Enjoy The Ride With Your
Bike Exercise Fitness Workout
Whether you use a bicycle or exercise bike machine, cycle for fun and fitness. Bike exercise fitness is a great way to workout using your aerobic body systems (cardio), helping you to lose weight and get fitter.
Combined with
strength training,
you have the perfect combination of different workout systems to greatly improve your body image, fitness and health.
Personally, I think if you are always pushed for time and struggle to fit exercise into your life, then cycling is your best option for fitness.
If your journey to work is anything under 6 miles, you could cycle there and back 2-3 out of 5 days. The days you don't cycle, you can do a strength workout as soon as you get home, with the set of dumbbells you wisely invested in!
Cycling on the road doesn't appeal to you? Well you could invest in a good (price and quality) exercise bike machine.
As soon as you get back from work, you can do a bike exercise fitness workout. Let the stress of work and daily life out on the bike, in the comfort of your home, then carry on with the rest of your evening.
Advantages Of Cycling
The key to my cycling, and part of the reason why I love bike exercise fitness, is that it's easy on my knees. Similar to
swimming,
it's a low impact activity. If you have any problems with your joints, you'll be safe on a bike.
Exercise bike machines are very easy to use. The seat height should be adjusted so that when you push the pedal down to its lowest point, you still have a slight bend in your knee. Your feet should be strapped in the pedals, and you are basically ready to go.
Getting going on a bicycle isn't much harder, safety precautions should always come first i.e. helmet and reflectors. Then you can get going and enjoy the outdoor ride and everything that comes with it.
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Avoid Injury SideNote
If you are recovering from a lower limb injury, then I would advise first using the machine. This will help strengthen your muscles to a stable and safe starting point on the bicycle and re-train them to the movement of riding a bike.
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The aerobic nature and the ease of controlling each workout (i.e. for speed (strength), endurance or health), make cycling a great cardio workout. Yes this will help you lose weight, and more importantly for some, it will help keep your heart healthy.
Along with this, bike exercise fitness also improves coordination. Especially useful as you get older, where a natural loss of balance can lead to trips and falls (and fractures!). Cycling is truly a life long activity.
Bike Exercise Fitness Workout
Cycling is an activity that doesn't need as much structure as some other aerobic exercises. By this I mean that you just need to start it and get into the routine of cycling.
Start with a 10 minute ride and plan a circular route back home, best to stay close to home at first. If you have to go round twice to complete the 10 minutes that's fine. You'll start to get an idea of linking your cycling time to distance.
Always start and end your bike exercise fitness workout in a low gear (i.e. low resistance easy pedalling), this will be your warm up and cool down.
As you get more advanced and want to finish with a sprint, then allow time for 2 minutes of relaxed cycling after the sprint. I recommend to stretch after a strenuous ride too, as part of your
cool down.
Back to the workout plan, you've done at least 3 days per week of 10 minute rides, for 2 weeks. You'll very quickly feel the improvement, 10 minutes starts to feel easy. Note down the distance you covered with each ride, and use this as your base level. (Use an online map to check distances.)
Now you have your base level, you can start to progress. Each week increase the time slightly. So you may increase to 12 minutes one week, then 15 minutes and so on. Write down your distance each time, and try to improve on it with each ride that week.
Once you can ride for 30 minutes, 5 times a week, you are doing enough to stay healthy (if cycling is your only exercise).
From this point, you have several options, depending on your goals:
To stay healthy and lose weight.. if you have started to lose weight then continue progressing your bike exercise fitness until you reach your target weight. Cycling 30-45 minutes 4-5 times a week should be enough to achieve your goals.Endurance.. continue progressing your time, aim to do two 60 minute rides per week, and then include one 120 minute ride per week, as well as the other shorter rides. Keep gradually building your endurance. To mix things up, you could go on a long 40 mile nature trail every month.Sprints.. you can include sprints in your ride no matter what your goal is. In fact, it's a good idea to include 1-2 short sprints if you are cycling for at least 30 minutes. If sprinting is your goal (i.e. increased strength) then keep your workouts shorter in time and improve your speed. So you could include two 10 minute rides per week, where you ride virtually flat out and beat your previous distance. Or set yourself a fixed distance, say 3 miles, and aim to beat your best time.
Off road mountain biking.. not for the faint hearted! It's a great escape and variation to your usual road bike exercise fitness. Go with a group of people to a recognised trail.All of the above..! keep things interesting and vary your bike exercise fitness workout from week to week or even day to day. Once you're in the routine of cycling, you'll want to challenge yourself in different ways.
Final WordYour bike exercise fitness workout will quickly show you a good time and make you fitter. All you need to do is jump "on yer bike" and get going.
Please visit http://www.lcc.org.uk/ for more information on cycling in London. Including cycle route maps and further great advice for cycling fitness in London.
Cycling is one of my favourite activities, make it one of your's too and improve your bike exercise fitness.
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