Health: How Does a Cycle Work-Out Help You?

Using cycling to work out is an effective way to build muscular endurance and cardiovascular stamina, and to burn calories. Because of the limited leg muscle use during cycling, workouts can get monotonous unless you vary your routines. Adding variety to your route, intensity, duration and/or pedaling will help you get the maximum enjoyment and benefit form your cycling workout.

Muscle-Building Workout
Although you won't build as much muscle cycling as you will lifting weights, you can get some resistance work on a bike by lowering your gears and riding hills. The harder it is to pedal, the more muscle stress and thus, muscle building you'll get. On flat terrains, lower your gears and try pedaling fast, using long, powerful strokes to stress your muscles differently. Standing up while pedaling uses more of your glutes and quadriceps to support the added weight on your legs, according to research conducted by the Department of Exercise Science at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and reported in the September 1998 "Journal of Applied Physiology." When riding hills, you'll push yourself up, using more or your calves. Cycle using one leg at a time to increase the muscular effort for each leg during that type of pedaling.

Muscular Endurance Workout
Endurance is your ability to do exercise over a period of time, and cycling lets you work your muscles at a moderately intense level for many minutes, and even hours, without fatigue. This long use of the muscles improves their endurance. The key to an endurance workout is not to ride at maximum effort, so raising your gears, staying away from long, steep hills and riding at a pace that doesn't come close to a sprint are your keys to benefiting from this type of workout.

Aerobic Workout
Cycling at 70 to 80 percent of your maximum heart rate (MHR) for 15 minutes or longer helps you burn calories and improve your cardiovascular endurance, or stamina. To gauge if you are in your aerobic heart rate range, you should break a sweat during an endurance workout but be able to talk during your ride. To be more exact, use a heart rate monitor to track your pace. Calculate your aerobic target heart rate by first subtracting your age from 220 to get your MHR. Then multiply that number by .7 and .8 and stay between those two numbers.

Interval Workout
Sprint training burns more calories per minute than aerobic exercise, but it also tires you out more quickly because it's done in short bursts at close to MHR. Interval training helps train high-twitch muscle fibers and your heart's ability to recover, which has carryover benefits to other sports, where you need to recover to get ready for the next point or play. To create an interval workout, sprint at 80 to 90 percent of your MHR for 30 seconds if you are a beginner, or 90 seconds if you are in better shape, with 90 seconds to two minutes recovery time between each sprint.

Source