How Much Should I Cycle a Day to Lose Weight? – The answer to this question largely depends on your age, starting weight, and fitness level. A person who cycles every day will use fewer calories for the same cycle than someone who has never cycled before because their body has adapted to this exercise.
- So, in terms of how many calories a person should aim to burn through each cycling session, there is no one answer.
- But that’s a disappointing answer, so let’s try to do better.
- Many trainers, health gurus, and exercise advocates say that burning 400 to 500 calories a day through exercise is a good goal to set your sights on.
In this article, certified trainer Brooke Taylor recommends burning 500 calories in exercise sessions five times a week. Using this rule of thumb and the data used in the Harvard study, we can determine how long it would take to reach the 500-calorie mark performing these cycling exercises. There you have it! It takes approximately 45 minutes of moderately intense cycling for most adults to reach their calorie expenditure needs through cycling. Do this five times a week, and you’ll burn 2,500 calories!
Cycling Type | Minutes Required to Burn 500 Calories |
Bicycling Stationary: Moderate Intensity | 48 min |
Bicycling: 12-13.9 mph | 42 min |
Bicycling: BMX or Mountain | 39 min |
Cycling can be an affordable and efficient way to get in some exercise and lose weight. With the added bonus of being an environmentally friendly form of transport, bike riding to and from work or to the grocery store can be a great way to reach your daily exercise goals.
Contents
- 1 What exercise burns 500 calories fast?
- 2 How long should I cycle to burn 500 calories?
- 3 Is 1 hour cycling enough for weight loss?
- 4 What happens if I cycle 1 hour everyday?
- 5 Can cycling reduce thigh fat?
- 6 What is the fastest way to burn calories on a bike?
- 7 How many calories do you burn in a 45 minute cycling class?
How many calories do I burn in 30 minutes of cycling?
– If you’re biking at a moderate, steady speed and without much resistance, you’re mostly using your aerobic metabolism system. This improves how well your heart and lungs work and helps your body use glucose efficiently. DeBusk cautions that not using glucose efficiently can raise your risk of pre-diabetes or metabolic syndrome.
- With moderate levels of cycling, your body also improves its ability to mobilize fats stored in muscle.
- If you’re biking at a higher speed or at greater resistance, you’ll rely more on your anaerobic metabolism system.
- This system isn’t one that you can maintain for very long, but cycling harder will help your muscle fibers learn how to adapt to demand.
As a general rule, the faster your speed, the more calories you’re likely to burn, because your body uses more energy to go faster. According to Harvard University, biking at a moderate speed of 12 to 13.9 miles per hour will cause a 155-pound person to burn 298 calories in 30 minutes.
What exercise burns 500 calories fast?
Weight Training – When most of us think of burning calories, we think of cardio exercises that spike our heart rate and leave us drenched in sweat. Because of this, weight training has traditionally been a very underrated form of exercise for calorie burning.
- But, weight training as an activity does burn calories (500 calories in two hours or so), and the real magic in the metabolic benefit comes from the fact that it helps build lean muscle.
- The more muscle you have on your frame, the higher your metabolism and the more calories you burn throughout the day naturally, even when the workout is done,” explains Smith.
“If you want to speed up your calorie burn during your weight training workout, add in some weighted jumps like jump squats or jumping lunges.” Circuit training also keeps your heart rate up and will accelerate your calorie burn.
How long should I cycle to burn 1000 calories?
4. Cycling – If you’re cycling at a rate of 10-12mph, you can burn roughly 7 calories per minute depending on how much you weigh. If you bump up the intensity to 14-16mph, you can burn up 15 calories per minute. Based on these numbers, you’d have to maintain a pace of 14 mph for about 65-70 minutes to burn 1,000 calories.
How long should I cycle to burn 500 calories?
How Much Should I Cycle a Day to Lose Weight? – The answer to this question largely depends on your age, starting weight, and fitness level. A person who cycles every day will use fewer calories for the same cycle than someone who has never cycled before because their body has adapted to this exercise.
- So, in terms of how many calories a person should aim to burn through each cycling session, there is no one answer.
- But that’s a disappointing answer, so let’s try to do better.
- Many trainers, health gurus, and exercise advocates say that burning 400 to 500 calories a day through exercise is a good goal to set your sights on.
In this article, certified trainer Brooke Taylor recommends burning 500 calories in exercise sessions five times a week. Using this rule of thumb and the data used in the Harvard study, we can determine how long it would take to reach the 500-calorie mark performing these cycling exercises. There you have it! It takes approximately 45 minutes of moderately intense cycling for most adults to reach their calorie expenditure needs through cycling. Do this five times a week, and you’ll burn 2,500 calories!
Cycling Type | Minutes Required to Burn 500 Calories |
Bicycling Stationary: Moderate Intensity | 48 min |
Bicycling: 12-13.9 mph | 42 min |
Bicycling: BMX or Mountain | 39 min |
Cycling can be an affordable and efficient way to get in some exercise and lose weight. With the added bonus of being an environmentally friendly form of transport, bike riding to and from work or to the grocery store can be a great way to reach your daily exercise goals.
Is 1 hour cycling enough for weight loss?
– Pedaling along at a leisurely pace probably won’t do much to help you lose weight. However, if you push yourself to work harder and up the intensity of your ride, you’ll make more progress toward your weight loss goal. As a general rule, the faster you cycle, the more calories you’ll burn,
That’s because your body uses more energy to cycle faster. And the more calories you burn, the more weight you’ll likely shed. Steady, moderate cycling burns about 300 calories in 60 minutes, but you can burn more than that if you increase the intensity. In fact, according to the Harvard Health Letter, a 155-pound person can burn as many as 298 calories in a 30-minute bike ride, if they pedal at a 12-to-13.9 mile-per-hour pace.
A person who weighs 185 pounds can burn 355 calories by cycling at this pace. And, at a faster pace of around 14 to 15.9 miles per hour, a 155-pound can burn up to 372 calories in just 30 minutes, while someone who weighs 185 pounds can burn 444 calories in that time frame.
Does cycling reduce belly fat?
Tips to lose fat while cycling – Does cycling burn fat? Yes. Although your stomach muscles aren’t working as hard as your quads or glutes when you’re riding, but cycling’s aerobic nature means you are burning fat. Work at a moderately intensive pace, so that conversation is possible, but not easy – less than than 80 per cent of your maximum heart rate – three times a week for about two hours.
How many calories does cycling burn?
Round off your ride with some interval sessions. Jon Sparks / Immediate Media To really push the calorie burn, add in some interval training. At the end of your long ride, or if you only have a short amount of time to train, do six sets of all-out efforts, each lasting two minutes, with 30 seconds of rest in between.
- As you improve you can keep going for longer.
- Be sure to stay aware of traffic if you’re doing flat-out efforts on the road – consider making the most of your turbo/smart trainer for these sessions.
- The benefits are that you’ll burn loads of calories in a short amount of time doing intervals and your metabolism will be up for the next 12 hours, meaning you burn extra calories over the course of the day.
You’ll soon be seeing the weight loss!
BikeRadar ‘s turbo training videos
This session is hard, but one of the best interval workouts cyclists can do to get into top condition Your natural instinct may be to concentrate on stomach crunches and sit-ups to remove belly fat. In reality, although these will help to build muscle and improve core strength, they won’t remove fat – aerobic exercise is still the most efficient way to do that.
These cross-training workouts will boost your cycling performance
Try aerobic muscle workouts such as the ‘lying down bicycle’ exercise. Lie on your back with your hands behind your head and raise yourself up so that your shoulders and legs are off the ground at a 90-degree angle with your knees bent. Touch your right knee to your left elbow while extending your left leg, followed by left knee to right elbow extending your right leg.
Repeat this, at a controlled speed, in sets of 20 with 30 seconds rest. Planks are also excellent for toning the core muscles and increasing strength. Circuits and classes such as Zumba and Body Combat are aerobic, so will give you a high intensity session where you’ll burn some serious calories, and can be fun too, as well as give you a full body workout.
Yoga and pilates may not be high intensity, but they are highly recommended for cyclists because they help stretch out muscles that can become tight after the repetitive motion of pedalling and being positioned on a bike for hours at a time. This helps avoid injury, which again means fewer impediments to staying on your bike.
Improve your core strength
In theory, losing fat is simple: you need to burn more calories than you consume. The bigger the calorie deficit, the greater the fat loss.
Wondering how many calories cycling burns?
Be careful to fuel your exercise with slow burning carbohydrates (wholegrain pastas and breads) and lean proteins (turkey) and avoid eating much of anything high in saturated fat, such as cheese, butter and sugary sweets. You should also be wary of food labelled ‘low fat’. Don’t be tempted to drastically reduce your calorie intake: you still need to make sure you’re getting enough food to function healthily. If you’re not fuelling yourself adequately in your training you won’t be able to get the most from your key sessions – lowering performance – and your body could start dropping muscle mass rather than fat.
- Your body may also go into starvation mode, slowing the metabolism to conserve calories, which is exactly what you don’t want.
- The general advice is to aim for a weight loss of between 0.5lb to 2lb, or 0.2kg to 1kg a week.
- There are plenty of online tools to help you work out the calorie deficit you need to aim for to achieve this.
The best way is to make healthy food choices and up your levels of physical activity. It’s also worth avoiding food and drink that can cause bloating. While this isn’t actually belly fat – it’s caused by water retention in the tissues (oedema) around your stomach and elsewhere on your body – it can cause that tum to look a little on the large side.
You might already be aware of certain foods that have this effect on you, but salty foods and alcohol certainly have this effect so are best avoided or limited – and that’s not even to mention the hidden calories in alcoholic drinks! Stress and its associated low mood can affect weight; some people stop eating properly and lose weight, others turn to comfort eating and gain weight.
Neither is ideal or healthy. Stress can also affect sleep levels. So controlling or managing your stress levels can have a beneficial effect on weight control. Happily, regular aerobic exercise such as cycling has been shown to be a great way of combating stress, decreasing anxiety, helping to reduce tension and boost your mood.
How many calories does a 2 hour cycle burn?
Calories burned biking per minute – Cycling at moderate speeds of about 12 – 13.9 mph for 20 minutes can burn 218 calories for a person weighing 180 lbs. However, if you use a stationary bike, you burn 12.5% fewer calories or only 190.7. Cycling for 120 minutes or 2 hours can burn between 1,140 to 1,300 calories, depending on if you use a stationary bike or a road bike, respectively.
Is cycling 15 km a day good?
Cycling Boosts Heart Health – Cycling is a great cardiovascular choice for anyone who doesn’t want to go running. It’s both high-intensity and low-impact, so it’s suitable both as a HIT workout and for more moderate sessions. Several studies suggest that cycling for 15 to 20 minutes each day can be beneficial for heart health.
- One study compared two groups using an indoor bike.
- Group one did a two-minute warm-up, a 20-second sprint, and then a slower two-minute ride and repeated it for 10-minutes.
- Group two rode steadily for 45-minutes.
- After 12-weeks, both groups had a 20% increase in cardiovascular endurance.
- The study showed that shorter intense bursts of exercise can offer the same heart health benefits as a longer workout.
Similarly, Science Daily wrote about one study that found HIIT workouts improved cardiorespiratory fitness almost twice as much as a long stretch of moderate-intensity running or cycling. A 15-minute workout can be more beneficial than a 45-minute one at a slower pace.
It’s good news for anyone struggling to fit longer gym or cycling sessions into their day. Classes are a good example of this. Riders go hard because they want a more intense workout in a shorter session. Intensity plays a key role in maximising the benefits of cycling for shorter periods. Vigorous doesn’t have to mean going all-out but you should push yourself if you’re able to.
All exercise has health benefits but according to one study published in JAMA Internal Medicine, 75 minutes of vigorous activity per week can also decrease your risk of getting cancer or cardiovascular disease. That’s just 12.5 minutes a day. Regular exercise can reduce a person’s risk of coronary heart disease by up to 29% in women and 21% in men.
How much calories will I lose if I cycle for 1 hour?
Q1. How Many Calories Does Cycling Burn? – Cycling really packs a punch as an accessible, everyday activity calorie burner. For the same time spent riding around (or using a stationary bike) you’ll burn more calories than walking briskly, or even doing low impact aerobics! On average, cycling burns over 50% more calories than walking, minute for minute.
What happens if I cycle 1 hour everyday?
Regular cycling, especially at a high intensity, helps lower body fat levels, which promotes healthy weight management. It also tends to increase your metabolism and build muscle, which allows you to burn more calories, even while at rest.
Can cycling reduce thigh fat?
Cycling can reduce thigh and belly fat as well as benefiting the circulation of blood around the body, strengthening the heart and other muscles and increasing the metabolism. It is a low-resistance exercise which means it puts less pressure on the joints than running, walking or jogging. We have previously considered other physical benefits of cycling here – and on the cardiovascular system, blood circulation plus its influence on other known diseases,
Which is better cycling or treadmill?
– Burning calories is a major reason why many people do cardio. When comparing the calorie burn from treadmills versus stationary bikes, you have to consider the intensity and duration of your training. Studies suggest that running on a treadmill burns 8.18–10.78 calories per minute, while stationary cycling burns 7.98–10.48 calories per minute ( 10 ).
- Over a 30–60-minute session, these small differences can theoretically add up.
- Still, if you bump up the intensity on the bike just a little or add a few more minutes of training, you could easily be burning more calories stationary cycling than treadmill running.
- For comparison, it’s worth noting that high intensity interval training (HIIT) on a hydraulic resistance system can burn a whopping 10.3–15 calories per minute ( 10 ).
This means that if time is a limiting factor, HIIT-style training will burn far more calories than steady-pace running or cycling. In perspective, this makes the calorie-burn difference between treadmills and bikes negligible for shorter workout times.
What is the fastest way to burn calories on a bike?
Cut down on coasting Whether it’s riding downhill or rolling to a stop at some traffic lights, coasting means your heart rate will decrease and therefore so will the calories that are burned. So, where possible, try and keep coasting to a minimum and you’ll be surprised how many more calories you’ll burn.
How many calories do you burn in a 45 minute cycling class?
It can also burn a lot of calories. – And, it has less of an impact on your body than running. Courtesy of SoulCycle Plus, the American Council on Exercise (ACE) says that a 45-minute group cycling class can burn 350-600+ calories, that makes it equivalent to running for the same amount of time (with less impact to your body).
But it’s the ability to connect the mind and body that makes indoor cycling so beneficial to your overall health. “It’s just you and the bike, getting it done,” said Moone and Del Carlo. One way they create an atmosphere that enables riders to make the mind-body connection is by not having screens or monitoring devices on their bikes.
“We really believe health starts with giving your mind a break from that stimulation and feeling the visceral sensations of your body hard at work,” they both explained. Certified Sports Chiropractor, Dr. Alex Tauberg, told INSIDER that one of the main benefits of Indoor cycling is the ability to customize your workout.
How many calories does a 2 hour cycle burn?
Calories burned biking per minute – Cycling at moderate speeds of about 12 – 13.9 mph for 20 minutes can burn 218 calories for a person weighing 180 lbs. However, if you use a stationary bike, you burn 12.5% fewer calories or only 190.7. Cycling for 120 minutes or 2 hours can burn between 1,140 to 1,300 calories, depending on if you use a stationary bike or a road bike, respectively.