Exercise bikes are gym equipment that you can use for many different purposes. It’s one of the best exercise machines you can find at a gym or buy at your home for effective home workouts.
When you are wondering which exercise machine to use at the gym or which exercise machine to buy for your home, the exercise bike is a solid option in both cases.
Training with an exercise bike resembles cycling. Basically, the exercise bike is a bicycle that allows you to cycle in place. That makes an exercise bike a good alternative for cycling when you want to exercise indoors.
What Muscles Do Exercise Bikes Work?
Training with the best-rated exercise bike works all your lower body muscles comprehensively. Mostly it puts work on your quadriceps, but also your hamstrings, glutes, and even calves are needed for biking with an exercise bike. When training with an exercise bike, you will quickly notice how your thighs are burning. Luckily, that’s only a good thing when you want to train your lower body effectively.
The exercise bike isn’t a machine for upper body training. If you want to target your exercising to your upper body muscles, you should choose the rowing machine instead. But for the lower body, the exercise bike is an excellent training device.
How to Use Exercise Bikes?
Here is a short guide on how to use an exercise bike for an effective leg workout. Note that for a more detailed training guide for exercise bikes, you need to determine what you are trying to achieve with it. For instance, if you want to build muscle with an exercise bike, your workouts should be different from the exercise bike workout for fat burning. Because of that, this is only a short guide for the basics of exercise bike workouts.
- Warm up before the actual exercise bike workout to prevent injuries and prepare your body. It should take about 5 to 10 minutes.
- Take a seat on the exercise bike. Make sure you are sitting straight and with your feet firmly on the pedals.
- Choose the right resistance for you. The right resistance depends on your goals and the planned workout length. You can also adjust the resistance during your workout.
- Keep biking until your muscles are hurting too much or you have reached your workout goal.
5 Ways to Boost Your Fitness with an Exercise Bike
You can use an exercise bike for many different purposes to boost your fitness. Here are the 5 main purposes of using an exercise bike. All of them will help you to reach your fitness goals and improve your overall health in one way or another.
#1 Improve your Endurance
One of the most common purposes of using an exercise bike is to improve endurance. And that’s no wonder because it’s extremely effective for that purpose. As an aerobic exercise, it can easily help you promote your endurance, oxygen uptake, and cardiovascular system.
When training for endurance, it’s important to use long exercise times. In this case, exercise biking for 45-60 minutes works well. To be able to bike for that long, you need to use a light resistance on your exercise bike.
#2 Gain Muscle Strength
You can also use your exercise bike for gaining muscle strength. It may not be the optimal form of exercise for maximum power, but it can still help make your muscles stronger.
If you want to use an exercise bike for building muscle strength, you should use short workout sessions with heavy resistance. Optimally your workout sessions contain several sets of exercise biking. Those sets can be something between 5 and 10 minutes long.
#3 Build Muscle Mass
Another way to boost your fitness with the exercise bike is by building muscle mass. Aerobic training isn’t an effective form of exercise for muscle growth as weight training is, but it’s still possible to build muscle mass using an exercise bike.
To build muscle mass effectively, you will also need to perform weight training. However, exercise bike workout sessions can be a good addition to your weight training workouts.
When training for muscle building, it’s crucial that your training is effective. Because of that, you should try to increase the resistance of the duration of your workouts regularly. Exercise bike workouts for muscle building work the same way as workouts for muscle strength, so use short sets and heavy resistance.
To learn more about progressive training for muscle building, read the full progressive overload guide at liftingbeach.com.
#4 Burn Fat
You can also use an exercise bike for boosting your fitness by burning fat with it. That makes exercise bikes good equipment to help you with weight loss. And using an exercise bike regularly doesn’t only burn fat, but also boosts your metabolism, which makes losing weight easier.
To burn calories with an exercise bike as much as possible, you should use moderate resistance and do workout sessions of 15 to 30 minutes. Repeating it twice or thrice a week will help you significantly to burn excess body fat and lose weight.
#5 Warm-Up Before your Gym Workout
Instead of training directly for your fitness goals, you can also use the exercise bike for warming up before your gym workout or workout at home. It’s one of the most effective ways to warm up because it makes muscles and joints warm, increases heart rate, and boosts blood circulation.
When using an exercise bike for warm-up, you should use a light resistance and do a set of 5-10 minutes only. Your exercise bike workout has to be light to make sure that you don’t exhaust your muscles too much before your actual workout.
Find 5 reasons why warm-up before the workout is so important from liftingbeach.com
Are Exercise Bikes Actually Useful?
Yes, exercise bikes are very useful and they can help you to reach all of your fitness goals, no matter are you training for weight loss, muscle growth, strength gain, or something else. If your gym has an exercise bike, you should really start using it. Or if are training at home, you should get yourself an exercise bike.
The Best Exercise Bike for Your Home
For all of the exercise bikes, I recommend buying the Pooboo Indoor Cycling Bike. It includes a built-in LCD monitor to help you to track time, speed, distance, and calories. It’s a heavy-duty and steel belt-driven product with robust construction. It comes with wheels to make transportation easy. Check the price at Amazon now.
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