Why Older People Should Like to Bike
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iStock/Thinkstock(LONDON) — People might be sitting on their own personal fountain of youth without even realizing it.
It’s called a bicycle and if you’re between the ages of 59 and 79, you may be in a much better physical and emotional place than your contemporaries who don’t bike. That is, if you meet certain conditions.
Researchers at King’s College in London had 80 older males and 40 older females considered amateur cyclists undergo a battery of tests to measure all kinds of heart, lung, neuromuscular and metabolic functions.
Basically, even the cyclists in their mid-to-late 70s did almost as well as those in their mid-to-late 50s.
As for the conditions, everybody tested had to be able to bike about 60 miles in under six-and-a-half hours and maintain a non-sedentary lifestyle that meant no smoking, heavy drinking or high blood pressure.
Even so, researcher Professor Norman Lazarus says that their good health, which was largely helped by cycling, was buying them “extra years of function compared to sedentary people.”
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