How To Lose Weight When Riding Your Bike

Video Blog
August 24, 2020
How To Lose Weight When Riding Your Bike

Hey guys, Dustin here, CEO of sixthreezero. Today, we're going to talk about how to lose weight when riding your bike. So before we get started, don't forget comment below, ask us any questions, tell us your thoughts, or reach out to us at the team at sixthreezero. We want to hear your feedback and we're also here to answer your questions. So let's jump right in.

How do you lose weight on a bicycle? I know a lot of people get bikes because they want to get out and get exercise and potentially get back into shape and lose weight. Well, I think that's great. Bicycling is a very low impact form of exercise, most people learn to ride a bike at some point in childhood, if not adulthood that's great too. Once you get the hang of it, it's simple. You can burn calories, get exercise, get a great leg workout.

So a couple of secrets tips and tricks to riding a bike to lose weight. If you're going to get a single speed bike and cruise around at four miles an hour, regardless of how long you ride, I'll be honest, it's not going to be an extremely good form of exercise. However, it will burn calories and I'm not saying that's not good if that's what works for you, then please do that because it's better to ride than to not ride at all. But the secret or my tip to riding for exercise to lose weight is you want to get your heart rate going, you want to get your body sweating. So what do you do to do that? Well, number one, find a ride that's got some hills on it. The key to really elevating your heart rate is going up and down hills.

If you've ever done a spin class before, part of what they do is they put resistance on the bike and they try to recreate like you're doing hills. That whole feeling of standing and sitting and peddling hard really gets your body working. It gets your heart rate up and it gets you sweating. Most of you had heard now a big buzz word in the weight loss field is high-intensity interval training and that's the ideal way to create weight loss on your bike is to try to do intervals, interval training to get the heart going and the body pumping. So try to find a ride with hills, even if it's just one hill to start and it's too much for you after one hill and you get your heart going. That's good, just keep building slowly time by time, and maybe over time, you can integrate several hills. Then over time, you might be doing only hills, you could go up the hill, down the hill, up the hill.

Now obviously the fun of riding a bike is to take scenic journeys. So going up and down the same hill, wouldn't be fun, but you can map a ride to find elevation changes. Couple places I go to map rides our mapmyride.com. There are some other ones out there if you just Google mapping routes, they'll tell you what the elevation change of the ride will be. I'll put some other places to look in the description for rides, but the cool thing is, is they will tell you the elevation changes. So you can kind of see what kind of workout will this ride be and it will tell you the distance so you can kind of get an idea of how hard will you have to work.

The next thing I would say too is to make sure you try to make your ride at least 30 minutes. Now I'm not an expert in weight loss, I'm not a certified personal trainer, but there's a lot of information out there about how much cardio should you do a week to lose weight and I've heard about 30 minutes a day, five times a week is sort of the minimum you want to do to lose weight. So when you're going out riding your bike, ideally you're getting on there for at least 30 minutes. Now, if you could only do 20 minutes, one day 40 minutes, the other because of your schedule, obviously that's better than nothing, but if we're trying to focus on weight loss, try to get every ride to a minimum of 30 minutes.

So in addition to that, other than doing the hills, the other real key to weight loss on a bike is to vary the gear that you're using and to vary what sort of tempo or as they say in spinning class cadence, how fast are you peddling? So one good thing to do is let's say you have a seven-speed bike, maybe for a mile, you flip it into seven, the seventh gear, which is going to be the hardest to pedal, but it will take you the fastest and you try to get your cadence going, or you move your legs as fast as possible and seven gears for one mile. Then you downshift to say third gear and it's a little easier. Maybe you slow your pedal, let your legs recover a little bit. So any variation in that, throughout your ride, as opposed to leaving it in one gear and one sort of pedal cadence the entire trip, vary that up a little bit to get your body working easier and harder, which that's going to recreate the kind of interval training that is known to create weight loss as well.

So, maybe go half a mile and pedal as fast as you can in first gear, then shift it up and go to the seventh gear, then go on a hill and put it in seventh and see how fast you can do it. If you can create that variance throughout the whole ride, I guarantee you, you're going to get a good sweat going and your heart's going to get a great workout.

So those are my three tips for weight loss on a bike. Number one tries to make it a minimum of 30 minutes. Number two, try to find some hills on that ride. Number three, vary up the cadence and the resistance just like in a spin class. The benefit of being outside is it's going to be a lot more scenic and a lot more fun. So if you have any comments, questions, please comment below and ask me. Again, I'm not a certified trainer. I am not any sort of certified person in weight loss, but these are just tips and advice that I think will work from what I've heard.

Lastly, you can reach out to us as a team at Sixthreezero.com with any questions and don't forget on our website, go to the top we have a body fit questionnaire, take the quiz, put in your personal information and see what bike we recommend for you, it's going to be suggested based on your body. Two other things. We have a 365-day test drive policy. If you buy a bike, you don't love it. Send it back within 365 days. No questions asked, no money, no fees out of your pocket. We cover everything.

Lastly, we have a lifetime warranty for the lifetime of your bike we will warranty it. Take care of anything, if you have any problems, that's it and enjoy the ride.

Similar Articles

2021 Best Electric Bikes for Short Riders

If you fall outside the average measurements of most folks, you know that sizing items are...

eBike
How to Bike Uphill - With & Without an Electric Bike

Getting started when biking uphill, it's going to be hard when you start off, especially if...

Video Blog
Bike Benefits How Biking Can Improve Your Fitness at All Ages

Now that spring is here, it's sunny, you definitely want to get that vitamin D and...

Sale

Unavailable

Sold Out

How To Lose Weight When Riding Your Bike