Top 6 Reasons to Take a Break From Cycling
When you’re obsessed with cycling, it can be hard to take a break. You just feel that urge to get out on the bike every day. But there are some pretty compelling reasons to take a break from cycling.
Take Time to Address Stress and Anxiety
Maybe your cycling obsession is caused by another problem altogether. Cycling can be a way to mask other problems, such as stress and anxiety. If you’re feeling stressed or anxious about work or home life, the solution isn’t to rely more on exercise – it’s to address the underlying cause of that stress/anxiety.
Catch Up on Sleep
You’ve no doubt heard it said that people need eight hours of sleep a night. Well, it turns out that’s pretty important. Getting enough sleep is crucial to good health and well-being (it can help you lose weight). Getting too little sleep has been linked to increased tension, irritability, depression, and fatigue. Regularly sleeping less than six hours a night increases your risk of heart disease, high blood pressure, and diabetes.
Avoid Workout Burnout
You know that feeling you get when you’ve been going to the gym regularly, but suddenly you can’t be bothered? That’s workout burnout. It happens to most people at some point in their exercise routine, and it can also happen with cycling – especially if your cycling obsession gets too much for your body to handle.
Putting your body under too much pressure can leave you feeling incredibly sluggish and exhausted, making it hard to do simple tasks like washing dishes or carrying on a conversation with someone. Take some time, read a few books, play at the best US online casinos, and get over your workout burnout.
Get Stronger
If you’re cycling a lot, your body will adapt to the stress of being on the bike. Take time off from it and, while your body won’t be in top cycling shape, neither will it be as out of shape as if you kept riding. That gives you an opportunity to do some strength training, which will let you carry on riding when you return to cycling.
Change Your Expectations
You might think that you can continue to ride a bike at the same level of intensity while on a break, but it’s important not to have any expectations of yourself. Cycling should be fun and relaxing – if you force yourself back on your bike for the sake of maintaining the strength and fitness you’ve built up through obsession, then that’s likely to just perpetuate the cycle.
Clean Up Your Diet
You’ve probably heard it said that cyclists are lean, mean bike-riding machines. But you also hear a lot of complaints from overweight cyclists who say they can’t take a break from cycling because they don’t want to gain the weight back. The reason cycling tends to lead to leaner bodies is that people tend to spend a lot of time riding, and when you’re on the bike, you burn more calories than with many other forms of exercise. This means cyclists usually have a higher energy expenditure than non-cyclists.
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