If you’re unhappy with your belly, cycling is an effective way to blast fat and make you feel more toned, while also reducing stress hormones and many other benefits. We’re here to help you make working out more exciting and effective. Grab your bike and head outdoors to lose belly fat and improve your fitness levels at the same time.
Does biking burn belly fat? To have answers to your questions, let’s jump into the detailed topic.
Does Cycling Burn Belly Fat?
Cycling is great for fat loss, but the key is to burn more calories than you consume. Although you can achieve this without any exercise (by limiting your daily calorie intake), exercise (especially aerobic exercise) can be an effective way to reduce your body fat and core strength. Due to the necessary positioning during cycling, the main focus is on your quads and glutes. However, below are some effective ways to strengthen your core muscles and lose belly fat.
Add Internal Training
The more vigorous your workout, the more calories you’ll burn. High-intensity interval training (HIIT) is a workout method where you push hard for a short amount of time and then relax for a specific time and repeat the exercise. Although you get a break in-between sets, this type of training requires you going flat out and then having little time to recover before doing it over again.
The major benefit of HIIT is that you’ll burn more calories in a short amount of time compared to sticking at the same pace. It’s also an effective way to improve your fitness as you’ll be out of breath quickly and have to push hard to keep going. Furthermore, HIIT boosts your metabolism for the next 12 hours, meaning that you’ll continue with a calorie burn and fat loss phase even after your workout.
Your goal should be to spend 80 percent of your time riding at a low intensity and the remaining 20 percent at a moderate to hard intensity.
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Eat Right
No matter how much aerobic exercise you do, your diet is a huge contributing factor in your weight. Ensure that you’re eating a balanced diet and don’t be too consumed at the idea of drastically reducing your calorie intake; you can still eat and lose weight. In fact, if you’re not fueling yourself correctly or enough, this will massively affect your training and result in less energy and a poorer performance. In this case, your body could actually start dropping muscle mass rather than fat.
Make sure that you have a healthy diet packed with plenty of vitamins and minerals to nourish your body so you can work harder when cycling and reduce your belly fat.
How Does Cycling Help You Lose Weight and Reduce Belly Fat?
Let’s take a look at how cycling regularly can effectively burn belly fat and help you to lose weight.
Increases Your Heart Rate
Cycling is anything but an easy activity, and the more effort you put into it, the more benefits you’ll receive. In order to burn belly fat, consider burning fat from all over your body, because you can’t just target one specific spot. One way to do this is to engage in body weight exercises that help you reach a maximum heart rate, so you can burn fat quicker.
Cycling helps to raise your heart rate and has the capacity to burn a significant amount of calories. Engaging in regular cycling means that you burn more calories, so you can lose fat that’s stored in your body fat, including around the belly.
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Blasts Through Calories Quickly
Another tremendous way cycling can help lose belly fat is by burning calories quicker than some other activities. In fact, cycling burns around 300 calories per hour (depending on factors including your weight, metabolism, and amount of effort you put in, etc.). The good news is that the more effort you put into the sport, the more calories you’ll burn and more belly fat you’ll lose. Ensure that you remain smart and consider your overall heart; don’t over-exercise or undergo any severe weight-loss strategies.
Increases Your Metabolism
Finally, proper diet and cycling burn belly fat by increasing your metabolism. Cycling improves your metabolism as well as fat-burning hormones. And the better your metabolism is, the more calories you’ll be able to burn on a daily basis. Cycling can effectively burn belly fat, increasing your overall fitness and boosting your metabolism, which is proven to be the most effective way to reduce body fat, thus, increasing the number of calories you burn.
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What Fitness Experts Have to Say on Biking to Lose Weight
If you want to lose a few extra pounds that aren’t making you feel as comfortable as you should, we recommend taking action and getting more activity on your bike—whether that’s cycling indoors or outdoors. Below is some advice for beginners to get started on cycling, according to fitness experts.
Opt for Long and Easy Rides
You might be under the impression that you have to indulge in high-intensity rides to burn calories, increase muscle mass, and increase your heart rate to lose belly fat. But that’s not always the case. Instead, opt for long and easy rides once a week, especially when the weather calls for it.
In particular, long rides (up to five hours) burn fat effectively, as they offer a good endurance exercise, so you have to continue pushing to prevent slowing down. For some beginners, this can be a more enjoyable experience than shorter HIIT training sessions.
Stay Hydrated
To blast belly fat, you need to be pushing your body, so you burn more calories than you consume. When you’re cycling outdoors in hot, humid weathers, you must remain hydrated. Always take a bottle of water with you on your travels to avoid becoming dehydrated, resulting in a loss of energy. You may even wish to drink a sports drink that’s packed with electrolytes to replenish those that you lose during vigorous workouts.
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Everything in Moderation
While you’re focusing on burning belly fat with cycling, you might become so focused on exercise and eating healthy that you forget to live your life and indulge in the little things that bring you happiness.
It’s important to eat fruit and vegetables on a daily basis, but you can’t ignore a small portion of chocolate or a few slices of pizza. In fact, if you constantly deprive yourself of the treats you love, you’ll be more likely to binge and gain weight you’ve lost through cycling. Instead, try to think about adding more nutritious foods to your daily diet, rather than taking away the ones you love. This will stop you from feeling like you’re always missing out.
Create a Workout Journal
We can get so caught up in our future goals that we neglect acknowledging the progress we’re making. Keeping a workout schedule can help you see how far you’ve progressed and even if you need to up the workout routine. Furthermore, having a workout schedule planned in advance makes you less likely to cancel exercise for a night on the couch. A plan keeps you on track so you can reach your goals.
Recharge Properly
Although you need to burn more calories than you consume for losing weight, that doesn’t involve massively cutting back on food and starving yourself. Instead, make sure that you’re refueling with carbohydrates and protein after cycling sessions. You won’t lose more weight by not eating, but will actually become weaker, not recover as well, and may even get weather.
You may also wish to focus on stretches after cycling to make sure that your body has properly cooled down. This is great for injury prevention as well as reducing any muscle aches the following day. In fact, a cool-down can help you properly recover and safely brings your heart rate back down to resting.
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Keep Your Upper Body Strong
Cycling is an effective form of aerobic exercise to lose belly fat, but it requires a strong upper body, so you can risk losing muscle volume in your upper body. Fortunately, there’s a solution for this that involves more strength training in the gym or at home with weights. You needn’t spend hours lifting weights to strengthen your upper body, but a couple of short sessions weekly will improve your body and increase your muscle mass so that you burn more calories when cycling.
Cycle Your Way to Weight Loss
Overall, cycling has many effective benefits to it, including burning belly fat. Create a workout schedule in advance to keep you motivated and help you reach your weight loss goals while ensuring that you consume plenty of nutritious meals daily. Cycling increases your metabolism, allowing you to burn calories while you’ve finished your workout, and that’s a benefit we can definitely get behind.
