A study of 45,000 over 20 years has shown that even tiny amounts of cycling can boost your health.
People who do even very small amounts of cycling weekly are at significantly lower risk of suffering a heart attack compared to those who don’t cycle, a new study has found.
The massive heart disease project undertaken by Danish researchers tracked for 20 years a staggering 45,000 people aged between 45 and 60 years when recruited.
And the key finding to emerge was that cycling to work in middle age dramatically reduces the risk of suffering a heart attack as you grow older.
Those who cycled for a total of 90 minutes per week where 24 per cent less likely to develop angina or have a heart attack.
And even cycling for 30 minutes per week reduced their chances of a heart attack by 16 per cent.
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The findings on cycling are seen as crucial for public health because a commute by bike is seen as one of the easiest forms of effective exercise for people of any age to build into their daily routine.
Dr Anders Grøntved of the University of Southern Denmark, who headed the study in recent years said it was clear Governments and medics needed to promote cycling more.
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“Finding time for exercise can be challenging for many people, so clinicians working in the field of cardiovascular risk prevention should consider promoting cycling as a mode of transportation,” he said.
His team monitored the 45,000 volunteers from 1993 to 2013 and has only just released its findings after an extensive analysis of the data.
Of all of those in the study, there were a total of 2,892 heart attacks during the period.
And the researchers estimated that at least 7 per cent of those would have been averted with regular cycling.
But for those who took up cycling in the first five years of the 20-year research period, the reduction in the incidence of heart attack was at the upper end of the range; some 24 per cent.
Another of the researchers, Dr Kim Blond, said the promotion of cycling as a means of commuting had clear benefits.
“Recreational and commuter biking is an easy way to make physical activity part of one’s routine in a non-structured and informal fashion,” she said.
“Public health authorities, governments and employers ought to consider initiatives that promote bicycle riding as a way to support large-scale cardiovascular disease prevention efforts.”
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