Have you recently walked or rode your bike for exercise? Did you do so during your commute? If you can answer ’yes’ to the first question, chances are, you cannot answer ’yes’ to the second. And yet, for the vast majority of downtown employees, the daily commute would be a perfect time to get some exercise while getting to work without your gas-guzzling car.
Both biking and walking (even walking to a transit stop) have nothing but positive implications for your health, decreasing your chances of many diseases including heart disease, stroke, type II diabetes, and obesity.
The reality is, we have become a sedentary society, encouraged by the ease of getting into our cars for anything and everything, even a short jaunt up to the corner store. Unfortunately, our increasingly sprawling land use patterns reinforce this behavior. Because of this reality, it becomes more and more a question of proactively making different choices—walking three or four blocks to a bus stop, walking or biking just once or twice a week (perhaps in conjunction with transit use), or living close to work.
As the ability to integrate fitness into our increasingly busy lives becomes more and more difficult, a means of doing so could be to merge walking/biking with your commute. Kicking your car to the curb a couple of days a week and using your commute to get fit is just one way to change your life for the better!