Study: moving farther away from the gym makes you exercise more*

I used to live 5 blocks from campus and about 3 blocks from the gym. I used to go a fair bit in my first couple of years of school (especially when I had a fitness pass.) But, like anyone else, I'd get busy and stop going.

After 2 1/2 years, I moved so that I am now 2 miles away from school and also 2 miles away from the gym. I figured that I would work out less, and therefore have to work out more at home with TiVOed Denise Austin DVDs. But it didn't work out that way. My definition of "exercise" is basically doing any kind of physical activity for 30 minutes. So the 5-block bike ride to school didn't cut it, but 15 minute bike ride, two ways, does. These figures are drawn from 11.5 months of data living near the gym, and 13.5 months of data living away from the gym:

	close to gym	far from gym
total exercise	9.2 days/month	15.4 days/month
gym exercise	2.7 days/month	1.2 days month

So, I traded 1.5 gym workouts for 6.2 four-mile bike rides. Not bad. Or, to put it a more impressive way, my exercise days per month increased 67%. Your mileage may vary if your bus system isn't annoying as hell, or if you have free parking. Either of those would motivate me to bike less. But currently, as long as the weather's decent, biking is the fastest and most convenient and cheapest and least annoying way to get to school.

As a side note, I love collecting data (for anything besides research projects.) I currently track: days of exercise, hours for my two jobs (one of those is required), my finances, and grocery and utility expenses. I just found a book that encourages me to obsessively track my dissertation progress too.

*provided that you bike to school