I know, I know! Another weight loss article!! This one is different though, I promise!! Bike commuting provides many, proven benefits to your physical and mental health but does it help with weight loss?
Bike commuting and weight loss – the truth. In order for you to lose weight, you need to be in a consistent and sustainable calorie deficit. Cycling can help to increase your Total Daily Energy Expenditure (TDEE), contributing to weight loss but without a calorie deficit, you are NOT going to lose weight.
Bike commuting can play a fundamental part in maintaining a healthy lifestyle and so is definitely beneficial to your health and wellbeing and it will help you to burn more calories than if you spent the same amount of time sat in your car during your daily commute, but it does not hold the secret to weight loss. The only way you lose weight if by maintaining a calorie deficit.
The fact that a daily bike commute helps you to meet the NHS guidelines for 30 minutes daily physical exercise, while you would normally be sat in your car, shows just how beneficial bike commuting can be and is definitely a great habit to start and maintain to contribute to an overall healthy lifestyle.
When we talk about weight loss, what we really mean is fat loss, don’t we? Do we really care what our body’s relationship with gravity?? Surely we should be more focussed on removing the layers of fat that cover our bodies?
I know which I care about more, and whilst weight is a good metric for measuring fat loss generally, it also has limitations, and is not the complete story. In this article we will refer to fat loss over weight loss, hopefully, this doesn’t offend you, it shouldn’t!! Let’s use our bike commute to shed the fat.
Total Daily Energy Expenditure and the Energy Balance Equation
The key to fat loss is understanding the Energy Balance Equation. The energy balance equation is quite simple and is born from thermodynamics. It states that to maintain an energy balance (sometimes referred to as ‘maintenance’ in fat loss) the energy input shall equal the energy output, and can be expressed as below:
Energy Balance: Energy Input = Energy Out
If the energy input is EQUAL to energy output, we MAINTAIN fat.
If the energy input is GREATER than energy output, we GAIN fat.
If the energy input is LESS than the energy output, we LOSE fat.
The energy input equates to how much calorific intake we consume each day (how much we eat and drink). Energy output is the amount of energy we burn in a given day (Total Daily Energy Expenditure – TDEE).
In order to understand why cycling alone is NOT the answer to all of your prayers when it comes to fat loss, you need to understand Total Daily Energy Expenditure or TDEE. This is a key factor in not only understanding how to lose weight but also to help sustain a healthy lifestyle and mindset by not kicking yourself every time you miss a ‘workout’.
TDEE is the amount of energy (calories) your body burns in a day. The way our body burns calories is made up of the 4 groups below:
- BMR – Basal Metabolic Rate
- TEF – Thermic Effect of Food
- NEAT – Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis
- EAT – Exercise Activity Thermogenesis
Understanding these 4 groups will help us to understand why bike commuting, whilst contributing to our fat loss goals, is not the major area to focus on. This is great news by the way. It means that you can remain motivated is circumstance stops you bike commuting on a given day, making long term sustainability much more likely. You can forgive yourself if life gets in the way!!
Let’s look at the 4 groups in turn.
BMR
Basal Metabolic Rate, or BMR, is the number of calories our bodies will burn in a given day while at rest. This is what we burn whilst we are sleeping or being sedentary. If you sat in a chair all day and then went to bed, your BMR is the number of calories you will burn over the course of the day.
BMR makes up 70% of your TDEE. Yes, 70%, or in other words the vast majority of your total calories burned in the day.
BMR is different from person to person and is affected by loads of biological, hereditary and health factors, such as weight, age, gender etc. You cannot magically increase your BRM significantly.
You can make incremental changes to your BMR by consuming certain food and drink types (caffeine for instance), through increasing lean muscle mass, rather than fat mass, and by increasing water intake. There are other ways to increase BMR too which have some evidence (scientific or anecdotal) but the gains in BMR will be very marginal and it is definitely not worth losing sleepover.
Accept your BMR as a fairly constant part of you!!
TEF
The Thermic Effect of Food is the number of calories you burn when digesting certain food types. Protein, for example, can burn up too many times the calories in the digestive process than Fats and Carbohydrates.
Below is a breakdown of how much energy is consumed through TEF per macronutrient.
- Carbohydrates: 5 to 15% of the energy consumed
- Protein: 20 to 35%
- Fats: at most 5 to 15%
TEF makes up about 10% of your TDEE. Increasing protein intake, while remaining within a calorie deficit can be a great habit to increase TDEE.
NEAT
NEAT is the calories you burn by moving, not including deliberate exercise. NEAT is the calories burned when taking the stairs, walking from your car to the supermarket, blinking, fidgeting and other normal daily activities. Increasing your NEAT is a great habit to increase the energy consumed each day, and it is easy.
A phrase coined by the online PT James Smith in his book ‘Not a Diet Book’ is NEAT up 24-7, the idea being that keeping your NEAT up is a great contributor to your fat loss goals.
NEAT up 24, 7
James Smith – Not a Diet Book
NEAT accounts, again for only 10% of your TDEE, but can be accomplished much more easily than dedicating time to hitting the gym or smashing a long bike commute. NEAT can be increased by parking a little further from the shops or workplace, walking up the stairs instead of using the lift, and getting out of your office chair a little more often. Daily lifestyle habit improvements are what NEAT is all about to make you generally more active and healthy.
EAT
Finally, we get to the final 10% of TDEE, Exercise Activity Thermogenesis, or EAT. EAT is energy expenditure through formal and deliberate exercise. After all of the other elements in TDEE, we get to discuss the effort you put in daily on your bike commute (or through other exercises). That’s rights, you can work super hard on your bike commute, and you may burn up to an additional 10% of calories for the day.
Whilst this fact can be a little disheartening at first, it is better to burn them than not, not to mention all the other physical and mental benefits your get from physical activity, but remember that it is not the answer to all of your fat loss prayers and it never will be. It contributes, of course, but it is not the big factor we sometimes think it is.
EAT can be accomplished doing any planned physical activity, such as walking, running, bike commuting, resistance training, HIIT, strength training and many others and they will all contribute to about 10% of your TDEE. The key is to pick exercise that you enjoy and can sustain. This is where the bike commute is great because you get to complete your EAT each day during ‘dead time’ where you are normally sat in traffic.
Calorie Intake – The Key to Weight Loss
The biggest contributor, by far, to fat gain and fat loss is the amount of food and drink we consume, our calorie intake. The ONLY place our body gets excess calories from is by overconsumption of them through our eating and drinking habits. It is what you choose to eat and drink that determines your calorie intake. They do not come from the sun or anywhere else.
We have already seen that 70% of TDEE is dictated by BMR and there are only marginal improvements to be made here. We can make up another 30% of TDEE by changing our daily habits and routines but we are now into marginal gains.
As BMR, is comparatively constant, the only other meaningful option for fat loss is to reduce your consumption of calories. This doesn’t mean eating less. You need to consume a lower level of calorie intake, you can, in fact, eat more volume of food if you opt for foods and drinks lower in calories (less calorie-dense) and lower your daily energy intake.
Losing fat doesn’t need you to be on a low carb diet, low fat, ketogenic or any other fad diet. These diets are simply a method by which you can maintain a calorie deficit and they come down to personal preference on what works best for you and what you can sustain over the long term.
I personally just track and log my calorie intake in an iPhone app called ‘Lose It’. I don’t follow any type of ‘diet plan’. This helps me keep track of my calorie intake but also to enjoy the occasional treat. The app sets my calorie intake goal to ensure I am in a deficit if I want to lose fat. You can also track your fat maintenance calorie intake if you wish. It also and measures my weight, and other, health goals so it makes it easy for me to hit my calorie deficit targets and stay motivated.
In order to determine your daily calorie intake, you can use a calorie calculator, the ‘Lose It’ app will do this for you. This will estimate your daily intake in order for you to meet your goals. It takes into account your activity level, so those bike commutes can still contribute to your fat loss.
It is important to remember that calorie deficit is the key to fat loss. You could eat cake all day and lose fat if you remain in a deficit, but your overall health would obviously suffer. To ensure you maintain good overall health, you need to be eating a balanced diet and to lose fat in a healthy way, this balanced diet should be targeting a small daily calorie deficit maintained over a long period of time and be made up of all the food nutrients your body needs. Evidence suggests that losing weight too quickly, without changing the lifestyle habits, will likely result in weight re-gain in the future.
How Many Calories does Bike Commuting Burn?
Moderate cycling burns around 355 calories an hour (the exact amount varies by size, age, and gender, etc, and how much effort you choose to put in). Work hard, increase your heart rate and sweat and you might burn more calories an hour, up to approximately 600 calories, but most bike commuters ride at a moderate pace. So for a commute of 30 minutes, each way will use 355 calories.
Remember, this. calorie burn is within the EAT element of TDEE and so a relative increase in calories burned on your bike commute is small in relation to the whole day’s energy expenditure. In total, you only have 10% of your TDEE contribution coming from the EAT element. So even doubling your exercise calorie burn is a small increase in overall TDEE. You are better off focusing on your NEAT element which is easily increased through a few small changes.
There are more time-efficient ways to burn calories, cycling is an efficient way to convert human power into movement. This study published a rough comparison of differences between different exercise regimes and calorie burn. The table below shows some of the comparisons, which are based on 30 minutes activity duration for an 85 kg, male subject:
| Activity | Approx Calorie Burn |
| General Weight Lifting | 133 |
| Walking: 3.5 mph (17 min/mile) | 178 |
| Golf – carrying golf bag | 244 |
| Running: 6.7 mph (9 min/mile) | 488 |
| Gardening | 200 |
| Bicycling: 12-13.9 mph | 355 |
As can be seen from the table above, there are loads of ways to introduce EAT into your TDEE which can burn a good level of calories, bike commuting is just one option.
The beauty of bike commuting is you are exercising when you would usually be sat in your car, so it can be seen as an added bonus to your TDEE without adding the significant additional time needed to go for a run, to the gym or do a home workout before or after your commutes at each end of the day. When your commute is complete, your daily activity goal is complete (targeting 30 minutes minimum), and you will have captured a large proportion of you EAT component in TDEE.
Maintaining a daily bike commute is also a great habit-building tool. By bike commuting daily, you become a healthy person, who maintains good healthy habits so is great for an overall health-focused mindset meaning you are less likely to want to binge on food at the weekend. This gives an added beneficial contribution to your fat loss goal.
Other Bike Commute Health Benefits
Whilst bike commuting alone is no silver bullet for fat loss and requires effort and understanding of the energy balance equation and TDEE, bike commuting CAN contribute significantly to an overall healthy lifestyle and improve your overall health and wellbeing. Below are ways in which bike commuting can be great for general, overall health.
Bike Commuting Boosts Your Immune System
Regular moderate exercise enhances your body’s immune system, making you less susceptible to colds and other viruses. Even if you do get infected, you’re likely to have fewer symptoms than your less active workmates and recovery has been proven to be faster in people who regularly exercise.
Exercise can encourage the production of infection-fighting white blood cells and bolster your antibody response. In fact, important immune cells circulate around your body faster for up to three hours after exercise, in order to deal with bacteria and viruses.
This daily habit of physical activity, such as bike commuting, can be achieved in any way, and bike commuting is not any better than anything else, the benefit for bike commuting comes with the habitual nature of the daily activity as well as completing your daily physical activity while you would otherwise be sat in a car, stuck in traffic.
There are some studies that suggest that the immune system can be improved further by multiple exercise sessions in any one day. Bike commuting allows for two exercise sessions, riding to work and then home again and so enables to this factor easily without the need for an additional trip to the gym.
Bike Commuting Relieves Stress
It is not only your physical health that benefits from regular, sustained exercise, but your mental health also gets a boost too. Evidence suggests that people who take part in regular suffer lower levels of stress, anxiety and depression than more sedentary people.
There are many reasons to draw this conclusion. Physical activity provides a diversion from every day worries. The more scientific explanation is that exercise induces biochemical changes and hormone releases that improve your overall mood. In addition, many people report that they find the regular cyclic movement of pedalling more relaxing than other forms of exercise giving bike commuting a potential edge.
Again, any habitual form of daily exercise will provide this benefit, not just cycling, but bike commuting gives you this hit in the dead time of the daily commute and enables you to be active twice a day.
Bike Commuting is Lower Impact on Your Body
This is where bike commuting can really come into its own over other forms of exercise. Cycling generally offers a lower impact form of exercise when compared to running and other ‘high impact’ activities. This opens bike commuting as a real option for more and more people with lower starting fitness and joint and muscle problems. It is a great way to incrementally improve your health and fitness and pace yourself in line with your personal circumstances.
People sometimes worry that repetitive exercise will wear out their joints, but a moderate amount of cycling actually increases flexibility and reduces the risk of arthritis and other health problems.
Most joint injuries from cycling occur when people do too much too soon, rather than building up gradually – a simple rule is to increase the amount you ride by no more than 10% a week to avoid trouble according to Cycle Scheme. Cycling is an excellent way to get a cardiovascular workout without stressing your joints.
Bike Commuting Builds Muscle
As discussed in this article, one way to boost your BMR, and hence increase TDEE, is to create lean muscle mass rather than fat. Lean muscle mass burns more calories at rest than fat and so gives an overall improvement in contribution to TDEE.
Cycling helps us maintain muscle mass, and although it mostly works our quads, glutes and calf muscles, you’ll also feel the benefit in your abs and back muscles, as well as your shoulders and arms.
Your bike commute can be a great daily workout for your muscle, slowly
Bike Commuting Helps Prevent Cancer and Heart Disease
Ok, this one is a stretch to link these illnesses directly to your bike commute but there is a growing body of evidence showing that regular physical activity reduces the possibility of some cancers.
Experts believe it’s because exercise speeds up the movement of material through the digestive system and colon, giving less time for cancerous agents to become malignant.
Heart disease is now the biggest killer in the UK, but many studies have shown that bringing cardiovascular exercise like cycling into your life will lower the chance of you having a heart attack or stroke, and reduce the possibility that you’ll need something like bypass surgery.
According to the British Heart Foundation, if you cycle at least 20 miles a week you are half as likely to have heart problems as those who don’t exercise at all. Riding just two miles to work every morning, and two miles home every evening would cover it. That has to be worth the effort.
The risk of you getting cancer or heart disease of any form is linked to loads of reasons surrounding lifestyle and through hereditary conditions so should be simplified to your daily commute being the solutions here, but bike commuting can improve general health and it certainly won’t do any harm.
Bike Commuting Improves Your Cardiovascular Fitness
Bike commuting will contribute to improving your whole cardiovascular system, meaning your body will be able to carry oxygen and nutrients to your muscles more efficiently. Whilst other physical activities will contribute too, bike commuting is a great way to improve this on a daily basis and in a habitual way.
This isn’t just useful for sport, it’s vital in everyday life too. Normal tasks like walking up a couple of flights of stairs or carrying heavy shopping will feel easier after a few weeks commuting by bike.
Bike Commuting Improves Your Cholesterol
Most studies suggest that endurance exercise increases the amount of HDL cholesterol – often called “good cholesterol” – in your blood while lowering LDL cholesterol – often called “bad cholesterol” (the artery-clogging kind).
The amount you need to exercise to improve your cholesterol levels has been the subject of many debates, but most health organisations recommend a minimum of 30 minutes on most, including NHS guidelines, preferably all days of the week, at a moderate to vigorous intensity.
Your bike commute can be a simple habit to ensure you hit this recommended level of daily activity and so is a great way to maintain a healthy lifestyle.
Conclusion
Bike commuting is a great way to contribute to an overall healthy lifestyle. The habit of bike commuting as a way of getting your recommended daily exercise can be a great one to build and sustain long term and can contribute to weight loss goals.
It is important to remember TDEE when trying to lose weight though as well as your calorie intake. Diet is king when it comes to fat loss as is your BMR. These two contribute the most to the amount of weight you will gain or lose over time. The EAT component is a contributor to weight loss, but more importantly is a key success factor in boosting overall health and fitness.
For weight loss, it is imperative you remain in a calorie deficit which is best achieved by logging and controlling your calorie intake habitually over a long period of time. Once you have this under control, your bike commute will be a great source of exercise and ensure you are optimising the EAT component on the TDEE.
