When my friend was in a corporate fitness challenge, he strapped the company-issued pedometer on his ankle to get credit for his biking. Not sure if he told the company that he did that, but his team won the competition.

They would prefer that healthy people don't get discounts since they are such low risks for claims. Better to incentivize the couch potatoes as a preventative health measure to reduce losses and have you subsidize the lifestyle of those who won't make an effort.

Tape it to a paint can at Home Depot and have them mix it up in the machine. You get the discount and people will think you're some sort of marathon runner.

Strap your phone to your ankle

Yes, I was just looking at stationary bikes and this was one of the solutions, but it was strapping the fitbit to your leg/shoe laces.

Some sort incentivised exercise was offered at our local school. The winner was putting the fit bit on a kid each breakntime and getting excellent result. Strapping then on young children gets good numbers fast.

You should be able to game that somehow in a legitimate way like Johnny says. Most types of oscillating movements should do

With Fitbit you will even get steps for turning the steering wheel while driving, so this is definitely something you can(and should) game.

I routinely rack up thousands of steps playing my cello, even with my Fitbit on my left wrist. I suspect the numbers would be significantly higher if I wore it on the wrist of my bow arm.

The first week I had mine I was getting tons of steps while I was sitting in the office working. A little googling revealed that Fitbit uses the settings for handedness versus where you're wearing your fitbit to tune the sensitivity of their algorithm. Long story short, I set mine up to say that I'm right-handed and that I wear mine on my right hand, even though I'm left-handed.

Their resting heart rate algorithm is pretty bad, too. My RHR goes from 56 when I'm sedentary for a day to 61 during the week when I'm working out regularly. Looking at the actual chart there's a nice line at 55-56 where my RHR actually is, but I guess Fitbit just uses a moving average.

I'm excited at the prospect of insurance companies using these algorithms to determine that I'm unhealthy.

are you more likely to sustain an injury than someone who is mostly idle?

Do you have statistics to indicate biking is inherently more dangerous than other activities or are you just repeating a certain assumption you have?

This is interesting... I am in my 20s and bike ~20 miles per day. Over the last 5 years I have had 3 broken bones due to bike accidents including one which required an ambulance ride. With few exceptions, I only go to the doctor for bike-related injuries and my annual physical. To my health insurance provider, do the benefits to my cardiovascular system and general fitness offset the cost to treat my injuries?

I am guessing the insurance companies are looking far enough into the future where the long term benefits to my health outweigh the short term risks, but they are definitely losing money in the short term.

You are correct - this is interesting. I run, and in the last 2 years my only medical visits are for bacterial pneumonia (non-flu related, just appeared to be really bad luck) and a stress fracture in my knee from ‘overtraining’. The stress fracture involved 3 visits with an orthopedic surgeon, an x-ray, and an MRI.

Wonder what the tradeoff is there for my lifetime medical expenses if I wasn’t running?

To be fair, you also need to consider the tradeoff of continuing to run but not seeking treatment for any injuries sustained.

3 incidents per year at 20miles/day is higher than the statistical average. Are you biking in a way to increase the likelihood of an incident, biking in an area that is less safe than the average bike ride, or did you just have an unlucky year?

That is 3 incidents over 5 years. I don’t think that is too much of a statistical anomaly. One of the injuries was from a pedestrian stepping into the bike lane without looking, one was from a car merging into me, and one was from a collision with another cyclist while racing.

I will agree that 3 incidents over 5 years is closer to the normal.

Could just be biking in an area that has no biking infrastructure (i.e. bike lanes well separated from roads). I commute to work by bike daily and the most dangerous part of that is by far when I leave the cycleways between towns and have to be on the road. Motorists everywhere (except maybe Denmark or the Netherlands) seem to have a very fuck you attitude towards cyclists taking away their road; this shows mainly in disregarding right of way or attempting unsafe overtaking manoeuvres.

Someone who ran the equivalent of ~20 miles per day (a 5K per day, maybe?) for 5 years would probably have their share of expensive medical issues too. Runners get fractures, they get in traffic accidents, they get pneumonia, etc. So in a straight comparison between running vs. biking as far as the insurance company is concerned, it's probably a wash.

20 miles per day and 5K per day are not comparable. Probability of injury is a function of the quantity/intensity you are performing the action, and of course running 7x farther will be result in more injury.

I think OP was comparing 5k running to 20 miles biking. That is still probably inaccurate, since a 20 mile bike is at least 60 minutes, and a 5k run is at most 30 minutes. It would be more accurate to compare a 10k or even 10 mile run to a 20mi bike.

Of course it also depends on the physical condition of the person, especially their susceptibility to stress related injuries, and the running surface. Generally speaking running is much higher impact than biking, which is why you so often see runners with a stress injury training on a stationary bike.

Between walking, driving, and biking, biking is the _most_ dangerous: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micromort#Travel

Given the same commute you can expect riding a bike to be 23 times more dangerous than driving a car.

Put another way, it looks like people get into car accidents roughly once every 18 years. If instead of driving your car for your commute you rode your bike, you can expect to get into an accident every single year (and then some).

And according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microlife , the first 20 minutes of moderate exercise is worth 2 microlifes (or -2 micromorts).

At 15 miles/hour, the means the first 5 miles of biking costs you about 0.25-0.5 micromorts of accident risk and gives you +2 microlifes of fitness.

Riding in a car, on the other hand, incurs accident risk AND has effects on fitness.

23x sounded pretty high, and indeed the GP's Wikipedia article cites 23x as one option from the original 1979 work, or 11.5x as a more recent one. The latter seems much more reasonable, and a quick look at stats for Australia suggests current stats put it at something like 6-10x.

But the more interesting article to me was [0] which presents a study that says around 30% of "cycling" deaths are due to natural causes such as heart disease.

[0]: https://blogs.crikey.com.au/theurbanist/2015/09/01/is-it-jus...

The key part of your clickbait article is this:

> It also signals that older males need to be mindful that vigorous cycling – as with any form of exercise – can be fatal if the rider has a serious medical condition like heart disease. It’s likely though that the exercise benefit of cycling prevents many more premature deaths from disease that it causes.

It would be interesting to break down the statistics on cycling to seperate those who cycle to commute, and those who cycle for leisure. I’d assume they have vastly different mortality causes.

Only the first estimate given there is reasonably sourced. And it's almost 40 years old. Bike safety has improved dramatically since then, so I doubt it's as bad as you suggest. [1] suggests that the number of trips made by bike increased from 1.7 billion in 2001 to 4 billion in 2009, but [2] suggests that the number of cyclist deaths was roughly constant over that range. So per-capita, cycling safety has likely improved dramatically. I couldn't find any data on the number of cyclists or number of trips by bike going back to 1979 in the 5 minutes I spent on it, but I suspect the trend is similar going back that far.

For comparison, the car number quoted on Wikipedia appears to be from 2009.

Also, you have a lot of control over your own safety on a bike. I think there are many cyclists who are an order of magnitude safer than your average cyclist.

To be clear, I don't doubt that cycling is risker than driving. I just don't find the typically quoted numbers to be accurate.

[1] http://bikeleague.org/commutingdata

[2] http://www.cyclehelmets.org/1258.html

I asked a question. Notice the '?' mark at the end

My hang gliding instructor, who was also an avid cyclist, explained that cycling is only dangerous because you spend so much time close to the ground.

This is a common joke in aviation, but sharing a thermal with multiple gliders whizzing around is a little disconcerting.

Lots of runners in my family. They often get injuries (especially knew) from running. Biking is a lot kinder to your joints.

I rarely bike because I don't trust drivers, and you can't bike on the sidewalk.

People who use bikes don't trust drivers either. In fact I work on the base assumption that bus drivers in particular, are actively trying to kill me.

A healthy dose of paranoia is absolutely the way to survive on your bike. About the only thing you can trust not to screw you over is a tree. Of course, trees can easily conceal other objects...

Trees, after all, are the dominant life form on this planet ;)

I am invisible in my mind when I'm riding. In fact, the one thing that catches me off guard is people yielding when they shouldn't be yielding - drives me crazy, and throws off my game.

Can't stand that. If they'd just gone when they should have, I wouldn't have had to fully stop and unclip. Working on my trackstands, but can only do them for a few seconds still...

Most places its not actually illegal to bike on the sidewalk. Common myth.

In Sydney, Australia there is a $109 fine for cycling on a footpath (for those 13 and older), and a $319 fine for not wearing a helmet.

That means a 13 year old trundling down a 5 meter wide footpath to the local shops on Sunday morning is up for a $428 fine, roughly 23 hours of adult minimum wage work.

It seems to be seldom enforced, but it is doing a good job at what I think is the main objective - keeping people off bikes and in their car paying road tolls to the government and their private contractor businesses.

Rule 64 You MUST NOT cycle on a pavement (emphasis in original)

https://www.gov.uk/guidance/the-highway-code/rules-for-cycli...

Cops never bother to enforce it that I’ve seen tho’

Modern bike seats pretty much eliminate this issue.

Yes, but the reduced risk of heart disease/stroke/obesity more than makes up for it. Also better lung function and less car fumes breathed in since your car cabin isn't trapping them.