Are you curious about the number of calories burned during bike riding? The answer depends on how fast you are cycling, what kind of resistance you have, and the bike you are riding.
In this article, you’ll get in-depth information on how biking burns calories, the number of calories burned while riding a bike, and the benefits of cycling. Read on to learn more!
Table of Contents
How Biking Burns Calories
Adenosine triphosphate (ATP) is the molecule that supplies energy to cells. It’s created when your muscles burn fats, sugars, and proteins for energy. When you breathe out oxygen, your muscles begin converting fats and sugars into ATP.
The body generally needs ATP all the time, even if it’s just playing around, but when exercising, it needs more. You may make or access ATP in the body differently, depending on how intense and long your workout is. Your muscles contain a limited amount of ATP, but you make more when you need it.
In short, intensive exercise, your body converts carbohydrates to ATP through anaerobic metabolism. In long, less intensive workouts, it produces ATP using aerobic metabolism in which carbohydrates provide most of the energy.
How Many Calories Does Biking Burn?
Most people ride their bikes at a moderate intensity and burn around 300 calories an hour. If you do vigorous riding within an hour, you can burn over 600 calories. If you’re racing, however, you can burn almost 1,000 calories an hour.
During a two-and-a-half-hour ride each way, the commuter burns about 750 calories. On the other hand, a pound fat has approximately 3,500 calories. Each pound of fat requires riding for over a month to lose. The assumption is that your diet will remain the same, and you will not gift yourself for biking to work with drink or food.
The cost of an additional 150 calories per day can be something as simple as a few chocolate digestives in your morning breakfast. If the goal is not to lose or gain weight, then adding and consuming extra calories negates the benefits of cycling to burn fat.
Even when you are sitting on the couch doing nothing, you constantly burn calories and convert them into energy to keep you alive. That’s what we call our resting calories. By getting on your bike and riding, you will burn more calories, usually called active calories.
Many factors determine how many calories you burn, including your weight, fitness level, and gender, as well as whether you ride on flat ground, steep terrain, or against the wind.
If you want to measure active calories accurately, you need to experiment in a lab, either by looking at the heat that you generate or by measuring how much oxygen you consume and how much carbon dioxide you produce while riding a stationary bike.
A body’s energy is generated by burning foodstuffs and releasing carbon dioxide gas, so the link between calories and breathing is true. Laboratory testing is expensive and difficult, so fitness tracking apps estimate fitness based on various calculation methods.
This app calculates your total heart rate and power according to what you provide as inputs and how those measurements determine what number the app comes up with and how accurate it is.
When exercising at a moderate level, a 75kg male cyclist can burn approximately 600 calories an hour, while an average female cyclist can burn approximately 500 calories per hour.
What Is the Calorie Burn Rate on a 20-Minute Bike Ride?
Bike riding is an enjoyable and low-intensity form of exercise that you can do outdoors or indoors. You can burn 140 to 498 calories by cycling for 20 minutes, depending on your fitness level and body weight.
A 20-minute bike ride outdoors can burn 160 to 489 calories, whereas a stationary bike can burn 140 to 311 calories. Your body weight determines how many calories you burn.
Strategies for Biking to Lose Weight
Here are the strategies that will help you lose weight through cycling.
Make Your Rides Longer
You can increase your cycling mileage more efficiently by extending the cycles you are already taking, such as your every day travelling and weekend rides. Things like changing and exiting your bike are already taken into account, so adding 30 minutes to your commute is only half an hour added to your time.
Even if you take a direct route to work, you may make small deviations along the way to make it more pleasant and quiet. Continue to use this way whenever the time is limited, but create extra, extended, and less direct routes.
If you conduct this couple of times each week, or even every time you commute home, you’ll pile up more kilometers with minimal extra exertion.
Make Your Way To The Hills.
The most efficient routes when cycling are those that go around hills rather than over them, especially when trying for fat loss. Most of the time, we travel along these routes. Despite this, biking uphill is an excellent approach to enhance your fast fitness, unequivocally in light of the fact that it’s harder. This indicates you’ll be working harder and that you will burn fat more efficiently.
Increase Your Riding Frequency
Cycling more often also implies cover a longer distance on a bike. If you bike each day, try adding in one more day.
Look For Other Ways to Utilize Your Bicycle
It’s much more convenient to go into town by bicycle rather than drive or take the bus. How about going to the weekly grocery store? Buy a child seat and take your preschooler places. That extra weight will make you work harder. Hypergravity training is what fitness instructors call it!
Embrace the Challenge
Getting fitter doesn’t only require more time on the bike; you also need to ride harder. You need cycling gear when doing this, a bathroom for showering at the workplace since you’ll sweat.
A GPS device such as a smartphone or computer enables riders to log rides, upload them to performance monitoring sites, and keep track of their progress – and mileage.
When pushing yourself while commuting, it is paramount to safeguard yourself and the other road users. This is a training exercise, not a race. On congested streets and shared-use paths, you shouldn’t ride at high speeds.
You should avoid rushing the traffic lights that are changing. If you overshoot, you may rear-end a car as you peer at your cycle computer. Goals should be based on rough guidelines and will have to take the condition into account.
It is better to set a maximum speed limit for shorter ride segments rather than for the whole ride. Faster riders are better spent on uphills without junctions.
Continue Pedalling
If you want to burn fat through biking, keep pedaling!
A typical ride involves about 15% freewheeling. Therefore, in freewheeling, no exercise is done. However, if you pedal consistently, you would get about 15% more workouts, which turns the 10-mile distance into 11.5 miles.
If you prefer riding a fixed-wheel bike, you will always be pedaling: no freewheeling, so you will burn through 100% of your drive cycling. You will pedal at various rhythms, as well, moderate and hard uphill and quick downhill – making each excursion an exercise.
Don’t Forget To Rest.
Exercise is about getting in shape and adapting your body to the additional pressure you have subjected it to. Don’t simply pound out hard rides; however, substitute them with simple rides. Possibly take a vacation day. Put forward gradual objectives.
Eat Healthfully
You can’t eat whatever you want halfway to work. Also, you won’t automatically drop weight from biking an hour. You’ll burn around 300 calories after an hour of fairly gentle cycling. A five-day week of 1,500 calories is less than a half-pound of fat, which doesn’t sound like much, but over a year, you would shed off more calories on the off chance that you didn’t change your eating routine.
If you commute regularly and you eat a lot due to your travelling, you’ll have constant weight and, in some cases, continue to increase. On the other hand, if you commute regularly and start eating sensibly, the weight will come off much more quickly.
Benefits of Cycling
Here are the reasons why riding a bicycle will help you stay healthy.
Your Immune System Is Boosted By Cycling.
If you regularly exercise moderately, such as cycling from work to home, you will have a stronger immune system and therefore be less prone to the common cold and other viruses. Even if you do get ill, you will experience fewer problems than your inactive colleagues.
Workouts can enhance your immunity by enhancing the production white blood cells. In fact, your body’s immune system will continue to work much better after exercise for up to three hours, helping it to fight off bacteria and viruses.
Exercise-induced immune cell surges require frequent exercise to repeat themselves, thus improving viral control and reducing illness in the long run. So cycling will certainly keep the diseases away.
Cycling Reduces Stress.
Exercise such as cycling has been shown to decrease stress, anxiety, and depression in people compared to sedentary folks.
Various explanations for this have been offered, from the simple – that exercise distracts you from daily troubles – to the complicated – that workouts trigger uplifting biochemical changes. Nevertheless, numerous individuals report that they look forward to the frequent cyclic movements of cycling.
No matter your reasons, regular biking will certainly help to enhance your mental growth.
Biking Reduces Obesity
For anyone looking to slim down or prevent weight accumulation, cycling regularly is a great exercise choice.
Biking doesn’t impact your joints, and contrary to many workouts, you can bike for extended periods of time as long as your body enters a considerable calorie deficit. As a result, you are absorbing fewer calories than burning, which make your fat stores a source of energy.
While the number of calories you burn on the bike is based on your workout intensity and weight, it’s usual to burn 400 calories or more an hour.
Cycling Lowers Your Risk Of Heart Disease.
Numerous investigations have shown that cardiovascular exercise like cycling is a demonstrated method to lessen the danger of coronary episodes, strokes, and surprisingly the requirement for sidestep a medical procedure. Coronary illness is currently the world’s leading killer disease.
It has been discovered that cyclists who ride under 20 miles seven days are half as liable to experience the ill effects of coronary illness as the individuals who don’t practice by any means. Simply riding two miles to work and home daily would suffice. This is a healthy investment.
Cycling Will Improve Your Cardiovascular Health.
By biking, you will protect your heart and build a stronger cardiovascular system, which will enable your body to convey nutrients and oxygen to your muscles effectively.
In addition to helping you in sports, cycling will also help you in everyday chores, such as buying grocery and going upstairs. You’ll feel more comfortable after a few days of cycling.
Taking A Bike Ride Can Lower Cholesterol.
Research shows that endurance sports such as cycling improve HDL cholesterol levels, which are commonly known as “good cholesterol,” and lower LDL cholesterol, more commonly known as “bad cholesterol,” the arterial-clogging kind.
While many health organizations disagree on the amount of exercise you should do to improve your cholesterol levels, many recommend at least half an hour daily on most, if not throughout week, at a moderate to vigorous intensity. It’s possible to accomplish that in 15 minutes while riding to work and 15 minutes when you return home.
Conclusion
To achieve your weight loss goals or maintain the weight loss you’ve already made, biking can be an excellent way to achieve this.
If you want to lose as much weight as possible, increase the intensity of your bike workout. Exercises such as interval training and cross-training can also have a beneficial effect on weight loss and fat burning.
Consult your doctor if you have a health condition or haven’t exercised for a long time to determine whether a cycling workout is right for you.