Surprising Tips on How to Lose Weight with Indoor Cycling

Irrespective of the reason for your resolve to slim down, whether it’s for an upcoming special event like a wedding or the holidays, workout should form part of your weight-loss regimen. Exercise helps in preserving muscle mass, something that’s not only healthier for your body but also great for your appearance. Also, maintaining muscle makes it easier to sustain your weight loss for the long term.

Although you won’t lose much weight with a leisurely bike ride, indoor cycling does wonders for weight loss.

Apart from the fact that it rips 400-600 calories in just 45 minutes, it also helps to kick your metabolism in gear and gives you an opportunity to strengthen and tone your muscles in your core, glutes and legs. Here are tips on how to shed pounds with indoor cycling.

1. Eat Before Riding

Eating supplies your body the energy it requires to ride harder and faster and enjoy the advantages of this form of exercising. Even for an early morning class, eat something half an hour before the ride. It could be two slices of toast with jam, a small banana, or even some whole-grain cereal. The same is advisable 1-2 hours before an evening or an afternoon cycling session but have a mix of carbs and proteins.

2. Vary difficulty and the pace

Just as is the case with most types of working out, interval training can rev up your metabolism more compared to exercising at steady state, and this also applies to indoor cycling. Think of interval training as a method of tricking the body into shredding calories faster. Through alternating bursts of faster pedaling, with more comfortable paces, you are likely to rip more calories when exercising than you would when you cycle at steady pace. This also triggers greater exercise post oxygen consumption, which will make you continue burning more calories for a couple of hours after biking.

3. Revamp Cycling Workouts

The danger with doing the same kind of ride every day is that your body adapts to it and prevents you from getting a metabolic bang like you did at the start. The answer is regularly switching up kinds of rides that you do. You can alternate between strength, endurance, race-oriented rides and interval training. Also, vary the intensity to make your body burn calories faster not only during but also after the workout. Read lots of spin bike reviews to learn the different opportunities for varying your workouts.

4. Properly Replenish Your Muscles

Within one hour after your workouts, eat a mix of proteins and carbohydrates (for instance a pear and a handful of walnuts) to refill your muscle glycogen stores and at the same time offer amino acids for muscle building and repair. This ensures that your muscle and metabolism remain working smoothly and also prepares the body for the next workout.

5. Split Your Workouts

You may not have time for a 45-minute cycling class. In that case, you just need to do 2 25-minute solo sessions and you should be able to burn the same amount of calories that you would burn in one longer class. You could even push yourself harder when you do a shorter session, burning more calories. Either of these guarantees that you will experience the afterburn effect two times a day as opposed to once, helping you to torch more calories in a day.

There are some notable cardiovascular benefits that come with indoor cycling. These include improving your oxygen uptake capability, lowering your blood pressure and making the heart more aerobically fit. It also enables you to strengthen your body in several areas like your core, legs and glutes. Increased muscular strength implies toning and build, which results in a higher calorie burn for daily activities.