Exercise bike

Hermie123451982

Just got an exercise bike for indoors and wanted to know which would be best for fitness and weight loss. Would it be better to do hiit or ssc or a mixture of the both. Also any good apps to use as don't thibk the bike will be that accurate on tracking calories so how do you log your calories burnt?

NorthCascades

Depends on your current level of fitness, and your experience with bikes.

HIIT is massively overhyped, mostly by people who don't actually know what HIIT is. If you don't already have a solid aerobic base you probably shouldn't waste your time on it.

cwolfman13

https://www.nerdfitness.com/blog/cardio-vs-hiit-vs-weights-rebooting-our-research/

sijomial

Remember no-one knows anything about you and your capabilities.....

Highest calorie burn would come from long duration at a high but sustainable effort.
HIIT (genuine HIIT, not fashion label HIIT !) is extremely short duration so small calorie burn per workout. For suitable people HIIT can get them quick short term fitness gains.
If you are unfit then would suggest building a fitness base before tackling high intensity intervals.

An app isn't going to know what power you are producing unless you can link data from it so not much chance of calorie accuracy.
What does your bike measure/estimate in terms of data?
It could be the most accurate calorie estimate you will get outside of a sports science lab or it could be a complete joke. Depends on the exercise bike.

A mixture of steady state and intervals would be as a complete generalisation probably be best for fitness but refer to my first sentence.

DrifterBear

Depends on your goals. I always think a mix of anything is stronger than just one approach. HIIT takes less time, SSC (especially on a bike) takes far more time. For weight loss, HIIT will fit more into a smaller period of time. If you're goal was riding a century then you should spend a lot of time in SSC.

TimothyFish

If time is no object, steady state will blow away HIIT on calorie burn because you can just keep going for as long a you need to for whatever calorie burn you are looking for. For training purposes HIIT can help you achieve your fitness goals at a faster rate. But HIIT isn't something you do every day.

scorpio516

Base building.

If it works with your bike, trainerroad is great. Golden Cheetah is really good, but less user friendly, again if it works