Aren't Bicycles Great.

Retrogamer

I'm not long back from some mountain biking over the Friday and Saturday at Glentress. Awesome fun. Just wish i was a lot lighter and a bit fitter as trying to pop off all the jumps sapped all my stamina and stregth.

Good fun though, even with typical Scottish weather.

simsi

I'm totally into long distance biking. for now I'm trying to do my routes by bike and not by public transport and some 1 day bike tours with 90 km ...

Tamsak

Stopped driving to work about 6 months ago, cycling is so much better. Sometimes faster with modern traffic.

brat

Back to it after the school hols. a sunny 48 miler to get the legs working again. Got 6lbs of holiday excess baggage still to shift!

Hope to get out to the tour at some point this week work permitting. Thursday at Hartside's looking good!

The_Groat_Counter

Aren't Bicycles Great.

:j

Yes, they are. Life affirming to the max!

Retrogamer

For the fitter / more experienced cyclists here what would you say gives you a better work out?

A long distance cycle on relatively flat ground, keeping a reasonable speed.
Or a cycle around half the distance but takes the same amount of time and is a mix of short sprints and has a lot of hills. Would include a few rest breaks as well.

I'm only out cycling once a week the now roughly and still have a lot of weight to lose but usually have limited time to do my cycling on my days off.

daivid

I've never cycled to lose weight but do cycle to stay fit for other sport (hockey). For me what translates to the best fitness on the pitch is Tabata training - short interval sprinting.

I'll cycle about 10 miles at a moderate pace to ensure I'm warmed up then do 20 second sprints followed by 10s 3/4 pace to recover. I'll aim for 4 or 5 reps if I've not done much for a while, building up to 7 or 8 by increasing by a rep every other ride or so. Then its a 5 mile ride home to cool down followed by stretches. To make sure I don't slack off during the recovery sections all this is done on a long moderate hill of somewhere between 1 in 10 and 1 in 20. The whole ride takes under an hour and for fitness I find it more effective than a much longer steady ride.

I've no idea if this would specifically help with weight loss but isn't the main thing for that regulating ones diet, the exercise is just the cherry on the cake?

daivid

It's very rare for me to have a camera with me when I cycle but as Sunday was an exception I can share a cycling photo at last:



I hope you all had/have the chance to catch some of the Tour of Britain, it was great to see a decent turn out of spectators:

Johnmcl7

Retrogamer wrote: »

For the fitter / more experienced cyclists here what would you say gives you a better work out?

A long distance cycle on relatively flat ground, keeping a reasonable speed.
Or a cycle around half the distance but takes the same amount of time and is a mix of short sprints and has a lot of hills. Would include a few rest breaks as well.

I'm only out cycling once a week the now roughly and still have a lot of weight to lose but usually have limited time to do my cycling on my days off.

If you're wanting to maxmise your general cycling I'd say a long flat route where you can push a high average speed mixed in with some short, full power sprints. The reason I say flat is that I find it's easier to keep a decent cadence and speed while on hills you can ease off quite a bit just trying to get up the hill.

I was curious how my calorie consumption compared between my mountain bike rides and road bike rides, at one point I was usually out for around 1.5 to 2 hours at the start of the week on the road bike then an MTB ride for a similar duration later in the week. My cycle computer estimated the calorie consumption for the road bike at around double that of the MTB which I thought was an error as it wasn't accounting for the much heavier MTB and huge rolling resistance from the tyres.

However when I gave it more thought I reckoned the cycle computer probably isn't far wrong, while the MTB is harder going at times at others I'm putting much less effort into it while it's rolling through technical sections or belting downhill. Comparatively on the mostly flat road bike rides I was pushing hard most of the time and absolutely killing myself on the sprints. At the end of a road bike ride I felt shattered, at the end of the MTB rides I felt fine (well aside from injuries )

All that said I still feel it's important to do what you enjoy, although I think the road cycling is probably better for my overall fitness it's mostly mountain biking I do simply because I enjoy it more.

John

brat

Johnmcl7 wrote: »

ll that said I still feel it's important to do what you enjoy, although I think the road cycling is probably better for my overall fitness it's mostly mountain biking I do simply because I enjoy it more.

John

That's the crux of it for me. I have road cycling friends who spend most of their time on the flat, taking on the occasional sprint (usually a strava segment :cool:) to mix it up a bit. I prefer to stick a few hills in and use them as my heart rate raiser.

For calorie consumption to lose weight I think it's important to do what you enjoy most so that you will spend more time on the bike. You can use up to 8,000 calories in a 10 hour weekly cycling plan (depending on bodyweight and effort), which is about 2.5lbs in weight per week. If you do that, you could look at a reasonable weight loss programme of about 6lbs per month while still eating relatively normally.

I use the MyFitnessPal app which allows me to record everything I eat and the calories I expend. It automatically links into your ride data and takes that into account. I usually use it so that I eat enough and not lose weight.
Recording everything you eat puts you in much greater control over your calorie consumption too. I find I eat less junk and snack less, for the daft reason that I find it harder to record on the app.