cycling trips on an upright bicycle. Since this last trip I’ve even started vaguely planning to cycle around Australia at some point. Recumbents tricycles are much safer. For example: they’re inherently stable; they’re closer to the road; they’re wider, so cars can see them better from behind despite them being lower, and so they can’t sneak by in such dangerous ways as they do in many parts of the world with bicycles; when riding one, it’s easier to be watching the road (especially compared with a road bike where you’re constantly craning your neck up); your mirror (necessary, since you can’t look over your shoulder) will be well-mounted and clearly in your stable field of view, you can constantly keep an eye on upcoming traffic, too; and as they’re unusual, cars pay them more attention and act more carefully. On a good surface, a trike is much more comfortable than a bike. On a low-quality surface, such as many cycling paths, it can be less comfortable, since the seat and frame are providing suspension and not your legs as they can on an upright bike. I personally like to go fast, and am not afraid of roads on my trike; I didn’t worry much about roads on a bike either, but in high-traffic scenarios I definitely feel happier with everything on my trike than on a bike. I generally just ignore cycling paths and ride on the road. Another negative point on the recumbent tricycle: having three wheel tracks instead of one is occasionally troublesome: highway shoulder often has corrugation at the edges (the Australian style of adding <15cm-wide bumps on top is unpleasant to ride over; the US style of ~40cm-wide gouges is intolerable and dangerous to ride over at even 20km/h, and it’s so wide you can’t even straddle it properly), and a 90cm wheel base sometimes doesn’t fit on narrow country highway shoulder, and so I sometimes have to go in the lane where a bicycle might not. Also dodging thorns growing in the shoulder can be more difficult—with the slick Greenspeed Scorcher tyres I had in my first long trip, I gave up counting how many punctures I had (it averaged more than one a day—I became skilled at repair!); I haven’t had any punctures other than the ones on that trip (I’ve only ever had two punctures since adulthood in Australia), and for subsequent long trips I’ve used Schwalbe Marathon Plus tyres. One more: trikes take more space. Greenspeed specifically pioneered and uses a folding frame, which is great for transport. I’ve taken my trike to the US twice now, just folding it in half and wrapping it up in a tarp, no extra cost with Qantas since it’s sporting equipment (otherwise it’d incur an oversized baggage fee). But back to the positives: a recumbent tricycle is much more fun than an upright bicycle. Why aren’t they more popular? They’re generally more expensive: in part because there actually is a bit more to them, but mostly because they’re less popular so the cheap junk category doesn’t exist, which will skew price perceptions. And not many people even know about them. This may be in part because of UCI’s ban of recumbents in 1934 (a sordid tale of political intrigue, commercial interests, wounded pride, and arguably bribery and corruption), which basically crippled the recumbent industry. http://www.pjrider.com/BentHist.htm http://www.pjrider.com/BentHist.htm has some details of the history and story. (For racing, you’re talking about recumbent bicycles, but recumbent bikes and trikes exist in the same “human-powered vehicle that isn’t an upright bicycle” category.) But recumbent trikes really should be more popular, because in most ways they’re just better than trikes.