Exercise Bike Fitness -- Burning Calories

Exercise bike fitness comes with time spent on workouts and the machine you use to some degree. To lose weight and get fit with an exercise bike means more than just burning calories though. It is quite a bit more complex than that and in a way that makes for a better chance for long-term success. Here's how it works.
Surprisingly enough, many sorts of exercise use up about the same number of calories. Whether you pedal a bike, jog, or perform aerobics, all burn about the same amount of calories. It depends largely on the effort level but the calories burned are much the same for many forms of workouts.
That level is about 8 - 10 calories a minute. It depends on several factors including your body weight but it's in the range of 8 - 10. Now, when you consider that a pound of fat contains about 3500 calories, you can see the challenge you face if you want to burn away fat with an exercise bike or any other exercise machine for that matter.
If it were only as easy as just getting the right machine all people could be trim and fit. Consider though that pedaling away on an exercise bike for 350 minutes is about the least you could expect to spend to burn off a pound of fat. That's about 6 hours on the bike to drop one pound of fat. Quite the sad tale...
But there's actually good news on the fat burn front. Burning fat and getting trim is more complex that just burning calories. It's more about changing the manner that your body deals with fat. Really it is possible to change you individual fat burning rate so you burn more fat than the typical person or at least more than YOU have typically burned.
It's true that your body burns fat all the time, even at rest. That calorie burning rate is referred to as the basal metabolism. And that is where the secret to fat loss hides.
By exercising regularly with the right types of exercise, it's possible to begin to burn more fat and lose weight at a faster rate than the 8 to 10 calories per minute rate would lead you to expect.
It's more than just calories burned by exercise that matters. It's in addition the level of muscle you carry, since muscle helps burn fat too. That's why weight lifters tend to possess higher metabolism and weight training helps to burn fat. It's not that weight training is all that an efficient way to burn up calories. It's the muscle building that leads to fat loss.
That's why exercises like bike riding can lead to better fitness improvement than would seem possible. There's the use of the big muscles and some muscle building going on that makes for better results.
Exercise bike fitness is about more than just burning calories. Fat loss is more than just calories burned in exercise. Long-term the way to fitness is about increasing the rate of metabolism as well as just exercising to burn calories.

By: Al Freed

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