If you live close to your job or school and find it a terrible pain to drive there or take public transport, you may have thrown around ideas for alternative means of transportation. You could ride a bike, a skateboard, a moped, or even a kick scooter. Which will work best for you depends entirely on your needs and the route you have to take to get from point A to point B.
If you just need to shoot through a few blocks of town or want to do cardio workouts, you can opt for something you have to operate manually. But if you need to get yourself across town for work, and need to go up any small hills, you may want to look for a motorized option. Whichever route you choose, you’re sure to enjoy the benefits that come with using a scooter.
What Is A Kick Scooter?
As the name suggests, a kick scooter works via kicking your foot on the ground to propel the scooter forward. The difference between scooters for kids and scooters for adults is pretty substantial. Kids’ scooters take a whole lot of energy to go a short distance. The wheels are too small to make much headway. Adult scooters have much bigger wheels – some even having tires instead of plastic and polyurethane. They also usually have a hand brake along with the foot brake. They are much more efficient when it comes to getting you where you need to go without putting maximum effort into it.
There are also electric scooters that you can use to get you where you’re going with minimum effort on your part if you’re not interested in exercising during your commute. Electric scooters are convenient for traveling to and from work. Sometimes you don’t want to show up to work all sweaty from the cardio workout you get from a manual kick scooter.
Health Benefits
Even though a kick scooter takes less effort than walking, you still get a better workout from it. And you don’t have to feel miserable the whole time you’re exercising. Scooting can be a lot of fun, and you’ll come to love your thighs burning because you know you’re getting good exercise-much more than walking, driving, or riding the bus. When one leg gets too tired, hop over to the other one. It’s not just your legs that get the workout, either. It works your back, hips, chest, and core as well. Not many workouts are this easy and can target this many groups of muscles at once.
Scooting to work, school, a friend’s house, or simply scooting as a workout can help tremendously if you live a sedentary life; that is, sitting at work and then coming home to sit. We all need a little exercise to keep our bodies functioning to the best of their ability; this will help us feel better in general. If you sit all the time, this can cause soreness in your hips, back, and legs, which is a sign you need to get up and move more.
You don’t need to worry about straining your joints because scooting is low impact. That isn’t to say that you won’t get the benefits from it. You will have an increased heart rate and work the muscles throughout your body. When you kick off with your foot, you work that whole leg. When you dip down and then come back up on your standing leg, you work that entire leg. All the while, you’re keeping better posture than you normally would, keeping your core tight.
Getting a little cardio workout in is good for your body in many ways. It burns calories and fat more quickly and keeps your heart strong so that it doesn’t need to work as hard to pump blood to the rest of your body. It also increases your lungs’ capacity for holding air and reduces the risk of high cholesterol, diabetes, heart attack, high blood pressure, and even a few kinds of cancer (believe it or not).
Money-Saver
Some kick scooters can be pretty pricey, but what you end up saving in transportation costs more than makes up for the cost of the scooter itself. Think about it; you won’t need to pay the taxi fare, bus driver, or subway station to get you from point A to point B. That alone can save you a lot of money. If you usually drive yourself, you can save a lot of gas money. If you work in town, you’ll save yourself parking meter money. In the long haul, the investment is more than worth it. Just think, if you usually pay an average of $10 in transportation fees each day, you could have your scooter paid off in a month or two, depending on how much it costs to begin with. Even if it takes three to four months, it will still pay for itself – and then some.
Eco-Friendly
Whether you’re eco-friendly or not will depend 100% on whether you use a manual kick scooter or an electric kick scooter. Studies have shown that motorized kick scooters emit 202 grams of carbon dioxide with every kilometer they travel. Kind in mind – just because motorized scooters leave a carbon footprint, it doesn’t mean that you’re not at least lowering your contribution some by not driving, riding a motorcycle, or using public transportation. As far as sustainability goes, you just need to make sure you shop around and read reviews to ensure that the scooter you want to purchase will last more than a few months.
Now, if you use a true kick scooter, and it doesn’t have a motor, then you truly are reducing your carbon footprint. Since they’re 100% controlled manually, they don’t emit anything into the atmosphere, except maybe your sweat.
Speed of Commute
The speed of your commute will depend on a few things. This includes distance, terrain, incline and declines, traffic, and athletic ability (or an electric scooters’ top speed). If you just have to shoot down the road a few blocks, you can cut your transportation time in half or more. If you have to get across town with busy intersections, you may be able to get there faster than you could in a car, or you may not. It all depends on how the traffic is flowing while you’re trying to get through intersections.
Riding a scooter may take longer than riding a bicycle, but it will also give you more exercise. It could save you time or take more time than buses, subways, and taxis because you never know how the traffic will be. No matter the conditions, make sure that you leave yourself plenty of time to get to your destination, even if you run into a few hiccups along the way.
