Nowadays, people often suffer from a notorious lack of exercise, which also increasingly affects their health at a young age, yet there are many practical ways to keep fit all year round and lose excess weight easily. Many people wonder whether cycling is good for weight loss. The good news is that cycling is a particularly fun and effective way to remain slim or lose weight, and thanks to e-bikes this activity can be perfectly integrated into your everyday life.
We’ll give you some practical tips on how to shed excess weight by cycling and remain fit and slim at the same time.
Why Cycling Will Help You Get Slim
While many other activities and sports require a certain level of fitness, even untrained people can easily utilise cycling for weight loss. This has a very positive effect, especially on those who are overweight because it puts far less strain on the joints.
Here are the main reasons why cycling is ideal for body transformation and burning calories:
- It is a sport that is easy on the joints and has a low risk of injury.
- This sport helps build up and tone the important leg and gluteal muscles.
- You benefit from a boost to your lung volume and immune system
- The result is higher endurance and better performance, due to a healthy cardiovascular system.
- It’s a healthy and environmentally friendly alternative for the daily commute to work
Therefore, riding on your bike every day can be an excellent option for losing weight and keeping fit and healthy. Numerous studies confirm that regular cycling or walking are especially effective for lowering belly fat. Researchers at the University of Glasgow have found that cycling to work also significantly lowers your risk of cardiovascular disease and cancer.
Which Bike Burns the Most Calories?
There are different types of bikes that are suitable for burning excess calories. Some can be used as everyday bikes, while others are more suited to sporting and off-road activities.
Racing bikes: These lightweight, specialised bikes are great for covering long distances. Normally, you ride them on flat asphalt roads, so they can also be used for your daily commute.
Trekking bikes: If, on the other hand, you intend to eschew the city roads and prefer to train on forest and gravel paths, you should go for a robust trekking bike, which will be up for the challenge of a sporty weekend.
Mountain bikes: As the name suggests, these bikes are particularly suitable for demanding mountain and off-road routes. However, inexperienced cyclists should start off by training on easier routes first before venturing out on a mountain bike.
E-bikes: Getting slim by cycling works especially well with an e-bike. Although this may seem like a paradox at the first glance, riding on e-bikes burns a lot of calories, as people tend to cover longer distances.
Which of these bikes ultimately helps you to burn the most calories, depends on a number of factors. With a mountain bike on challenging terrain, you certainly burn more calories per mile than on asphalt, but you only manage a fraction of the distance. Both can have an impact on the number of calories burned – so there really is no standard answer.
An E-Bike Is Perfect for Slimming Down While Cycling
That’s precisely why an e-bike is an excellent way to keep fit in everyday life and burn fat. Although the electric motor makes pedalling easier and helps with acceleration, even untrained people can cover long distances with an e-bike. 5 miles on a mountain bike certainly burns more calories than 5 miles on an e-bike. But what if you can easily cover 20 miles on an e-bike?
Many people wonder how much cycling is necessary to lose 1 kg. This depends mostly on your pace, but it will take on average between 10 and 16 hours of cycling, so you should space it out over several sessions. As with other sporting activities, regular exercise is much more beneficial than long sporadic sessions.
A great advantage of the e-bike is that it can be used for your daily commute to work. If you manage to cycle every day, you will create the best conditions for losing weight in the long term. In many cases, e-bikes can be the ideal option for cycling 30 minutes or more on weekdays or weekends.
Why Cycling 10 Miles per Day Pays Off
How cycling can best be used to lose weight depends largely on how you manage to fit it into your daily routine and how often and for how long you cycle each week. Ideally, you should cover a distance of about 10 miles every day to enjoy the most important benefits.
These include the following:
- You enhance your overall health and burn a lot of calories while cycling. Daily exercise is particularly important as a counterbalance to a sedentary job.
- It’s a healthy, inexpensive and environmentally friendly alternative to the daily commute. Under these circumstances, losing weight by cycling does not even eat into your precious leisure time.
- Many people find cycling calming and relaxing. It offers you a lovely way of switching off from the stress of everyday life and simply relaxing.
The Perfect Training Plan to Get Slim by Cycling
In general, every distance you cover on a bike is a benefit to your health. However, if you want to lose weight by cycling and are interested in a strict training schedule, you can create your own training plan. It doesn’t have to be a formal plan on paper or in an Excel spreadsheet; it’s enough to simply follow a few tips on how to shed those extra pounds.
These days, there are numerous technical aids like smartwatches that can be used as heart rate monitors and to track distance and calories. This makes it effortless to maintain an ideal heart rate of between 60 and 70% and burn even more calories. It’s best to set yourself the goal of cycling at this rate several times a week, and then increasing the duration when you feel comfortable.
How to Measure the Number of Calories Burned While Cycling?
As mentioned above, the number of calories burned by cycling depends on many factors and can vary greatly depending on the distance and intensity. Typically, consumption ranges from 200 to 800 calories per hour, with the higher end almost equivalent to the vigorous style of a professional cyclist. Therefore, when you are covering slightly longer distances, it’s probably safe to assume that your calorie consumption will be in the middle range.
Here again, a smartwatch can pay off, as it is a far better indicator than any formula for calculation. This is due to the fact that no rider actually precisely manages to determine important conditions such as speed, distance, duration and heart rate while riding, in order to then convert them into a formula. Losing weight with cycling is much easier today than it was even 10 years ago due to these new technical possibilities.
The Bottom Line
Cycling offers you numerous advantages that can have a positive effect on your health. The extra exercise strengthens your muscles, cardiovascular system and immune system, and you can also lose a lot of weight. Slimming down by cycling is an excellent way to get back in shape.
In principle, this works with all types of bicycles, and the modern e-bikes from Ampler Bikes are ideally suited to help you lose weight. Our lightweight model Curt, for example, is perfect for long tours and commutes, where you can train your endurance and burn countless calories.
With our stylish Juna and Stellar city e-bikes, you can also reach your destination and achieve your desired weight with ease and great riding pleasure.
Book your test ride now or contact us with any questions.
