There are people reading this—you may be one of them—thinking, “Of course cycling is good for your knees, you idiot. Why do you think I switched from running?” I hear you. But there’s a big difference between something that’s “not bad” for your knees and something that’s actually good for them. The claim in a new study is that people with a history of cycling are less likely to develop osteoarthritis in their knees, and that’s a claim with some interesting implications both for cycling and for how we think about osteoarthritis.
The study was published last month in Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise. It’s from a big team led by Grace Lo of Baylor College of Medicine, analyzing data from the Osteoarthritis Initiative, which followed thousands of older adults with and without osteoarthritis starting in 2004. This particular analysis zeroes in on 2,600 subjects who had knee X-rays, reported subjective knee pain, and filled out a questionnaire reporting their lifetime history of various physical activities during four periods of their life: 12 to 18 years old, 19 to 34, 35 to 49, and over…
