Cycling to Walking

arushol78

Is there any accepted methodology, App, or practice that equates miles cycled to steps walked? Fr. Ex., what is a ballpark equivalent number of miles cycled (at a moderate level) to walking 10K steps/day?

sijomial

Completely different exercises.
One is weight bearing and one is not, different energy efficiency ratios too.

What bike you use and over what terrain also makes a huge difference, distance only reflects part of the effort required.

jjpptt2

Are you just looking to convert miles biked to steps walked for numerical purposes, or are you looking for calorie burn equivalents? If the latter, then as said above... completely different exercises. If you're just looking to convert biked miles to steps taken as a measure of activity, then you can probably ballpark it. For me, 5 miles walked is roughly 10k steps. Very roughly. So 10 miles ridden would be about 20k steps. For me -- your numbers could be very different depending on stride length and such.

mjbnj0001

Keeping in mind the distinctions that both @sijomial and @jjpptt2 have rightly pointed out, there is an approach to tie activities together at an underlying "metabolic equivalent" level of effort ("MET"). You'd have to be comfortable with a little number crunching to align your two activities, as the answers may not be straightforwardly obvious or available in a table, and keep in mind this method has limitations as well, as it doesn't distinguish between individual people, performance and such, since not everyone doing everything has been measured to get a calibration. But it is something.

NorthCascades

This is very easy.

One mile on a bike = 0 steps.

One mile walking = 0 crank and wheel revolutions on the bike.

One mile swimming = 0 bench presses.

That's the practice and ballpark equivalent. If you don't like them, you can make up whatever numbers you like. 😎

cwolfman13

arushol78 wrote: »

Is there any accepted methodology, App, or practice that equates miles cycled to steps walked? Fr. Ex., what is a ballpark equivalent number of miles cycled (at a moderate level) to walking 10K steps/day?

I see what you're getting at here, as I had some of the same thoughts long ago when I really got heavy into cycling. There really isn't any meaningful crossover. Personally, this is actually one of my pet peeves where fitness trackers and such are concerned...people getting so wrapped up in steps that they get lost in the weeds and can't see the forest through the trees.

The whole notion of 10K steps is fairly arbitrary...it actually comes from the name of one of the first pedometers put into everyday use in the 70s in Japan and is simply meant to bring awareness to activity or lack thereof...but when your primary activities aren't step based, that metric kind of goes out the window. I used to do a bit of hand wringing over this because "steps" were such a point of conversation at work in the breakroom or whatever and I somehow felt I was falling short of all of these people talking about 10K or 15K steps...

Ultimately, it's all about just being active. Did it really matter if I was getting 10K steps or not? Not really...at the time I was riding 20-30 miles five to six days per week and in the weight room 3x per week and doing other random stuff on top of that...suffice it to say I was very active and I didn't really need a certain number of steps to validate that. I stopped trying to make any kind of direct comparison...doing so didn't really provide me any kind of statistically meaningful data and it felt more and more like a fools errand to somehow try to validate my very active lifestyle in the context of steps.

heybales

NorthCascades wrote: »

This is very easy.

One mile on a bike = 0 steps.

One mile walking = 0 crank and wheel revolutions on the bike.

One mile swimming = 0 bench presses.

That's the practice and ballpark equivalent. If you don't like them, you can make up whatever numbers you like. 😎

What are cliff hangs equal to?

yirara

heybales wrote: »

NorthCascades wrote: »

This is very easy.

One mile on a bike = 0 steps.

One mile walking = 0 crank and wheel revolutions on the bike.

One mile swimming = 0 bench presses.

That's the practice and ballpark equivalent. If you don't like them, you can make up whatever numbers you like. 😎

What are cliff hangs equal to?

NorthCascades

heybales wrote: »

NorthCascades wrote: »

This is very easy.

One mile on a bike = 0 steps.

One mile walking = 0 crank and wheel revolutions on the bike.

One mile swimming = 0 bench presses.

That's the practice and ballpark equivalent. If you don't like them, you can make up whatever numbers you like. 😎

What are cliff hangs equal to?

Wool.

LtHammerhead

There some online calculators that will convert miles cycled to steps. My company did a step contest and told us we could cycle and convert.

girlwithcurls2

LtHammerhead wrote: »

There some online calculators that will convert miles cycled to steps. My company did a step contest and told us we could cycle and convert.

This. I doubt OP is trying to convert the energy expenditure, but rather get credit for physical activity that doesn't involve actual steps.
OP, there are online conversion charts. I have no idea how accurate they are, but for purposes of an office step challenge, they're probably fine

lorrpb

I think in contests and virtual step events etc they count 3 miles biking for 1 mi walking. I have no idea the basis for it.
If you’re tracking for personal activity monitoring you could do it in terms of time spent on the activity.