Why Cycle-Touring Is Good For Your Legs

Since I got back from a spon­tan­eous hitch­ing trip from Armenia to Eng­land and back, my mind has been on the prob­lem of keep­ing fit. Like an awful lot of us, I’m destined to spend my time (for the next few months, at least) in a city. More than half of the world’s human pop­u­la­tion now live in urban envir­on­ments. With this comes the threat of the sedent­ary life­style, and the declin­ing levels of fit­ness and health with which we’re now becom­ing increas­ingly familiar.

Luck­ily, some of my favour­ite blog­gers have been busy pin­ning up frag­ments of what is becom­ing a simple fit­ness regime, along with plenty of motiv­a­tion (although some of the chubby-cheeked pho­tos from my uni­ver­sity days do that job very well!). It couldn’t come at a bet­ter time. I was very much inspired by a good friend of mine who became an Iron­wo­man a few weeks ago. She went to incred­ible efforts to train for a course like that. Because of her, I’m now run­ning sev­eral morn­ings a week, and I cycle every­where, but this isn’t enough on its own.

One recom­mend­a­tion that caught my atten­tion was a site simply entitled ‘One Hun­dred Push Ups’, which pre­scribes a thrice-weekly 10-minute workout to get you doing a hun­dred con­sec­ut­ive press-ups after a mere 6 weeks. The basic idea is to do five sets of press-ups three times a week, gradu­ally increas­ing in num­ber each time until you hit the satisfying-sounding tar­get num­ber of One Hun­dred. I took the test to see where I’d be start­ing from, and duti­fully knocked out a rather aver­age twenty (proper) press-ups before my arms gave up. In six weeks time, appar­ently, I’ll be able to do five times this num­ber. We’ll see…

There are three sites in this net­work, the next being named ‘Two Hun­dred Sit-Ups’ (stom­ach crunches, really, rather than the back-breaking PE-lesson ver­sions of yore). The for­mula is the same. I got down on the floor to see where I was at, and man­aged a not-entirely-unrespectable thirty-four before my stom­ach muscles seized up. Another ele­ment of my fit­ness routine on the chart for the next six weeks — nice.

The final site is — you’ve guessed it — ‘Two Hun­dred Squats’. I figured I should do a bit bet­ter with these, hav­ing only stopped cyc­ling about three months ago. Accord­ing to the site, the aver­age per­son can do between twenty-six and thirty-five before col­lapsing in heap of jelly, whereas more than fifty is branded ‘excel­lent’. Well, I got to two hun­dred and nine before scan­ning the room for a heavy object to hold to make it more dif­fi­cult. I grasped a conveniently-placed vacuum cleaner to my chest and con­tin­ued. After three hun­dred squats clutch­ing the hoover I figured I’d done enough for one day. So I guess all that cyc­ling did some­thing permanent!

It would be point­less to do these routines just for the brag­ging rights alone. Behind the numer­ical tar­gets lies a simple way to restore respect to our bod­ies and remem­ber what they’re cap­able of and what they evolved to do. While it might be slightly sorry to ima­gine a grown man in his liv­ing room embra­cing a house­hold appli­ance whilst per­form­ing three hun­dred deep knee bends, the point is that when you feel the urge to head for the hills, you aren’t stalled by the thought that your body won’t be able to keep up — and that’s going to be my goal for the next few months. We’re all cap­able of get­ting fit and stay­ing that way, so why not give one of these chal­lenges a go?

Thanks for read­ing. You might also like these recent articles:

• 341 Pho­tos of Fully Loaded Tour­ing Bicycles
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