If you want to lose weight for swimwear season, a special event, or the holidays, indoor cycling exercise can be part of the weight loss equation.
8 Tips to Be Strong and Healthy with Indoor Cycling
Exercise will help you preserve muscle mass, which is healthier for your body and better for your appearance.
Plus, maintaining muscle will make your weight loss easier to maintain in the long run. While a bike ride away from home is unlikely to help you lose weight, indoor cycling can. In addition to burning 400 to 600 calories in a 45-minute class, indoor cycling also helps boost your metabolism (your body’s calorie-burning engine) and offers the opportunity to tone and strengthen all the muscles in your legs. the glutes and core. Without bulging your thighs.
Improve Your Health and Lose Weight with Indoor
To get the most out of an indoor cycling routine, pay attention to some basic nutrition and training rules. These tips will help you perform the indoor class much better.
Eat before riding
Contrary to what you may have heard about the benefits of exercising on an empty stomach, it’s smart to give your body the energy it needs to ride hard and get the maximum benefits from training. Even if you take a class early in the morning, eat something small 30/45 minutes before riding.
This could be a small banana, a slice of toast with jam, or a handful of whole grains.
Do the same an hour or two before your afternoon or evening cycling sessions with a combination of protein and carbohydrates (maybe a small apple with a tablespoon of almond butter or a few tablespoons of trail mix). In addition to helping you prepare for training, eating beforehand can help you burn extra calories, thanks to the thermic effect of food.
Make sure you drink plenty of water before, during and after exercise; since your body needs enough water intake to maintain metabolism and burn calories efficiently.
Vary the pace and difficulty
With most forms of exercise, interval training can increase your metabolism more than exercising in a steady state, and the same can be said for indoor cycling. Almost all indoor bike models have programs for this.
Think of it as a way to trick your body into burning calories faster.
By alternating harder bursts of pedaling (that is, faster cadence versus heavier resistance) with a more comfortable pace, you’ll burn more calories during your workout than you would at a steady, moderate pace.
This will also trigger more exercise after oxygen consumption (the post-burn effect), causing you to continue burning more calories for a few hours after cycling.
Divide your workouts
If you don’t have time for a 45-minute cycling class, do two sessions of just 25 minutes and you’ll burn as many calories between the two as you would with a longer class. You can even push yourself harder during a shorter session, burning more calories.
Either way, you’ll reap the afterburner effect twice a day instead of once, allowing you to burn more calories in 24 hours.
Improve your bike workouts
Do the same type of walk day after day, and your body will adjust to the activity and won’t get as big of a metabolic hit as it initially did. The solution is to regularly change the types of walks you do (alternating between endurance, strength, interval, and run-oriented walks) and vary the intensity to convince your body to burn calories more quickly during and after training.
Do resistance training
The leaner muscle you have, the higher your resting metabolic rate (RMR) and the more calories you will burn 24/7. To build muscle outside of the cycling study, perform at least one set of strength training exercises for each major muscle group two to three times a week, advises Wayne Westcott, Ph.D., director of exercise science at Quincy College in Quincy, Massachusetts, and author of “Get Stronger, Feel Younger.” In this way, you will add muscle mass and increase your TMR in the process.
Whether you use weight machines or weights, resistance bands or kettlebells is up to you.
Replace your muscles properly
Within an hour of your workout, consume a combination of carbohydrates and protein to replenish your muscle glycogen stores and provide amino acids for muscle repair and building.
This will keep your muscles and metabolism running smoothly and prepare your body for your next workout.
Diet is still important
Some people make the mistake of thinking that since indoor cycling is a high intensity exercise, they can eat whatever they want and still lose weight. The reality is that even if you take your heart out, you are unlikely to burn more than 500 or 600 calories in 45 minutes.
You must consume approximately 3,500 additional calories to lose one kilo of body weight, so if you have a piece of chocolate cake, you will consume 537 calories, eliminating the calorie burning you did in cycling.
Keep moving
If you’re exhausted after a hardcore biking session, don’t allow yourself to become a couch potato Homer Simpson for the rest of the day.
Do so, and you’ll end up compromising the calorie-burning effects of your indoor cycling workout and your progress toward your weight loss goal. A better approach is to move more to lose more.
