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| *Vultures Knob>>>Cycling |
Cycling??!? |
ive been cycling to and from work 5 days a week for the 2 years (3 miles each way and steep hills either way!!) i also do a further 40 mile cycle trip at the weekend making my total cycling over 7 days 70 miles for the 2 years... i dont seem to have lost much weight from it or dont feel as though cycling actually helps you lose weight... Anybody know the ins and outs of daily cycling?? thanks!! There is no doubt that cycling every day will strengthen your heart and help keep you healthy but sadly 70 miles (approx. 112 Km) a week is not really far enough to have a major effect on your weight. Cycling is a great low-impact exercise, unfortunately, as bikes are so good at their job (to this day- one of the most efficient machines ever developed by humanity) that you need to go a lot further than running or walking to burn off the same amount of fat. Professional cyclists have incredibly low body-fat levels and they can burn over 2000 calories an HOUR (the Recommended DAILY calorie intake for adults is between 1800 & 2500!) but they travel huge distances, some races lasting 8 hours or more. Counterintuitively- sprinting hard up hills may also not help. Fat burning tends to happen most during steady-state medium intensity rides. Going flat-out up a steep hill tends to make your system run more in "an-aerobic" mode (it gets complicated!). Don't stop cycling it is a great form of sport, try going a further or making a longer loop to & from work and extending those weekend rides. After 2 years of 70 miles a week you obviously have the underlying ability, now you just need to extend yourself a little to get some results. It is amazing how far you can go with a little time and practice. It's difficult to suggest another activity that can offer you such a wide scope of sights, experiences and health benefits. It can become quite addictive after a while. Go for it! The ONLY way to control your weight is to control what you put in your mouth. And that means a limit on sweets, junk foods, and sodas...You must be in good shape if you do that much riding. The key is burning off more calories than you take in. The problem stems from two issues. 1) Riding the same distance and terrain over and over your body adapts and simply gets use to what you are doing. 2) When you first started riding you probably saw a drop in weight then leveled off and since no change. To keep loosing weight just decrease your calorie intake by a few hundred a day and the weight will come off. No magic here. 3 miles 2 x day really amounts to little weight loss. The 40 mile trip is significant though. The short trips do you good by maintaining a certain fitness level as well as being very green. You burn calories cycling. Very short rides just don't amount to much time on the bike. If you ride slowly the calories burned is very low over time. As with any aerobic exercise, you need to work fairly hard for longer periods. The harder you work large muscle groups for longer periods of time the more calories you burn. There is no "trick" to it. You simply eat more than you use in biking. If you bike 3 hours on the weekend then go eat a double whopper you just ate more calories than you burned. you have to combine diet with any exercise to work, and also, even with the hills, 3miles isnt very far. to see results you have to eat less calories than you need, and you need to ride at a high enough intesity to keep your heartrate up for at least twenty minutes. i am betting you are eating too much calories, and the one good long effort you get is largely lost before you get another. the trips during the week arent long enough to really maintain the gains from the weekend. I lose a ton of weight cycling. Imagine, if you will, how much you'd weigh if you were on the couch the whole time. Ask your doctor first but if you want to lose weght fast just run about three miles a day. Also it seems as though you are just doing the same thing every week. You need to mix up the distance a little. Your body has gotten so use to it, if you stopped biking you would gain alot of weight. Because by biking as you have your body is use to you burning off so many calories. So now your body does not burn fat as well. |
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