If you are looking for an amazing method for losing weight with adventure, mountain biking can be an ideal sport to help us achieve such a precious goal. Cycling is one of the cardiovascular sports par excellence, and as any other sport of this type practiced regularly helps us to improve our health and fitness, with the benefits this entails for our body. Cycling, whether mountain or road, is an excellent cardiovascular sport that will help us without a doubt lose those extra kilos that we want to eliminate.
5 good reasons to help us lose weight thanks to cycling
One of the best benefits of cycling is to improve our body’s ability to burn fat much more efficiently, which we can achieve thanks to these five good reasons that we will see below:
1. Strengthens the largest muscles in our body
Cycling strengthens all the bigger muscles of our body; our quadriceps, hamstrings, hip muscles and your glutes. When we ride a mountain bicycle we develop more muscle tissue in the lower part of our body, especially in the upper legs and in the buttocks. Being some of the largest muscles in our body, we exponentially increase our body’s ability to burn fat much more optimally and efficiently.
2. Protects the joints of our body
Mountain bike riding is generally a sport without impact, which means that our joints are not subject to jerks or jerks. Unlike other cardiovascular sports, cycling can be practiced by any type of person, so even the plumpest cyclist can hop on a bicycle and start pedaling. In this way, thanks to cycling, any beginner athlete can pedal for many kilometers and, of course, burn calories without stopping hour after hour.
3. Train your muscles to burn more fat
Thanks to the practice of cycling, and especially to long-distance training, long routes or constant bicycle rides, we built hundreds of thousands of capillaries in our legs. Thus, our body brings much more oxygen-rich blood to the muscles that work during exercise, and mitochondria (the fat-burning furnaces in our muscle cells) also get bigger, using a greater influx of oxygen to generate more energy and burn more fats.
4. Increase the daily energy expenditure of our organism
Cycling on a regular basis is more than enough to increase the daily energy expenditure of our body. While we are giving the pedals, even at a leisure time of between 10 and 15 km / h, our body burns between 2,100 and 2,500 kilojoules in an hour. In a week, we burn about 16,800 kilojoules, which translated into calories are more than 4,000 kilocalories burned or about half a kilogram of weight, if we shoot every day of the week for an hour.
5. It helps to burn fat even after exercising
Cycling starts our body and increases the energy expenditure of muscle cells, burning more fat even after the physical exercise is finished, as our body repairs and rebuilds the affected muscles. In this way, cycling helps build more muscle tissue and increases our basal metabolism (the minimal energy expenditure of a human body). Many studies have shown that with only 30 to 45 minutes of daily cardiovascular exercise we can increase our basal metabolism and keep it elevated for most of the day, burning much fatter effectively.