How To Lose Weight While Cycling

Are you looking for a fun workout that will help improve your heart and lung health, build muscle strength, and help you shed the pounds?

Then cycling could be the activity for you. Not only is cycling a fun and healthy activity but it can also be done both inside and outside, as you have the option to ride around your neighbourhood or use an exercise bike inside at the gym.

That said, if you want to lose weight while cycling, simply going for a leisurely ride isn’t enough. Don’t worry though, chaps, as we have some tips that will have you shredding while peddling. 

Going for at a leisurely pace won’t help you lose much weight, but if you push yourself beyond your ‘Sunday drive’ speed, you start burning calories.

The faster you ride, the more calories you burn. Moderate cycling burns about 300 calories in an hour, but if you push beyond that, you’ll burn more.  A man weighing 100kg cycling for an hour should burn about 750 calories or 3138kj.

We’ve touched on high-intensity interval training (HITT) before in pieces on increasing your metabolism and overcoming weight loss plateaus. For the uninitiated, it involves alternating between short bursts of intense exercise and intervals of low-intensity exercise.

While riding a bike, a HIIT routine would involve cycling as fast as you can with high resistance (e.g. a hill, or a more resistant gear) for 30 to 60 seconds, before riding with little resistance for two to three minutes. You then repeat this process for 20 to 30 minutes.

HITT burns more calories in less time, will improve your cardio and should boost your metabolism post-ride, even when in a resting state.

The logic behind endurance training is to push yourself just a little further, even when you feel like you’ve had just enough exercise. Endurance training should help burn fat and in turn help with weight loss.

When doing endurance training, start slowly and then steadily build up. For example, at the start of your endurance training, you may cycle for 10 minutes, but you could continually add more time to each session until you’re riding for three hours per week.

Incidentally, if you’re looking for something that could give you more energy during an endurance ride, you should try The Man Shake BOOST. BOOST is a delicious and energising drink that will turn your body into a fat-burning machine so you can power through and smash your goals.

If you find riding a bike a bit monotonous, you may want to try cross-training, which adds different activities and thus some variety to your workout.

An example of this could be cycling for an hour one day, and then doing 30 minutes worth of weights at the gym the next day, and then going for a swim on the third day.

Incorporating two activities into one single training session could also boost weight loss, studies have found. So maybe you could try doing 30 minutes of weights immediately after completing a 30-minute bike ride.

Cycling can be a fun and practical way to shed the kilos. However, it’s not enough to simply go for a slow-paced ride around the park — you need to increase your intensity a little bit if you want to ditch your spare tyre. That said, if you’re a little unsure whether your body is up for some semi-strenuous cycling, we advise you to consult your doctor before you go for your first ride.

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