Can Riding an Electric Scooter Help Keep you Fit?
It’s surprising until you ride an electric scooter for any length of time that there is actually more exercise involved than you initially might have thought. In this blog we are looking to answer the question, can riding an electric scooter help keep you fit?
When you think of the word exercise it is often related to jogging or going to the gym and performing high impact or high intensity workouts, but there are many forms of low intensity exercise that do not include raising your heart rate to 140bpm or sweating buckets.
Exercise, by definition is “an activity requiring physical effort, carried out to sustain or improve health and fitness.” Well if you have ridden an electric scooter for any prolonged period of time you will have realised that there are a few ways in which it will have provided a benefit to your health and fitness.
The key one is your core development. Remaining stable when scooting along improves your core strength, especially when going around bends and over the natural bumps on the path or track. Of course the more you do the activity, the better your core strength gets and less you notice it but that’s the same with any exercise.
The second noteworthy point worth touching upon is balance. Balance is listed as one of the six skill related fitness components that are associated with health related exercise. Leaning to the left and right when going around bends and also leaning into the electric scooter when riding up a hill all add to the exercise you will be exerting when riding your e-scooter.
The next is flexing your legs. This is to absorb the previously mentioned lumps and bumps in the road (unless you have a dual suspension electric scooter like the Inokim OXO).
When you get to grips with riding an e-scooter you will automatically be looking in a lot more detail at the surface you are riding on. You will be scouring the pathway for sticks and stones or even drains to ensure that you either avoid them, or you flex your legs in order to absorb that obstacle without jarring yourself or even being thrown off. By flexing your legs for the duration of your journey you will soon notice aching muscles that you didn’t even know were there to start with.
Of course none of the above will provide quite as much exercise as hitting the gym for an hour or jogging a few miles a day, but we believe that it will be far more fun. And for those who are simply not motivated by gyms or jogging it is something that, once you start, you will want to do again and again.
So in our opinion, and that of our aching muscles after a long session on our Xiaomi M365 Pro, electric scooters do help you keep fit in various ways, certainly more than if we had jumped in the car and simply driven to our destination, and it’s better for the environment.