“What Does An Exercise Bike Do For Your Body” is the core of this writing. You don’t need me to tell how important role exercise plays in our life. Exercise brings out good changes in our lives and so does an exercise bike. An exercise bike is a solution for those who don’t feel comfortable exercising around sweaty strangers in a large hall and those who don’t have enough time to pay a visit to the gym in a day.
Exercise bikes have made exercising at home so convenient. You can get high-amount of cardiovascular exercise which is very important for people of all ages. Plus, exercise bikes are also effective in toning muscles.
However, let me walk you through the article where I have demonstrated what exactly an exercise bike does to your body. Let’s go…
How Does an Exercise Bike Effects On Our Body?
There are a bunch of things that can be achieved by an exercise bike, toned muscle, strengthened bones, effective cardio and many more. You are going to find out everything right down below.
Offers Amazing Cardio Exercise:
As I said earlier, cardiovascular exercise is highly important for people of all ages. You can do anything from running to jumping, everything will be counted as cardiovascular exercise. People who have 9 to 5 jobs, most of the time they don’t feel like going out of the home again after coming from the job.
And exercise bikes cut off this excuse completely, you don’t have to go out in order to complete your daily exercise goals, just sit on the exercise bike and start pedaling.
Performing cardiovascular exercise will allow your lungs to inhale more oxygen and your heart will also beat faster. Sometime you will feel that you are out of breath but that is temporary, what permanent is, you will have a healthy heart.
Strength Training:
Exercising on a bike mostly targets the lower body muscle and that’s obvious since in exercise bikes there is less muscle movement on the upper body. And in exercise bikes, you can increase or decrease the intensity by increasing or decreasing the resistance level.
The more resistance there is, the more intensity you will get and therefore, more strengthened your muscles will be. Exercising in higher intensity also burns more fat, since high intensity requires more energy.
Below I have demonstrated which muscles exactly does exercise bikes target.
Upper Legs and Glutes:
When riding an exercise bike muscles we work the most are the hamstrings and quadriceps. Hamstring muscles come into play when we pull the pedal upward to push it downward. And we use quadriceps when pedaling downward.
If you have a spinning bike that mimics a road bike, then by riding that you will also work your glutes. Upright and recumbent exercise bikes also help in toning glutes. Our glute muscles engage most when we ride leaning forward but that also increases the risk of knee injuries.
Most newbie makes this mistake, in order to engage glute muscles at their highest, they ride leaning too forward and that is what causes the injury. If you exercise by leaning slightly forward, you will be good.
Lower Legs:
When out upper leg muscles get activated during pedaling, our lower leg muscles also get involved highly. With each push and pull stroke, we work out calf muscles. And when we point the toe down while pedaling, the calves get more involved.
Most newbie exercise bikers keep their feet flat when pushing or pulling the pedal. Try to bend your feet pointing the toe down, that would be much better. If you are exercising wearing exercise shoes, then it would be easier for you. But you can do that with normal athletic shoes too.
Another best way to highly involve the calves is, pedaling in standing position. When you do, make sure you don’t do it for longer periods.
Core Muscles:
If the right body posture is maintained while exercising on the bike, we also work our back and abs. But if our body posture is wrong, let our abs slouch during exercising, we are not going to see any result. The right posture is to keep the abs tight and the back straight.
People who exercise on the spinning bike they can involve their back deeply just by pedaling leaning forward. And people those have a recumbent bike, the reclined position will help them to involve the abs deeply.
Upper Body:
Our upper body muscles such as hand, arm, etc. don’t get that much involved in recumbent or upright bikes. But when it comes down to spinning bike, we do work our upper muscles too. In the spinning bike, we hold out entire upper body weight by holding the handlebar and that’s exactly where out muscle gets targeted.
It tones the upper back, shoulders, arms. For people who are using recumbent or upright bikes, in order to get the upper body, exercise you can do curls while you pedal. You can do overhead raises but make sure you pick a very lightweight to avoid any kind of unexpected injuries. And also ensure that you are exercising sitting on the tight posture.
Weight Loss:
And here comes the major one. Most people think that exercise bikes are not effective for weight loss. Before I answer this, let me clear something, for whom exercise bikes are? People who don’t get enough time to go to the gym or older members of our family who can’t perform high-intensity exercises.
Obviously, there are a hell lot of exercises that will help you to weight faster but the reason you have bought an exercise bike is you are unable to do those exercises whether because of the time or age issue.
So from that point of view, there is no better alternative than exercise bikes. According to several pieces of research 135-pound, women can burn 500 calories by cycling in a moderate intensity for an hour.
And not only that, as you have seen earlier, with the calorie burn, exercise bikes also strengthen our core, tones our muscles, offers great cardiovascular exercise.
Another thing I would like to mention, treadmills are a better option than the exercise bikes. A treadmill will tone your entire body muscles since running involves all our body muscles. But for aged people, treadmills are not a good option.
Running on treadmills put a lot of pressure on our body joints which aged people won’t be able to tolerate.
Enhances Joint Mobility:
Exercising on bikes enhances the motion range of our joints such as ankles, knees, hip joints, etc. All these joints get affected when we ride an exercise bike. All the joints also become stronger.
Doctors recommend patients who just had surgery on bones or joints to slowly exercise on the exercise bike. This will eliminate the numbness (if there is) and will strengthen the bone again.
Enhances Knee Alignment:
Do you know cycling, climbing is always hard on knee joints? Exercising on the bike regularly in the right posture will keep your knee well-aligned. And your bike setting plays a great role here.
For optimum output, you must adjust your exercise bike in the right way. Set saddle height according to the handlebar. Both heights should be the same. Or you can set the handle height according to your saddle height, but what would be ideal saddle height for you?
Time to find that out. Stand beside the exercise bike and adjust the saddle height to your hip. Means your hip and saddle should be leveled and that is the perfect height for you. And once you have got the perfect saddle height, now adjust the handlebar height according to it.
Increases Stamina:
When for the first time you start pedaling an exercise bike, you will notice that you are not being able to keep the consistency for a longer period and that is because of low stamina level though that completely fine.
And after a month of continuous exercise at moderate intensity, you will see that you are being able to exercise for a longer period of time and that’s happening because with time your stamina level has increased.
The more resistance you add to your exercise, the higher the stamina level you will get. At the very beginning, you might feel like you are out of breath but that’s okay. Rest for a minute and then start again. Once you see the improvement, you will automatically continue it.
Refreshment:
Any exercise will give you a good refreshment. And it feels really good when you can exercise comfortably in your home, no sweaty strangers around, no bad smells, no noise, no restrictions. These are the things that will motivate you to exercise daily and that would result in a healthy life.
To Learn More About The Benefits of Using Exercise Bike:
Final Words:
That’s all for now. These are what an exercise bike do for your body and hope this article helped you. If you have enough time, then I would suggest you go to the gym and do weight training, that will be more effective.
I am saying again, exercise bikes are only for old people and for those who don’t have enough time to exercise in the gym. However, may you have a healthy life ahead and see you in the next article.
