The Time to Pedal in Pain: It’s Relatively Brief and Certainly Good for Your Health
By Kevin Kolodziejski
Humor me for a moment if you might and picture a famous man who never once rode a bike. But rest assured that’s only because he died 70 years before they were invented. He did, however, and on more than one occasion, fly a kite.
That famous man’s Ben Franklin.
Now you’re seeing him undoubtedly as he’s depicted on the $100 bill. With saggy jowls and a double chin that suggest Franklin’s gone to fat. And by the last decade or so of his life, he had. Prior to that, though, the Colonies’ answer to Leonardo da Vinci was not only a Founding Father but also the forefather of guys like Jack LaLanne and gals like Jane Fonda.
Not to mention a health-and-fitness fanatic, who got a unique nickname early in life because of that.
Why Ben Franklin Was Dubbed the Water-American
While a young adult working as a typesetter in London, Franklin was dubbed the Water-American for he drank water throughout the workday while his co-workers quaffed pints of beer. They did so because the belief was the yeast-fermented beverage provided the energy and nutrients needed to meet the physical demands of the job. Franklin argued against that with more than words. He would run about the printshop while others walked, and he’d really make his case by carrying two heavy trays of lead type up and down the shop’s stairs while the beer-imbibers struggled to lug one.
Prior to his time in London, Franklin taught himself to swim and became adept at longer distances. So much so, that he once swam three and a half miles on the Thames to prove his prowess to friends. That he performed all sort of water tricks while doing so created a swell of additional onlookers and gave the eventual inventor of both bifocals and the lightning rod an early bit of the celebrity he would encounter later back in the Colonies from publishing what became a yearly bestseller, Poor Richard’s Almanack.
Many editions include the health-and-fitness aphorisms you now recognize as Franklin’s.
Some Aphorisms You Recognize as Franklin’s
They are “Early to bed and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise,” “Eat to live; live not to eat,” “A full belly makes a bad brain,” and “To lengthen thy life, lessen thy meals.” But there’s one from the 1745 issue that doesn’t make the list despite the fact Franklin’s friends reported it was what he would reply if they ever noticed he was moving about gingerly.
The Aphorism You Don’t Know as Franklin’s
Franklin would explain he was sore from yesterday’s hard bout of lifting and swinging handheld weights or “leaping” for distance and height (a popular exercise of the day often done with a pole though sometimes without) and then say, “There are no pains without gains.”
That observation from a man possibly as sagacious as he’s famous is why you’ve read so much about him here even though he never once rode a bicycle. That and the fact that for the last 25 years or so, we’ve all had a really good laugh at those leotard-clad ladies, muscle-bound men, gung-ho coaches, and over-the-top exercise instructors still seemingly living in the 1980s and uttering the line that quickly became cliché after Jane Fonda uttered it in an exercise video.
“No pain, no gain.”
It may be time, though, to take that saying a bit more seriously — or at least the concept behind it. For a study published in the September issue of Cell Reports Medicine finds that a way to cycle we all find somewhat painful is particularly gainful.
Bike Sprints Can Be Painful — and Gainful
Researchers at Rockefeller University in Manhattan recruited 19 healthy young men and had them cycle indoors in one of two ways. Once a week for eight weeks, nine of them did 90 minutes of pedaling at a pace determined to be of moderate intensity, while the other 10 incorporated 6 sets of 30-second all-out sprints followed by a 4-minute recovery as part of a ride that took far less time. Before, immediately after, and three hours after each ride, researchers took blood from the participants. By doing so, they found the sprint workout “elicit[ed] greater circulating protein and metabolite responses” than the longer moderate ride.
These proteins have been linked to better health.
Data held in the UK Biobank on more than 53,000 individuals, for example, shows a positive association between them and a lower risk of both cardiovascular and metabolic disease. The study done at Rockefeller University found that of the 33 proteins associated with this lower risk, 32 were increased by the sprint workout, but only three were upped by the moderate cycling. More than a quarter of these proteins have also been linked to slower biological aging. Moreover, the researchers discovered that human fat cells exposed to blood collected after the sprint workout underwent changes in gene activity that positively affected how they process fuel, respond to hormones, and sense the availability of nutrients.
All of which, in the words of Paul Cohen, MD, PhD, is “exciting.”
A Reason for Excitement
Cohen, the head of the Weslie R. and William H. Janeway Laboratory of Molecular Metabolism at Rockefeller University, writes in a press release about the study, “that just a few minutes of intense exercise can trigger a significant molecular response [and that] we still see it after eight weeks of training, which tells us this response isn’t simply a product of the body struggling to keep up with unfamiliar stress. It may be that the responses we observed are intrinsic to intense exercise.”
And it may be that those responses are ones you seek — along with getting just that little bit better on the bicycle — so it may be time to do what Ben Franklin says. But don’t buy a pole and leap about. Buy into the idea of going really hard for short bursts once or twice a week when you ride, whether it be indoors or not.
Kevin Kolodziejski began his writing career in earnest in 1989. Since then he’s written a weekly health and fitness column and his articles have appeared in magazines such as “MuscleMag,” “Ironman,” “Vegetarian Times,” and “Bicycle Guide.” He has Bachelor and Masters degrees in English from DeSales and Kutztown Universities.
A competitive cyclist for more than 30 years, Kevin won two Pennsylvania State Time Trial championships in his 30’s, the aptly named Pain Mountain Time Trial 4 out of 5 times in his 40s, two more state TT’s in his 50’s, and the season-long Pennsylvania 40+ BAR championship at 43.
