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Any physical exertion that makes you breathe harder will cause you to take in more pollution, worsening the effects. Even if exercise helps to offset the damage

• dmos62 7y ago
  It's about the balance of positive and negative effects. There's always some kind of pollution and there's always some kind of benefit from exercise. The benefit from commuting on a bicycle is considerable. Question is how does the effect of pollution compare. If air quality is better indoors and you can do it indoors, great, but for many people commuting is one of the few opportunities to be physically active.
• Psychlist 7y ago
  There's been studies done specifically on people cycling to work, and IIRC the conclusion was that the overall QALY result was significantly positive. But that does depend on your baseline - for someone who is fit and active anyway the marginal gain might be small, but for the average person the 10+ QALYS you get from being active vastly outweigh the combined (run over + pollution + injury) cost. https://eos.org/articles/novel-air-pollution-study-gauges-individual-cyclists-risks https://eos.org/articles/novel-air-pollution-study-gauges-in... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2920084/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2920084/