30-40 mins of stationary bike every day

To gain weight? Very little.

The 1600 cals per day may or may not help you gain weight, but the stationary bike riding won't do much.

Sounds more like a way to lose weight...

How much it helps with weight loss depends how much energy you put into the bike. It's possible to measure that precisely (bikes are a special case that allow for this) but it's expensive and probably makes more sense to let the scale answer.

If you're enjoying it, keep doing it! It's definitely helping with weight, it's also doing other things for you like improving your fitness, strengthening your legs, improving heart and lung function, hopefully giving you more confidence in your body, and making you a cyclist, the rest of us accept you as one of us now.

It depends on how fast you are cycling and what the resistance is set at. For me, 30 minutes on the bike supposedly burns about 150 calories if I do 11-12 miles. When my husband does 30 minutes on the bike he only goes about 5 miles so burns a lot fewer calories.

Retroguy2000 wrote: »

spiriteagle99 wrote: »

It depends on how fast you are cycling and what the resistance is set at. For me, 30 minutes on the bike supposedly burns about 150 calories if I do 11-12 miles. When my husband does 30 minutes on the bike he only goes about 5 miles so burns a lot fewer calories.

Those numbers seem off.

Google searches (and my own stationary bike) put 30 minutes of moderate pace at 260+ calories, and vigorous pace at 390 calories. Probably higher than that if you're heavier.

Also, if your machine says you're doing 24mph for 30 minutes that seems a bit high to me, unless you're a very strong cyclist. Either way, that's a lot more than 150 calories.

https://www.dailycaloriescalculator.com/stationary-bike-calories-burned-calculator

Your weight for a non-weight bearing exercise is only relevant for gross calorie burns.
Net calories (which you want for calorie estimates on here) are all about the power you put into the pedals and not a person's weight.

150 calories is entirely possibe for someone either not a strong cyclist or not trying hard (about 85watts).

And no-one is doing any speed or distance on a stationary bike as they don't move, the mph number is purely a construct that bears little relation to real speed outdoors and a highly variable one across different machines that shouldn't be used for comparisons.

Moderate and vigorous effort levels are personal and not universal. My vigorous is a pro cyclist's easy, my maximal effort for an hour would be multi hour cruising pace for a pro.

I use the MFP app to add saved/calculated workouts on days I do them and it automatically recalibrates the daily calorie and macro targets. There's a fair amount of individual human variation, but as a general principle over time (e.g. some months) endurance cardio adapts the body to lean out both body fat and muscle mass ("weight", a term I hate) and efficiently slow down the calorie burning resting metabolic rate, while high intensity / resistance workouts build muscle and increase the resting metabolic rate accordingly - ironically cardio may have the effect of requiring more and more of it over time, to achieve the same results. Personally 10lbs of muscle feels good on me where 10lbs of fat does not, and so try to steer that course of action. Bikes can be very versatile for both modalities and many calculate the calories themselves: 40 minutes of light cruising is not the same as hard hill workouts for either long term metabolic adaptation or daily fat burn.

@sijomial Surely it takes more calories for a heavier person to cycle at the same speed as a lighter person? It takes more energy to move more mass at the same speed.

At the site I linked before, it says a 200lb person doing 30 minutes at moderate watts is 324 calories, and a 140 pound person is 227 calories. A difference in BMR between the lighter and heavier person does not account for that difference. That BMR difference would only be about 10 calories?

@spiriteagle99 MFP tells me 359 calories for 30 mins (male, over 200 pounds). My bike says about 325, for what I assume is a moderate pace. The site I linked suggests I'd be close to 300, guessing at my watts, I'm sure I'm not at the lowest end on their table. The first Google links for the question of 30 mins stationary bike calories says 260. I'm just offering more data here for other readers, who could otherwise leave here thinking it's not a good option for burning calories.

@sijomial The table at the site linked earlier is for a stationary bike, not road bike. You're correct that on the road, gravity and air resistance would be huge factors for energy use, but indoors the basic truth still applies that moving more mass to work the pedals requires more energy.

Here's an article from Harvard Medical School, showing an 84 calories difference in 30 mins of stationary bike in people up to 60 pounds apart. That 84 calories is not from the BMR difference. The BMR difference between a 125 and 185 pound person sitting idle for 30 minutes would be about 10 calories.

Isn't the net calories the difference between BMR at rest for 30 minutes vs gross calories for the 30 mins of exercise? In this Harvard study then, about 10 of the 84 calories difference would be from BMR, the rest would be from the exercise itself.

https://www.health.harvard.edu/diet-and-weight-loss/calories-burned-in-30-minutes-for-people-of-three-different-weights

NorthCascades wrote: »

The pedals weigh the same thing no matter what the rider weighs. They call it a stationary bike because it doesn't move. You're literally sitting down, the bike is bearing your weight for you.

What is the point of your post?

a) Everybody's legs do not weigh the same. That's the mass being moved.
b) Are the links I provided completely wrong?

From the Harvard link:

Reading/sitting 30 mins: 34 calories (125 pounds), 47 calories (185 pounds)

Stationary bike 30 mins: 210 calories (125 pounds), 294 calories (185 pounds)

Retroguy2000 wrote: »

@sijomial The table at the site linked earlier is for a stationary bike, not road bike. You're correct that on the road, gravity and air resistance would be huge factors for energy use, but indoors the basic truth still applies that moving more mass to work the pedals requires more energy.

Here's an article from Harvard Medical School, showing an 84 calories difference in 30 mins of stationary bike in people up to 60 pounds apart. That 84 calories is not from the BMR difference. The BMR difference between a 125 and 185 pound person sitting idle for 30 minutes would be about 10 calories.

Isn't the net calories the difference between BMR at rest for 30 minutes vs gross calories for the 30 mins of exercise? In this Harvard study then, about 10 of the 84 calories difference would be from BMR, the rest would be from the exercise itself.

https://www.health.harvard.edu/diet-and-weight-loss/calories-burned-in-30-minutes-for-people-of-three-different-weights

@Retroguy2000

But the heavier person isn't moving all that mass! They are weight bearing through their backside.
The only part moving is their legs, is there a teeny, tiny difference between spinning heavier legs (and circular motions are very efficient) and spinning lighter legs? Yes, but that's focussing on the 1% and not the 99%.

Could you make a case that in a particular demographic (same gender, age, fitness level...) that heavier people may tend to have higher fitness capabilities (e.g. their "moderate effort" might be producing more power than their lighter same demographic)? Sure, to a very variable degree.
Extend that across populations including fat and unfit people and that correlation is stretched well beyond breaking point.

There exist very good ways to get calorie counts cycling (indoors and out) but there also exist extremely generalised methods which have massive ranges of inaccuracy.

Beware Harvard publish all sorts of stuff on their site - that doesn't make it their study or have merit. More content = more clicks = more revenue.
Three sources have been cobbled together into one article and I'm not going to drill down to find which bit is the cycling bit or their methodology.

Just like the METS tables used by MyFitnessPal are a very generalised average from a sample and often hidiously inaccurate on a personal level.

Sorry you have been misled by a pretty useless article (or more accurately useless in parts).

sijomial wrote: »

Beware Harvard publish all sorts of stuff on their site - that doesn't make it their study or have merit. More content = more clicks = more revenue.
Three sources have been cobbled together into one article and I'm not going to drill down to find which bit is the cycling bit or their methodology.

Sorry you have been misled by a pretty useless article (or more accurately useless in parts).

I see. So the data at both articles I posted is wrong, because you say it is, including the parts you mention above which you haven't double checked, but you know it's wrong anyway, and your source is... yourself saying so. Forgive me, I need a bit more than that.

Retroguy2000 wrote: »

sijomial wrote: »

Beware Harvard publish all sorts of stuff on their site - that doesn't make it their study or have merit. More content = more clicks = more revenue.
Three sources have been cobbled together into one article and I'm not going to drill down to find which bit is the cycling bit or their methodology.

Sorry you have been misled by a pretty useless article (or more accurately useless in parts).

I see. So the data at both articles I posted is wrong, because you say it is, including the parts you mention above which you haven't double checked, but you know it's wrong anyway, and your source is... yourself saying so. Forgive me, I need a bit more than that.

Both articles are wrong because it's dumb to base the ability to produce power on a person's weight during a non-weight bearing activity.
You have no answers to the multiple examples I've given which disprove whatever unstated theory is behind those websites. Want another personal example from this 40,000 mile cyclist?
Since winter I've dropped 8lbs and due to fitness improvements seen a tested over 5% increase in sustained power output and resulting calorie burns. That is very normal for a huge range of cyclists from recreational to professional transitioning from the off season back to peak fitness and best weight.

Cycling is unusual in that there is widely available technology to actually measure the person's power output and hopefully you can realise the link between power and energy.
The resulting data is freely available - this took me seconds to find on https://www.cyclinganalytics.com/blog/2018/06/how-does-your-cycling-power-output-compare



Think of the x5 spread of calorie burns from people at the same weight from a lowly 1w per kg through to an exceptional 5w per kg. That's not exactly useful for estimating based on bodyweight is it?