It’s cheaper than Ozempic and easier to stick at than sweating on a stationary exercise bike in the gym. Here’s how cycle commuting can shift the pounds

For most of us, exercise programmes are not an effective way to lose weight. Not because the regimes themselves don’t work but because they’re hard to commit to. Take everyone’s January favourite, the gym. You have to dedicate a chunk of time for travel there and back, and it’s not much fun when you’re there. So people stop. Cycling to work is different.

When you commute by bike, exercise happens as a byproduct of getting where you want to go. It’s stealth exercise. You don’t need to set aside time for it because it’s time you’d otherwise spend in a car or on a bus or train. If your commute is quicker by bike – and cycling often is quicker in urban areas – it actually gives you back some free time on top of all the benefits from exercising. As a fitness or weight loss regime, it’s therefore much easier to stick to.

Weighing the benefits

For general health, the NHS recommends that adults “do at least 150 minutes of moderate intensity activity a week” and “spread exercise evenly over 4 to 5 days a week”. You can meet both of those recommendations with a 15-minute each-way commute by bike, assuming you do it Monday to Friday. That equates to a trip of two or three miles at the start and end of each working day. It’s so easy that you might not even think of it as exercise. But it is.

Keep on doing it and, other things being equal, you will lose weight. Moderate cycling – which is how most people commute – burns about 300 calories per hour. The exact amount depends on your size, age, gender and the level of effort; more intense cycling can burn up to 600 calories per hour and racing even more. If you want a more precise picture, use a fitness app on your phone or smart watch.

Calorie expenditure isn’t directly linked to cycling speed. What matters is your pedalling effort and the time you spend riding. A slower journey on a Dutch roadster will burn just as many calories as a faster ride on a road racing bike if you’re putting in the same effort. And you can lose weight just as effectively on an e-bike if you do more miles than you would on an unassisted bike. Let’s say, for example, that you burn 75% as many calories per mile on the e-bike. If you ride 133% the distance – four miles rather than three – you’d get the same benefit.

The best bike for losing weight isn’t the one that’s the fanciest. It’s the one you’re happy to ride most often and/or furthest. That means having a bike that’s comfortable and that can be ridden in any weather and in the dark as well as the daylight.

Calories in, calories out

Losing weight by cycle commuting alone is a gradual process. Cycling is efficient, typically burning fewer calories than swimming or weight-training. But you can’t swim or bench-press your way to work, and even moderate exercise is much more effective than sedentary commuting by car or public transport.

Let’s assume you expend 300 calories per hour riding to and from work, and that your journey is a mere 15 minutes each way. That’s an extra 150 calories burned per day. Over the course of a year, that’s 150 calories x 5 days x 48 working weeks, which equals 36,000 calories. A pound of body fat contains roughly 3,500 calories. So you could expect to lose a little over 10lb of fat in a year.

The calories in, calories out equation isn’t quite that simple. As you get thinner, you need fewer calories to maintain your weight. So if you stick with the same diet while burning the same 150 extra calories a day, your ongoing weight loss will eventually taper away to nothing. You’ll reach a weight and stay there.

Yet even the notional weight loss figure of 10lb is revealing. It’s worthwhile, especially considering the minimal effort involved, but it’s not exactly dramatic. Per month, it’s less than 1lb. For that reason, it’s not really worth monitoring your weight on a weekly basis. Log the hours that you cycle instead; it’s easy to do on your phone. You can then be confident that you’re still making progress. Slow progress, true, but sustainable progress. As you’re losing weight slowly, you’re much less like to snap and eat a whole packet a biscuits in one go.

While we’re on the subject of biscuits… Like any exercise, cycling makes you hungrier. It’s very easy to wipe out the calorie-burning effects of exercise by over-indulging in treats afterwards. A couple of biscuits or half a Danish pasty can add up to 150 calories. That’s enough to offset the 15-minute each-way commute in our example. If you only want to maintain your weight, that’s fine: cycling to work gives you a licence to have some treats. If you want to lose weight, however, you can’t just reach for snacks that are high in sugar and fat.

While this isn’t an article about healthy eating, it’s important to understand that you can’t outride a bad diet. All the usual sensible advice on what to eat still applies. Limit junk food and confectionary. In fact, unless you’re riding for more than 90 minutes at a time, you don’t need sports nutrition products like gels or bars, either.

Try to decide ahead of time what you’re going to eat. Choosing what to eat when you’re already peckish is like supermarket shopping when you’re hungry. It’s all too easy to end up picking the highly calorific options. If you’re going for a long ride at the weekend, try preparing your post-ride meal in advance so that all you have to do is warm it up when you get back. Swerve that mid-morning Danish pastry by taking a banana with you.

Bigger gains

If you want to lose weight faster through exercise you’ve got two options: ride more or ride harder.

To ride more, you’ll need to ride further or more often. Riding further is complicated by the fact that your work commute is a set distance. Yet you can plan alternative routes so that – perhaps once a week – you can take the long way home. Increasing frequency is generally easier. Even if you already cycle to work every day, there are other journeys you can use your bike for. Do the weekly shop by bike. Take your kids places using a trailer or cargo bike. Run errands by bike.

Riding harder is generally only practical for commuting if you can shower and freshen up at work, because it will make you sweat – although you could just ride harder on the way home. Unless you can throw in some extra hills on your commute, riding harder means riding faster. Only ride faster when it is safe to do so. If you’re going to measure your rides by the time taken or by your average speed, make sure you set your phone or bike computer to auto-pause when you stop. That way you won’t be tempted to take chances at junctions. Going faster is not an end in itself but a way to burn more calories. Half a minute here or there is irrelevant.