Cycling Pedal Power For Weight Loss
What makes cycling so special for weight loss? Let’s start with the mechanics. Bicycling is a nonimpact exercise, which means there’s no jarring on your joints, so even the heaviest rider can climb aboard a bike and pedal. With today’s fully geared bicycles, anyone from the most out-of-shape beginner to the recreational racer can pedal in comfort for miles. Cycling also uses all the biggest muscles in your body – your glutes, hamstrings, hip muscles, and quads. That is all essential for improving your fat-burning ability.
Cycling, especially long, steady rides, builds hundreds of thousands of capillaries in your legs, which means you can deliver more oxygen-rich blood to your working muscles. At the same time, your mitochondria – the fat-burning furnaces in your muscle cells – get bigger, so they can use the increased influx of oxygen to burn more fat and produce more energy. In one study of relatively sedentary men and women, after just 8 weeks of riding five times a week for 30 minutes, they increased their capillary-per-fiber ratio (a fancy way of saying how many blood vessels per muscle fiber) in their quads by 40 percent, the density of their mitochondria by 15 percent, and the amount of oxygen their legs could use during exercise by nearly as much (13 percent).
All that after just 2 months. In another study, researchers found that bicyclists’ LPL (fat-burning enzyme) activity was elevated for a full 30 hours after riding the Trek bikes for sale. The kind of endurance training you do on bicycle fixie bike parts also elevate your levels of fatty-acid-binding proteins and fat-carrying enzymes so your body is more efficient at shuttling fatty acids from storage into your working muscles. Simply put, the fitter you get, the more oxygen you can use, and the more fat you can burn.
Cycling also increases your daily calorie burn. First, and most obviously, cycling burns calories – hundreds of them – while you’re out there turning the fixie bikes for sale pedals. Even at a recreational pace of 13 to 15 miles per hour, you burn 500 to 600 calories in 1 hour or about 4,000 per week – enough to burn off more than a pound – if you ride just an hour every day. As if that weren’t enough, most people find cycling so energizing that they are simply more active, and hence burning more calories, all day long. All you have to do is ride.