Exercise Bikes - Effective or Not?

goofy6472

Has anyone experienced any great weight loss with only using an exercise bike as their workout machine of choice?

AnnPT77

If you ask me, exercise is not the key to weight loss. Calorie balance is the key to weight loss. Eat more calories than we burn, we gain weight. Eat fewer calories than we burn, we lose weight. Balance right in the middle, stay the same weight.

Don't get me wrong: I'm not saying calories are the only relevant thing when it comes to the daily "how to". There's more to it, in a practical sense. But I AM saying calories are the essential foundation.

So what about exercise? It burns a few more calories, so we can eat a bit more while losing weight at the same sensible, moderate pace. That's about it, on the weight loss side. Yup, exercise is great for health and for improvements in daily life functioning, too. But it's not the absolute key to weight loss.

Why do I say this? At a point in my life, I gradually increased exercise until I was working out pretty hard 6 days most weeks. I was even doing a formal training plan for a while, competing as an athlete for a few years, and not always unsuccessfully competing in age-group terms. But I stayed obese for a dozen years that way.

Later, I got my eating under better control. It was easier than I thought, honestly. In under a year, I lost weight, class 1 obese to a healthy weight, have stayed there for nearly 10 years since. I do the same exercise. I eat the same range of foods. What changed? Portion sizes, proportions on the plate, frequencies of some calorie-dense things.

The average person burns around 5% of their total calorie burn in the form of intentional exercise. In really heavy exercisers, it can be up to 10-15%, though that's unusual. More than that is pretty hard to fit into a normal life with a job, maybe a family, social life, home chores, non-exercise hobbies and that sort of thing.

I'm a retired person, reasonably heavy exerciser. Last time I did the arithmetic, exercise accounted for about 13% of the calories I burn. That's underwhelming. Moreover, the actual extra daily calories are around one open-face peanut butter sandwich on hearty whole grain bread. If it's treat foods, the amount is even worse: One medium McDonald's fries. Less than many Starbucks sweet coffee drinks. A little more than one regular-sized Snickers bar. Not all of those, just one.

I can not-eat any of those foods in way, way less time than it takes me to burn the equivalent calories via exercise. 😆

One of the things I do in Winter is stationary biking. I admit I don't go super hard at it: I reserve intensity for my main workouts, rowing. An hour of cycling at 100W burns about 360 calories. That's not a lot. It's a good workout, worth doing. But the calories? Meh.

Focus on the eating side of the equation, that would be my advice. Sure, do some exercise. Pick one you think is fun, or at minimum tolerable and practical. Exercise we like so do routinely is 100% more beneficial for burning calories or for fitness improvement than some theoretically perfect thing we hate, so procrastinate, skip at the slightest excuse, and eventually give up entirely. Moreover, overdoing any exercise triggers fatigue, so we drag through the rest of the day(s), rest more, move less, burning fewer calories in daily life . . . effectively wiping out some of the calorie benefit of exercise. Overdoing duration, frequency or intensity is counter-productive.

Exercise is over-rated for weight loss. It's worth doing for other reasons. If you think stationary biking is fun, practical, convenient, do it. If it's none of those things, do something else. Any extra movement burns calories.

Getting to a healthy weight was a huge quality of life improvement for me, more than worth the effort it took to accomplish. I'm cheering for you to succeed at it. Best wishes!

yirara

Everything above! if you sit on a bike and watch tv while pedaling a bit you won't burn a lot of calories. Cycling on a stationary bike is one of those things where your weight doesn't increase calories by a lot because you don't have to overcome your own weight to move. Also, every kind of exercise probably burns a lot less calories than you'd think. I might not be very big and heavy, but a 5km run for me burns about 220kcal or so. If I wanted to lose 2lbs I'd need to do this every day for 15 days and eat at maintenance, hence not eat more when the running makes me hungry.