5 Reasons Why Cycling Boosts Weight Loss (You should try it)

Whether you’re sweating it out at the gym or lifting heavy weights at home, you’re bound to strain your joints in some way or the other. Fortunately, bicycling is a non-impact exercise, which means there’s no jarring on your joints.

1. It Produces More Ways to Burn Fat

In order to burn fat, you need the fatty acids to shuttle from your body’s storage into your working muscles. That is enhanced by the endurance training you do on a bicycle, as the levels of fatty-acid-binding proteins and fat-carrying enzymes increase. The idea is to use more oxygen to burn more fat, and that can be done only when you get fitter.

2. It Strengthens Your Body’s Biggest Muscles

In order to increase your fat-burning ability, you need to build lean muscle tissue in your lower body, especially in your legs and glutes. Cycling does exactly the same—it uses all the biggest muscles in your body—your quads, hamstrings, hip muscles, and glutes.

3. It Won’t Wear Your Joints Out

Whether you’re sweating it out at the gym or lifting heavy weights at home, you’re bound to strain your joints in some way or the other. Fortunately, bicycling is a non-impact exercise, which means there’s no jarring on your joints. Even if you are overweight, you will do good to your body by biking your way to weight loss.

4. It Trains Your Muscles to Burn More Fat

Cycling builds hundreds of thousands of capillaries in your legs, which means you can deliver more oxygen-rich blood to your working muscles. When the mitochondria (the fat-burning furnaces in muscle cells) get bigger, they use the raised influx of oxygen to burn more fat and produce more energy.

5. It Increases Your Daily Calorie Burn

Here’s the final good news: cycling also increases your daily calorie burn while you’re out there turning the pedals. Even at a recreational pace of 13 to 15 miles per hour, you burn 500 to 600 calories in one hour. If you ride just an hour every day, you can burn up to 4000 calories per weak. If you are not convinced, here’s a small example: an hour of walking burns just 150 to 250 calories, while jogging only burns between 350 and 450 calories.

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