The phrase ‘gotta get my steps in’ has become part of everyday life. But what if there were a simpler, faster way to meet your daily activity needs?
“A lot of people do try and get to that 10,000 steps and they just physically can’t. Their knees hurt, their back hurts, their ankles hurt."
Being someone who suffers from unspecified chronic pain, I can say that it hurts more to walk 4000 steps than to bike 200 km. It’s pretty wild!
Various studies have examined the concept of 10,000 steps, and while there is no basis in that number…
Fun fact, the concept of 10,000 steps may have originated in Japan in 1965 where a pedometer called the “Manpo-kei” was sold. Translated to English, “Manpo-kei” means “10,000 step meter”.
It was a literal marketing phrase!
But I don’t like how the article is like “switch to cycling instead of walking because you’ll burn more calories”.
Physical fitness can be roughly broken into three groups:
- cardio is really anything that gets your heart rate up
- aerobic activities are those where you’re breathing heavy, sweating, and your heart rate is up; oxygen is used as fuel here.
- anaerobic activities are usually “short burst” activities like weightlifting, sprinting, etc.; this goes beyond oxygen as fuel and the body switches to glycogen, glucose, and when you burn through those, lactic acid is next. Produce enough lactic acid and you’ll have sore muscles.
If all you do is walking, you aren’t covering all three groups. And if you don’t vary your cycling, you’ll also not cover all three groups.
If you’re serious about health, you have to do low intensity (aerobic), high intensity (cardio) and burst of anaerobic activities.
I’ve got some issues with my knees, I’m right there with you on walking vs cycling. I had to do a cardio stress test a few years back, and they only had a treadmill. My knees hurt for a month, and I told them in no uncertain terms that I was never doing that again and I’d find a cardiologist who offers a bike for that (and some do.)
I also agree very much on the variability of types of exercise. I bike in two very different ways - MTBing, which has your 2&3, and I have a cargo bike that I use instead of my car most of the time, and that tends to be zone 2 type steady state. I thoroughly enjoy all of it.
One thing that’s fair to point out though, is that decent bikes are expensive. I’m really glad to see the rise of decent DTC companies that are making bikes (primarily e-bikes) more affordable - Lectric, Aventon, Himiway, etc. that new Lectric cargo bike for $1500 is a great deal, but it’s still $1500. And of course that’s in comparison to older companies like Specialized or Santa Cruz, where you’re looking at significantly more.
If you are able to replace a significant amount of driving with biking/ebiking but walking isn’t viable, then $1500 is still pretty cheap.
In comparison to owning a car, it’s dirt cheap for sure, but unless you can entirely eliminate your need to own a car, it’s still an additional cost, and most of the US isn’t very good about biking infrastructure. I live in the Phoenix area and we have good bike lanes, but as the saying goes, “paint isn’t infrastructure” - the vast majority of my urban riding is along 45mph roads, and paint isn’t very good at stopping a distracted driver from wandering into my lane.
I kinda got sidetracked there but my point is, that 1500 is an additional cost to owning a car for a lot of the country. (Again, US focused.)
Most of car’s costs are milage related. Wear and tear mostly happen from using it. Some insurance costs scale based on milage. Oil changes, tire changes, gas, other repairs, etc mostly scale with milage. So even if you can’t replace the car, if you offset 3000 miles over the lifetime of the bike, it mostly pays for itself (although after 3000 miles on a weighty ebike, you might also need $400 in repairs/maintenance and maybe like $50 in charging costs?
But offsetting is a big if. Im certainly lucky where I live (granted I have based where I live partly off having bikeable infrastructure)
Yeah, that’s fair. I’ve put 2500 miles on my cargo bike since I got it just over a year ago. Bike was $1700, plus various accessories, probably $2500 in total.
Replaced the tires for $100, a few tubes, maybe $20, and the freewheel for $20. I do my own maintenance so no labor.
I doubt charging was that much, it’s pretty damn cheap to charge it.
I doubt charging was that much, it’s pretty damn cheap to charge it.
I think $50 may be accurate if you ride uphill both ways and charge it in hawaii. Definitely nowhere near that for normal use.
Walking 10k steps burns ~500 cals. Biking for ~1hr would burn similar amount.
