Is Indoor Cycling Good For Weight Loss?

There are several advantages to cycling. Cycling has been demonstrated to enhance fitness, improve general health, and offer lifestyle advantages like lower emissions when used as a mode of transportation, whether it is done outside or on a stationary cycle at home, the gym, or in a spin class.

People of all ages can enjoy riding a bike because it’s an accessible sport that’s simple to include in daily life.

Introduction

Do you want to know if indoor cycling can help you lose weight? The answer is definitely yes! This post will discuss how indoor cycling can help you reach your desired weight and support your weight loss objectives. Indoor cycling can be a very effective way to lose those extra pounds, even though diet is still quite important for keeping a healthy weight.

Your physical activity should be a component of your overall fitness and health objectives. Maintaining muscle mass through exercise is better for your health.
It will make it simpler for you to maintain your weight loss over time.

Along with increasing your metabolism—your body’s calorie-burning engine—and toning and strengthening your legs, glutes, and core, indoor cycling can help you burn 400 to 600 calories in a 45-minute class.

Although it’s obvious that indoor cycling helps people lose weight, get the most out of your courses by following some basic training and nutrition guidelines.

What Makes a Healthy Weight Possible

Appropriate eating is the first step to maintaining a healthy weight. As they say, you are what you consume. The secret to reaching and maintaining a healthy weight is eating a balanced diet, avoiding too many calories, and making wise decisions. But it’s crucial to understand that our metabolism is influenced by things like age, gender, and muscle mass.

Making a calorie deficit is still necessary for weight loss despite these changes. Although some people choose restricted diets, these methods frequently result in short-term gains, with weight being regained when the diet is over.

Does Not Following a Diet Help You Lose Weight?

Making dietary changes that don’t result in a negative deficit is the key to weight loss. Proteins, lipids, carbs, and vitamins are among the nutrients your body needs in sufficient amounts to sustain your immune system and general health. Prioritizing fat reduction over muscle mass is essential while trying to lose weight. Excessive dietary restriction or an imbalance in the quantities of nutrients can jeopardize muscle mass.

Thankfully, you may attain a responsible calorie deficit and encourage long-term weight loss with a balanced diet and frequent exercise. Strength and aerobic training are both beneficial, but it’s important to pick exercises you enjoy and can stick with. Running and other high-impact exercises can cause joint pain in those who are overweight. In these situations, swimming or indoor cycling are great substitutes that are easier on the joints and provide cardiovascular advantages.

Rejecting Myths About Indoor Cycling and Weight Loss

A common question is whether indoor cycling causes flatulence. It used to be believed that strengthening your abdominal muscles would result in a tight tummy. Regretfully, abdominal exercises by themselves don’t give you a six-pack. You must exercise your large muscle groups and pay attention to your diet in addition to working on your abs if you want to achieve a flat tummy. These are your shoulders, chest, back, and legs. Even when you’re at rest, your metabolism will rise as a result of training these big muscle groups and increasing your overall muscle mass.

People frequently worry about whether riding a bike indoors will make their legs thicker. Despite what many people think, riding a bike inside does not result in big legs. Just look at the professional racers who train out on their bikes every day. Regular cycling can help reduce leg fat, giving the appearance of increased muscularity and tone.

What muscles are used in indoor cycling?

All of the major muscle groups are worked during an indoor cycling session. These are seven places you employ while cycling and how you use them.

Core. To acquire total balance, especially when standing, use your core to stabilize your body throughout the lesson.

The upper body. When riding a bike, support yourself using your upper body. Some classes use resistance bands or dumbbells for upper-body workouts.

Back. Your back muscles will get stronger and more toned if you keep your spine steady and firm throughout the lesson.

Glutes. With every pump, feel your glutes working, particularly when you get up from your chair, do an incline, or raise the resistance.

Quadriceps. As you pedal and climb hills, your quadriceps will be the primary muscles worked, giving your legs strength and tone.

Hamstrings. Your hamstrings, which raise the pedal with each cycle and stabilize your joints, can be strengthened and loosened by cycling.

Lower limbs. Each cycle will strengthen your calves, protecting your ankles and feet both on the bike and in daily life.

Using Indoor Cycling to Burn a Lot of Calories and Reduce Weight

Because indoor cycling sessions burn a lot of calories throughout each workout, they are quite beneficial for weight loss. Body weight is one of the variables that affect the precise number of calories burned. A 45-minute indoor cycling workout can burn 561 calories for an individual weighing 80 kg, and a 60-minute session can burn 748 calories. That’s the equal of two hearty lunches!

‘MET-value’: Metabolic Equivalent of Task

The MET value (Metabolic Equivalent of Task) can be used to determine how many calories are expended during an indoor cycling workout. The intensity of effort is represented by MET values, which range from 8.9 for a typical indoor cycling workout to 9.8 for a strenuous workout. You can calculate the approximate number of calories burned by calculating the MET value by your weight in kilos, then by 0.0175, and finally by the number of minutes. For instance, cycling for 30 minutes would burn about 280 calories for a person weighing 60 kg.

Indoor cycling has become a popular aerobic workout for weight loss because of its ability to burn calories and minimal strain on joints. Nowadays, a lot of people decide to get indoor cycling cycles for their homes so they may work out whenever it’s convenient for them. Accessibility is further facilitated by the abundance of online indoor cycling training applications, which offer a range of workouts to accommodate varying fitness levels and tastes.

Using indoor cycling to reduce weight as a goal

We advise adding at least three indoor cycling exercises each week if you’re using indoor cycling to lose weight. It’s crucial to begin slowly so that your level of fitness increases gradually. Steer clear of overdoing it because long-term adherence depends on enjoyment and sustainable progress. Maintaining a nutritious and varied diet is essential in addition to frequent exercise. Reducing sugar and fat intake and emphasizing a healthy diet will help you lose weight. To achieve a well-rounded diet, you might find the Netherlands Nutrition Center’s website to be a useful resource.

Required number of calories

Calculating your calorie requirement is crucial for tracking your intake and understanding how many calories you need each day. Finding your basal metabolic rate (BMR), or the number of calories expended in 24 hours without physical activity, is a good place to start. The BMR calculation formulae vary according to gender:

Women’s BMR is 655 + 9.6 x weight in kilograms + 1.8 x height in centimeters – (4.7 x age in years).
Men’s BMR is 66 + (13.7 x weight in kilograms) + (5 x height in centimeters) – (6.8 x age in years).

Getting your PAL value is the next step. The amount of exercise you typically get each day is your PAL value.

1.2 Little to no exercise (spending the entire day in bed)
If you don’t play sports or have an active job, little exercise equals 1.375

1.55 for a regular workout
Heavy activity (daily exercise or physically demanding employment) = 1.725
Professional athletes that engage in really strenuous activity = 1.9
Your PAL and BMR values are now available to you. You may determine your daily caloric needs using these two figures: Your daily calorie need is equal to BMR x PAL.

15 Ways to Use Indoor Cycling to Reduce Belly Fat

Cycle at Least Three Times Per Week

You must consider both a weekly and longer-term plan if you want to maximize your sessions.

It won’t make much difference to ride a bike indoors just once a week.

What is the ideal amount of sessions, then?

At the very least, you should aim for three times a week.

Riding your bike every two to three days is optimal if you want to keep improving your fitness, according to Cycling Weekly. Three rides per week are the bare minimum you can get away with and still see noticeable fitness improvements.

Cycling at least three times a week will significantly increase your metabolism.

Additionally, this is where the advantages of endurance and cardiovascular fitness truly begin to materialize.

These two methods are quite effective in reducing body fat!

Take Up Cycling Six Times a Week for a While

When beginning indoor cycling and fat reduction, many people want a real challenge. For a brief amount of time (say a month), it’s a good idea to attempt cycling every day with only one day off per week.

Why the day off?

For a variety of reasons, health professionals generally concur that taking at least one day off each week is quite advantageous. It reduces the chance of damage and aids in your body’s reconstruction and recovery.

In many respects, a single day of rest is just as crucial as exercise days.

Therefore, take a day off. However, you’re seriously undermining your aims if you can ride your bike every day!

Daily cycling maximizes the advantages of indoor cycling, including:

• Cardio
• Increased metabolic
• Maintaining a calorie deficit
• Burning fat in the body

Another benefit I’ve discovered is that it becomes simpler every day. Your body and mind are just more prepared for the experience, and you have less mental resistance.

Interval exercise

The next step after deciding how much indoor riding you want to do is to consider how to do it.

Interval training is something you should incorporate into your sessions. While cycling at a single, steady pace for the duration of a session is acceptable, the outcomes are significantly better if you alternate between fast and slow bursts.

The technique of dividing your workout into intervals of relatively low effort and high resistance and low resistance, or sprints, is known as interval training.

As your meeting goes on, you can:

• Lengthen the sprints.
• Increase the intensity of the sprints’ speed.
• Increase the number of sprints.

Fun fact: if you do interval training, you will burn up to 30% more calories even if you cycle the same distance in the same amount of time as someone who rides at a steady pace.

Integrate Climbs Into Your Session

Replicating the feeling of climbing a bicycle is another method to truly intensify your session.

Setting the resistance significantly higher is the simplest method to accomplish this. Cycle for a predetermined amount of time (between 30 seconds and 2 minutes) at this intensity, then reduce it once more for a low-intensity interval.

During your session, vary these intervals.

This is going to happen if you attend a structured spin class. You can watch lessons online if you’re riding your bike by yourself at home. There are a lot of excellent free cycling sessions available on YouTube.

Leave the Saddle

Getting out of the saddle is another effective strategy to burn abdominal fat. There are several advantages to this.

It makes riding weight-bearing, to start. An activity that uses your legs to support your body weight is called a weight-bearing exercise.

Cycling is essentially non-weight-bearing when you are sitting in your saddle because the saddle supports your weight.

Weight-bearing sessions are beneficial because they increase the force applied to your legs and glutes. This makes it much easier to burn more fat and feel the burn in these muscles.

Enroll in an Online or Real World Class

You might want to enroll in a class to get more drive and a sense of responsibility.

Most gyms offer spinning classes, which are very popular. Online choices are also available.

There are numerous advantages to taking a spin class, such as:

• Use the herd mentality to your advantage to stay motivated.
• Acquire the appropriate methods.
• Include climbs and interval training in your bike as part of the accountability portion of the program!

In a State of Fasted Cycling

The best method to lose weight is to give your food careful thought.

Cycling while fasting is one experiment to try.

The carbs in the food you eat are burned by your body if you bike after eating.

However, your exercise will burn through the carbohydrates and begin to burn body fat if you fast for a while, even 12 hours before cycling.

Such a fast may seem difficult, but if you can cycle in the morning, it’s not that difficult. You’ll probably be cycling 12–16 hours after your previous meal if you just skip breakfast.

The Number of Calories You Should Expect to Burn

For many individuals, this is the most important question: how many calories can you anticipate burning during a spin session?

You should anticipate burning between 300 and 600 calories during a 45-minute indoor cycling exercise. The precise figure will consider several factors, including:

• Your age
• How fit you are
• The session’s degree of intensity
• The number of interval sprints and high-resistance exercises you incorporate into your session

Engage in Indoor Cycling While Maintaining a Healthy Diet

For indoor cycling to be truly beneficial, it must be combined with a nutritious diet. The amount of belly fat you shed is determined by your diet.

You should concentrate on the following in your diet, especially if you wish to reduce belly fat:

• Consume foods high in fiber, such as berries and sprouts.
• Consume a lot of protein-rich foods like chicken and fish.
• Avoid foods high in sugar.
• Stay away from processed foods.
• Stay away from alcohol.

Balance Your Carbohydrate Needs

When it comes to cycling and cardio, carbohydrates are an intriguing food.

Carbs are necessary for optimal cycling performance. However, cutting back on carbohydrates can help you lose weight since your body will begin burning fat rather than carbohydrates.

One straightforward strategy is to cut back on carbohydrates, especially on days when you’re taking a break. Carbs will be burned off naturally on days when you are cycling.

Maintain a Weekly Calorific Deficit

Maintaining a weekly caloric deficit is one thing that regular indoor riding truly helps with. When it comes to losing weight and reducing abdominal fat, this is the most crucial factor.

Between 300 and 600 calories will be burned throughout your indoor riding sessions.

Generally speaking, you want to be below your maintenance caloric intake to lose weight.

To maintain their weight, men need, on average, 2500 calories each day. For women, this will be roughly 200 calories.

For instance, a lady who consumes 2000 calories a day but burns 500 during a spinning session will only have consumed 1500 calories that day.

In addition to resistance training, spin

In addition to indoor cycling, there are additional quick wins you might think about if you’re serious about losing belly fat.

Including resistance exercise in your routine is a crucial one.

You can tone your muscles by doing resistance training, like lifting weights. Additionally, as your body rebuilds and restores itself, you will burn more fat throughout the day.

Cycling indoors can also be a great way to warm up before this.

Riding a bike indoors lowers fatty deposits in important places

One important thing to remember is that no one sheds body fat proportionately.

Everyone usually starts by losing weight in one location, and for many, this is the main focus.

In this case, gender plays a role. Women typically start losing weight around their hips and buttocks.

In contrast, men typically lose weight around their core and trunk.

Therefore, any weight loss from indoor cycling may help men lose belly fat. Just remember that it might not be the first body part targeted by ladies.

When riding a bicycle, perform crunches or leans.

Your core is somewhat worked during a cycling workout. Your core muscles are always striving to keep you balanced and to retain a decent posture.

But you can enhance this by including core-focused exercises in your routine. These consist of:

• When cycling, especially during sprints, lean to one side first, then the other.
• When performing sprints, it is best to lean forward and backward as though performing sit-ups.
• These kind of motions are incorporated into the curriculum of many spin classes. In terms of toning your core, they are essentially the icing on the cake.

Cycling Indoors Increases Your Metabolism

Cycling inside regularly has the effect of increasing your metabolism. This implies that even while you are at rest, you will continue to burn more fat.

Some folks may find a lot of inspiration in this. When you exercise, you’re not the only one losing weight; the effects last all day.

The Health Advantages of Cycling

It has been demonstrated that incorporating physical activity, such as riding, into daily living enhances general health. These advantages enhance mood, general body composition, heart health, and joint health. They can also help prevent and manage certain disorders.

• Advantages for the Heart

Cycling can improve resting heart rate, lower blood pressure, and lower the risk of coronary heart disease. According to one study, those who cycled were less likely to have a heart attack.

• Joint Health

Cycling is a low-impact, joint-friendly activity. It is frequently used in physical therapy to assist regain range of motion and mobility without putting undue strain on the joints, like walking or running does.

• Controlling Weight

Regular cyclists have been shown to have a healthy body composition and a lower prevalence of obesity. The distribution of bone, muscle, fat, and other tissues inside an individual’s body is known as their body composition.

For most people, maintaining their weight requires 150 minutes of physical activity every week. Since cycling is simple to integrate into daily life, it’s a great way to achieve this goal. Weight reduction can result from increasing the intensity by including hills, inclines, pace, and duration.

• Enhanced Mood

Cycling is one type of physical activity that generally has a favorable impact on mental health. Regular physical activity reports improved sleep, lower rates of anxiety and depression, and improvements in mood and quality of life compared to non-exercisers. Riding a bike in the outdoors can make your day better.

• Diabetes Prevention

Cycling can help prevent type 2 diabetes by enhancing general health and assisting individuals in maintaining a healthy weight. One study found that those who rode their bikes for exercise, fun, or commuting had a lower incidence of type 2 diabetes than those who did not ride their bikes.

• Lifestyle Advantages

Cycling is more than just exercise, despite its many health and fitness advantages. Biking has additional advantages as a mode of transportation and enjoyment.

Families can satisfy daily physical activity recommendations and spend quality time together by riding bicycles. Biking is a fun activity that the whole family can enjoy, which is why parents may want to encourage their kids to be more active.

There are advantages to using a bicycle for transportation. Those who ride their bikes to work might save money on their transportation costs.

By lowering transportation-related greenhouse gas emissions, cycling is a tiny step toward protecting the environment. There are indirect health benefits to reducing greenhouse gas emissions, which also help mitigate the effects of climate change.

• Advantages of Fitness

Cycling can help people reach the weekly physical activity recommendations for general health since it is a low-impact activity that strengthens muscles and enhances cardiovascular fitness.

For general health, adults should engage in 150 minutes of moderate-intensity physical exercise every week, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). You can still have a conversation while engaging in moderate-intensity exercise, even though your heart and respiration rates rise.

You can meet the suggested activity guidelines by riding a bicycle for fifty minutes three times a week at a leisurely pace. This can be done in ways other than just for exercise, including riding a stationary bike at home or the gym.

Additionally, biking helps strengthen other leg muscles, including the quadriceps, which are located in the front of the thighs. Balance, everyday tasks like climbing stairs, and other physical activities can all be improved by strengthening these muscles.

Another crucial component of good aging is muscle mass. Muscle mass declines with age. One method for older folks to keep their muscular mass is to ride a bicycle.

Cycling is good for your heart. Regular exercisers have been found to have lower resting heart rates and blood pressure than inactive folks.

FAQs

Reference

• Afaa-Gfi, S. C. (2024, May 23). Is indoor cycling good for weight loss? Verywell Fit. https://www.verywellfit.com/losing-weight-with-indoor-cycling-1958331
• CycleMasters. (2024, April 12). Losing weight with Indoor Cycling: How It Can Help You. CycleMasters®. https://cyclemasters.com/blog/losing-weight-with-indoor-cycling
• Williams, M. (2023, January 24). 15 tips on how to lose belly fat with indoor cycling. Bicycle 2 Work. https://bicycle2work.com/how-to-lose-belly-fat-with-indoor-cycling/
• Cronkleton, E. (2019, May 17). Indoor cycling class benefits: Are they worth the hype? Healthline. https://www.healthline.com/health/benefits-of-a-spin-class#what-gets-worked
• Martin, C. (2025, January 13). What happens to your body when you start cycling regularly. Verywell Health. https://www.verywellhealth.com/benefits-of-cycling-8773726