Two Ways to Rev up Your Exercise Bike Routine
Posted: August 4, 2010 at 8:16 pm
People often believe training with an exercise bike is by nature mundane, and that there’s only so much you can actually accomplish with exercise bike workouts. There are actually several ways to use an exercise bike to not only burn calories, but to burn and lose fat, too.
Instead of hopping on your exercise bike and planning to work out for 30 minutes, it’s a better idea to pay attention to heart rate while you ride. When you are working out in the correct heart rate range, you will burn more fat as you ride. If your bike has a heart rate monitor, you can use this to guide your work out speed and intensity. An alternative is to purchase a heart rate monitor and use that for work out guidelines.
If you routinely work out in your optimum heart rate for burning fat, you’ll have better results with exercise bike workouts. Another way to increase your results is to use an interval workout with your bike. Interval workouts involve high intensity training and recovery periods throughout the workout. The advantage is you’ll burn more fat while exercising, and you’ll continue to burn more fat after you’re finished exercising, too.
Interval training on an exercise bike is best left until you’ve developed a high level of fitness. It’s not ideal for beginners. When you’ve been exercising around 30 minutes at your optimal heart rate several times a week for a few weeks or months, you may be ready for interval training.
Instead of working out at a continuous high intensity level, interval training involves very short, intense exercise spurts followed by slightly longer recovery periods. It’s very important to thoroughly warm up before attempting interval training on an exercise bike.
You can find sample interval training workouts for exercise bikes online. A simple option is to start with 10 seconds of high intensity, hard riding, followed by a 60-second recovery period. Next, go for 15 seconds before the one-minute recovery. Increase to 20 seconds on the third and fourth exercise bursts, with one minute of recovery in between. Rest for two minutes and repeat the entire series. Follow this up with at least 10 minutes of warm down riding.
Paying attention to your heart rate and adding interval training to your exercise bike workout routine can keep things interesting and promote more fat loss. These are just two ways to make the most of the great fitness opportunity exercise bikes present.
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