How cycling changes your body

[ny biker]

Its a cardiovascular exercise, so to burns calories...but does that mean I will be all leg and no muscle anywhere else? Does it mean Ill lose weight everywhere (the good parts and bad?).

The answer in part is that it depends on your body type. I do not have huge leg muscles. When I lost weight I lost it from the top down, because I have a tendency towards being pear-shaped.

As others have mentioned, merely exercising was not enough for me, and I had to cut my food intake to see real weight loss. I never starved myself, though. I just stop eating when I start to feel full so that I don't overeat.

I stopped training for centuries because I was gaining weight. The really long rides made me very hungry for days, and also too tired to do any exercise for days. So now I generally limit my long rides to 40-50 mile rides, with a few 60ish-mile rides each summer. This way I'm able to remain consistently active instead of seesawing between huge bursts of activity and couch potatodom.

BTW, I highly recommend Nancy Clark's Sports Nutrition Guidebook. I really like her approach to eating for weight loss.

http://www.nancyclarkrd.com/books/sportsnutrition.asp


Also, I agree with indysteel's advice about the importance of a variety of activities for overall good health. But, you gotta start somewhere, and you have to find activities you enjoy if you're going to keep at it. So go ahead and start cycling, with some stretching on the side to help prevent injuries. Once you get into a routine you can look into other activities for whole-body fitness.

Good luck!

[DarcyInOregon]

I stopped training for centuries because I was gaining weight. The really long rides made me very hungry for days, and also too tired to do any exercise for days. So now I generally limit my long rides to 40-50 mile rides, with a few 60ish-mile rides each summer. This way I'm able to remain consistently active instead of seesawing between huge bursts of activity and couch potatodom.

BTW, I highly recommend Nancy Clark's Sports Nutrition Guidebook. I really like her approach to eating for weight loss.

http://www.nancyclarkrd.com/books/sportsnutrition.asp

NY, thanks for the link.

What you were saying about training for the centuries being hard on the body weight, I agree with you. What you say makes sense. I was thinking along the same lines for my 2011 cycling goals, to back off on the miles and keep the long rides to 40-50, with a few charity metric rides, and focus on shorter rides with some having difficult climbs, and get in more diversity of cardio with other activities, along with the core/weight workouts. Some people have no problem with body weight in training for the distance rides, however for some of us the training does something to how our bodies can burn fat, and we end up stalling on the weight loss or perhaps gaining a bit. I want to take 2011 and see if backing off on the miles will enable me to get rid of the last few percentage points of excess body fat that I have.

However, I want to add to the discussion because the question was what does cycling do to our bodies, and what I was surprised to discover is how the cycling fitness translated over to other cardio activities for me, some good and some not-so-good. I guess the good is I found I can run, and if I don't mind going slow I can jog 10 miles and not even feel winded; this doesn't mean I am turning into a runner, just that I know I can run 10 miles to save my life if I had to do so. The bad is walking is no longer cardio for me, even hiking up steep mountains because it doesn't get my heart rate into the lowest cardio zone. The good is I can do amazing things on the elliptical at the gym, upper ramp levels only, resistance set higher, totally hands off the side rails and I can really go fast, for whatever it is worth. Essentially I love how cycling increased my fitness so that I am able to be good at other activities.

For the comments on the calories, especially the calories consumed while on the bike, I have seen some strange things. I've learned to keep my mouth shut because cycling friends don't want to be told not to eat. But OMG, cycling with someone who is already up 20 pounds, and who has to stop at every rural grocery store on the route, and then comes out with a big bag containing nothing but sodium and fat over 2000 calories per stop, when the entire ride is no more than a 2000 calorie ride, so the person is consuming 6,000 to 8,000 calories and only burning 2,000, oh boy but I have to zip my lip. For some people, honestly, they get it into their heads that they are burning calories while cycling and so they can just eat whatever they want to eat, and there won't be any consequences. Now me, I record every #### calorie I consume in a food diary and that helps a lot. It is real hard to keep the calories down and under control on the rest days and I can't do it unless I keep the food diary.