Of course yes! Riding a bike is one of the best possible exercises to burn calories. Whether on a stationary bike in a gym, at home, or riding outdoors, cycling burns more calories than almost any other exercise in a given period of time. Also, riding a bike is much more fun than most other exercises.
Riding a bike is also much easier to use than most forms of exercise. It is not a high-impact sport that wears out your joints like running or many aerobic exercises. It is even an exercise that can be enjoyed after hip or knee replacements.
The longer you do it, the more calories you will burn. The amount of calories burned by cycling or any other exercise depends on the time you spend in the exercise along with its intensity. This is a great advantage for cycling because it is very easy to continue cycling for an hour or more. The longer you do it, the more calories you will burn.
Most cyclists I know can easily ride for two hours or more. Some of my wonderful fan friends are hikers. His trips are 60 to 750 miles at a time. These people ride day and night to achieve their goals.
Speaking of long rides, I recently met a very nice young lady on the University of Texas, Austin bike team and they just completed a ride from Austin, TX to Anchorage, Alaska and back in eighty days. They raised more than $250,000 for cancer research.
Then there is the Ride Across America (RAAM) from Oceanside, CA to Atlantic City, NJ every year. This is a truly amazing breed. The 8 person men’s team completed it in 5 days and 16 minutes with an incredible average speed of 22.42 mph. The men’s solo race was won in 8 days and 20 minutes with an equally incredible average speed of 14.38mph.
Those riders are amazing! I bet they can tell you about calories burned cycling.
Join a bike club
Join a cycling club and you will meet some very interesting people. Or join the CelebrateCycling.com community to meet other cyclists who live near you. Don’t worry about that bike saddle, you’ll soon get used to it. We all did.
Most of the cyclists started with short rides and slowly increased so that now cycling has become a part of their lives. Many of them join clubs or groups where they enjoy long weekend rides with their friends on quiet country lanes. When I started out I thought 10 miles was a big deal, but today my norm is a 30 mile commute after work twice a week. I also try to take a longer trip on the weekends.
While they’re at it, they burn plenty of calories. Let’s look at a list of how many calories a 200-pound person burns in various activities in one hour to see how cycling compares:
- Riding a bike for one hour at 12 mph = 725 calories
- Running for one hour at 6 mph (10 min mile) = 908 calories
- Basketball game for one hour = 725 calories
- Rowing (moderate) for one hour = 862 calories
- Jump rope (moderate) for one hour = 908 calories
- Aerobics (General) for one hour = 544 calories
- Weightlifting (moderate) for one hour = 275 calories
As you can see, biking is up there with the rest and this list doesn’t take into account headwinds and hills. They can easily increase the calories you burn while riding a bike. There is always a new landscape to behold and a new hill to conquer. There are friends to chat with and new routes to explore. Riding a bike is just fun.
Riding a bike is great, but you should do something else too. Riding a bike is a great exercise for your lower back and all your leg muscles, heart, and circulation, but it doesn’t do much for your abs, chest, arms, and upper back.
Spending a little time on the rest of your body will do wonders. If you’ve already conditioned your body for the discipline of riding a bike, you’re ready to work your upper body.
Cycling groups and clubs have members of all shapes and sizes, but it’s easy to spot those that combine cycling with some weights and core exercises like palate or yoga. They look great and have the full sculpted bodies we all wish we had.
Lose weight while gaining strength and shape
We all know that exercise is important if we want to lose weight the right way. Burning off those calories riding a bike is a great way to start, but we need a little more. We need to burn fat while building lean muscle mass to lower our Body Mass Index (BMI). It would seem that eating less and exercising more is the correct formula, but it may not be.
Depending on what we currently eat, we may need exercise more AND eat more. Our bodies are very complex machines. If we exercise even at a moderate intensity for more than an hour, we need to eat while exercising.
Even if we carb load for two days before our exercise, our blood and liver only store an hour and a half of energy for a trained athlete. Once we go over an hour our tank starts to dry out and we need a refill. An hour and a half later, we started to enter a hypoglycemic state where runners hit the wall and cyclists bonked. Neither one is funny.
Riding a bike for more than an hour and a half without additional food is counterproductive. Not only are we depleted and wobbly, but we could be burning off some of that new lean muscle mass we’ve worked so hard to build.
10,000 calories a month! Follow him! The calories you burn riding a bike can easily add up to 10,000 per month or more. Wouldn’t that be great?
If we continue like this, we will all be triathletes before we know it.
