Inline Skating benefits for Health

There are lots of different ways to stay fit and healthy during the summer months, including cycling, running and even playing soccer. However, if you are looking for something a bit different, why not try inline skating? It’s a wonderful way to stay in shape, you get to spend time in the great outdoors, and it has a number of advantages compared to some other forms of exercise.

Inline skating is an excellent form of aerobic exercise. This is the type of exercise that strengthens your heart and your lungs by training you to use oxygen with a greater level of efficiency. Aerobic exercise helps to reduce body fat, increases your stamina, lowers your tension levels and improves your sleep patterns. There is also some evidence that aerobic exercise helps to enhance your mood, eliminating anxiety and depression.

When you go inline skating, you are also getting an anaerobic workout. This is the type of training that builds muscle strength and mass. Unlike aerobic exercise, which is relatively low intensity, anaerobic exercise happens when you do high-intensity activities. Aside from toning your muscles, anaerobic exercise also has a number of other health benefits. It helps to strengthen your bones, improving bone density and delaying the onset of osteoporosis. It also helps to speed up your metabolism, so that you burn off calories more quickly. Because it strengthens your muscles, it takes pressure off your joints, reducing the likelihood that you will have joint problems later in life.

Inline skating is one of the best ways of getting all of these anaerobic benefits – in fact, it is significantly better than either running or cycling for this. This is because it exercises muscle groups that running and cycling don’t – such as those in the hips, buttocks and thighs. It is also a low-impact form of exercise, which means that it doesn’t put excessive forces on your joints. For instance, when you run, your hip, knee, ankle and foot joints suffer as you pound along the pavement – this doesn't happen when you go inline skating.

In terms of how much weight you are likely to lose, if you skate at a comfortable rate for 30 minutes, you are likely to burn 285 calories if you weigh 140 pounds. This is not quite as high as you will see with running or cycling, which come in at 350 and 360 calories respectively. However, if you take up interval skating – where you alternate periods of fast and slow skating – you will burn calories about 13% faster than you do running, and about 9% faster than cycling. In other words, you can take it easy and still burn off the pounds, or you can turn it up a notch and burn even more.

Another advantage of inline skating is that you can do it outdoors in the summer and indoors in the winter. Of course, you can also jump on a treadmill or stationary bicycle in the gym, but this is not the same as real running or cycling – to start with, it does not develop the same lateral forces that help you to improve your balance and agility. With inline skating on the other hand, you can find local indoor tracks where you can still really go skating when the weather gets nasty outside. In fact, this can be an excellent way of starting out – if you have never skated before, you can get fitted for skates and have fun at the same time.

Of course, as with any sport, you need to take precautions when you go inline skating. There are about 16,000 inline skating injuries each year, most of which could easily be avoided if people wore the proper safety gear. Unfortunately, well over half of all inline skaters don’t do this. If you don’t do anything else, you need to wear a helmet, since it’s really easy to take a fall when you skate. A good helmet will radically reduce your chances of a head or brain injury, and will increase your enjoyment because you know you are safe. It’s also a good idea to wear other protective equipment, including gloves, wrist guards, elbow pads and knee pads – these aren't as critical as a helmet, but they will stop you from getting some nasty scrapes. It’s also important to make sure that your skates fit well and support your ankles. Otherwise you could turn awkwardly and twist your foot.