For the last few summers I’ve been trying to do a lot of bike riding, mostly to lose some weight. I’ve been tracking which days I ride, how far, average speed, and my weight. I live near a bike path and from my place to the end, and back, is a bit over 25 miles. Takes me about 2 hours. Some of that is lost to traffic lights and such, my rolling average is between 13 and 15 mph.
Mostly I’ve been pretty happy with the results. The first few rides each year are tough, but it gets easier, I feel healthier, and I have lost weight. I do wonder if I might fine tune things a bit. Sometimes it seems like I can ride every day for two weeks and not lose an ounce, sometimes I slack off for a few days and lose two pounds. I know that there’s going to be some natural fluctuations (it’s interesting to see how much), but is there anything there I might use to my advantage? Is there any recommended schedule to get the most out of this sort of exercise, and what is it (every other day, two days on then one off, something like that), or do I just burn as many calories as possible and my body will catch up eventually?
Mods, I don’t know if there’s a strict factual answer to this. Move to another forum if you think it’s appropriate.
Add some steep hills to your ride. Try to attack (i.e. go up hard) them. At first you may not be able to make it to the top without stopping, but keep at it and eventually you will.
My experience is that exercise doesn’t lead directly to weight loss, diet does. Exercise can help but it’s a relatively minor contributor since it’s very easy to out eat your exercise. The schedule of the cardio shouldn’t matter much, but consider adding weight lifting to your routine. Muscle takes calories to support.
This. They say that you can’t outrun a bad diet. The result from a weight loss plan is usually attributable at least 70:30 to diet, as opposed to exercise.
Of course, the OP may already have a good diet, or he may be attending to his diet. At any rate, he is specifically asking about the exercise component of his regime. Two thoughts on that:
First, SFAIK the weight-loss benefit of exercise is not so much the calories you burn while actually doing the exercise as the changes you work, and sustain, in your metabolism by the fact of exercising. Therefore, the key is regularity. Whatever exercise you’re doing, try to do it at least three or four times a week.
And, secondly, related to this, the exercise regime that will work for you is the one you will actually do, and do regularly. Building it in to your commute is a good idea, since you commute regularly. Also don’t push it to a point where you no longer enjoy it, since that increases the likelihood that you will start to duck out of it, and eventually get out of the habit.
When I exercise hard/long, the next day I’m the same weight or even a hair heavier. If I can resist the urge to eat more that day or the next, then usually a couple of days later I drop half a kilo or so.
I went on an exercise rampage last september, and lost some weight. But I also started eating more, and come october and worse weather, I scaled back my efforts because they were unsustainable, but it took a while to scale back the eating, too, so I gained back the lost weight and more.
However, in the two years prior I lost a good deal of weight mostly by eating less but also getting some exercise every day. Some fairly hard exercise (stair walking for me, but cycling hard would also do it) for 30 minutes or so is a good way to burn off carbs stored in your muscles as glycogen. You could of course also go on a low carb diet…
An important side effect of exercise when dieting is that it helps you maintain your muscle mass. You really don’t want to be a light weight couch potato with little muscle mass and still a lot of fat, because at that point you burn almost nothing and can’t eat anything without gaining weight.
And of course exercise is good for all kinds of things, not in the least cardiovascular health.
I. Diet modulates weight.
II. Exercise modulates body composition.
Nutrition quality will improve how fast you lose or gain weight.
Exercise intensity will improve how fast your body composition changes.
Stop focusing on weight (which, unless you are trying to put on lean muscle mass, is a nearly useless metric for health or fitness) and instead measure performance goals, how well you feel, or how your clothes fit. Cardio is useful in the sense of building endurance for long duration activities (although not nearly as much as most people think it is) but if you want to appear leaner and more fit, weight training and strength endirance conditioning is really critical to reducing and maintaining a better body composition (less adipose tissue). Bodyweight training, kettlebell or steel club, swimming, rock or rope climbing, or other whole body exercises which condition for strength endurance, as well as some kind of progressive weight training (assisted bodyweight with parallettes or rings, olympic weightlifting, heavy sandbags, et cetera) is crucial to controlling body composition amd keeping fat accumulation at bay.
I. Diet modulates weight.
II. Exercise modulates body composition.
Nutrition quality will improve how fast you lose or gain weight.
Exercise intensity will improve how fast your body composition changes.
Stop focusing on weight (which, unless you are trying to put on lean muscle mass, is a nearly useless metric for health or fitness) and instead measure performance goals, how well you feel, or how your clothes fit. Cardio is useful in the sense of building endurance for long duration activities (although not nearly as much as most people think it is) but if you want to appear leaner and more fit, weight training and strength endirance conditioning is really critical to reducing and maintaining a better body composition (less adipose tissue). Bodyweight training, kettlebell or steel club, swimming, rock or rope climbing, or other whole body exercises which condition for strength endurance, as well as some kind of progressive weight training (assisted bodyweight with parallettes or rings, olympic weightlifting, heavy sandbags, et cetera) is crucial to controlling body composition amd keeping fat accumulation at bay.
There’s about 500 feet of elevation gain on my usual route, about 100 of that in the last mile-and-a-half. There’s another big hill nearby that I could ride, but it would mean a lot more traffic.
That’s always been the tougher part for me, but I’m trying to eat smarter as well. It’s tough to quantify, though, and compiling the statistics on my biking is one of the things that motivates me to keep doing it. (I’m a math geek at heart, I guess.) But if I’m going to exercise, I might as well get the most out of it.
Well, my biking pace increases the more I do it, and the ride does feel easier. But I notice the changes the most during the ride. I slacked off quite a bit last summer and didn’t notice the difference because I wasn’t doing anything strenuous enough to notice, if that makes any sense.
I might look into the rock climbing, although it would stretch my budget a bit these days to pay for a gym membership.
As far as timing goes, a guy I work with swears by doing cardio workouts first thing in the morning, before you eat anything. The theory is that your body is more likely to burn fat on an empty tank.
He claims to have lost 25 lbs this way, and he certainly does look thinner. He also does weight training and is generally pretty aggressive about his exercise routine.
OK, that’s respectable. When you said “bike path” in the OP, I assumed it was the usual urban path, where they usually try for the flattest routes to encourage more riding. Too many people out there don’t like hills, so won’t take challenging routes.
Anyway, attacking steep hills on a bike is pretty much the same as doing intervals in other cardio exercises. Intervals can increase the amount of afterburn you get.
As for the exercise vs diet: I eat the same stuff whether I work out or not. I try to eat somewhat less when I don’t work out, but it’s not a whole lot less. But if I want to lose weght, all I have to do is work out for three or four days in a row and I’ll notice that my belt can be tightened to the next notch. My typical workout is more extreme than the OP’s, though.
I think you might have the effect right, but not the cause. The path I ride is on a former railroad right-of-way, and so the grade was limited to what a train was capable of climbing. I think it’s more hill than flat, but gradual; climbs steadily for 4 miles to gain 200 feet. The worst hill is between the path and home; I’m a little tired by that point, but there’s very little traffic.
Former railroad rights of ways are not hills, or at least I don’t think they are hills. Generally, they don’t have more than about 1.5% grade. That’s pretty much flat in my book.
When I said you should add steep hills to your workout (way up in my first post) I meant significant hills, for you, perhaps 4% or more. And when you do them, stand up and really pump, so that your breathing is so heavy you can’t talk. Do those several times per ride, but only after you’ve gotten warmed up. In other words, you need to about the same as intervals on other forms of cardio. If you really don’t have those kinds of hills, try doing interval-type workouts on whatever kinds of hills you do have.
Anyway, this will raise your metabolic rate for hours after your workout ends (it’s called afterburn) and that’s how you lose weight by working out.
You’ve gotten some great advice and great links in this thread and really 2 hours of a pretty decent pace of cycling several days a week? Pretty dang impressive!
Yes the fine tune is, assuming good nutrition choices of moderate amounts, a greater focus on fitness and possibly body composition metrics than on the scale and following Stranger’s other guidance too.
Fitness metrics will likely be improved most by, as also suggested, adding in some interval training (hills, sprints, whatever).
It’s pretty much flat, but it’s enough that I notice. I try for 14-15 mph on the way out; I try to settle in to a pace that I can maintain for the whole climb, rather than overdo it at the start and conk out at the end. That same stretch on the way back I’ll do 18-20.
About 2 miles from home it starts stepping up, gain about 120 feet in five short climbs, about 5%-10% grades. Maybe I’ve been doing interval training without even knowing it.
I run an app on my phone that tracks route, elevation, speed over different segments, power output, and a few other things. I’m tempted to link to it, but it has my real name and approximately where I live.
It’s been very interesting and informative, if maybe a bit disheartening. I like to eat. I’m trying to be a little bit smarter about it since reading this thread. I definitely noticed some health benefits from riding, but I’d like to look a little better, too. Too soon to tell if it’s working.
There was a lot of good advice in this thread, so I thought I’d come back for a bit of an update. As much as I’d like to exercise and still pig out, the links in this thread were very persuasive. So I made a few changes to my diet; cut out most snacks and sweets, drink water with meals (except dinner), and have been trying to cut down my portion sizes (especially at dinner). It’s tough to change lifelong habits, but I think I’m doing okay so far.
As of today, I’ve lost 25 pounds.
I was even a bit worried I might be losing weight too fast (I know I’ll get a huge outpouring of sympathy for that), but it’s tapered off a bit the last couple weeks. And that’s not the only metric I’m following. I’m trying to get out on my bike every other day (done a bit more than 900 miles this summer, so far), my ride times are decreasing (so I’d say my overall fitness is improving), and definitely fitting into my clothes better than a few months ago.
