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Intense intervals are the most efficient type of training for weight loss.
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Tips to lose fat while cycling Try interval training Here are a few pointers on how to use cycling to shed fat and retain muscle. While this can help you to ride 100 miles and complte ultra-distance cycling challenges, as discussed previously, it doesn’t equate to weight loss. You can raise your maximal fat oxidation or Fatmax (the hardest effort you can sustain while using fat for fuel) by doing lots of zone 2 riding. This may explain why other studies have found women are less likely to bonk and slow down in endurance events such as marathons. A 2005 study into fat oxidation concluded that women are better at oxidising fat than men, meaning they have to switch later to easily extinguished carbohydrates. The timing of the transition from fat to carbohydrate varies from person to person. Your body tries to preserve its finite carbohydrate stores for when energy is needed quickly. This is because fat reserves are nearly unlimited even in the leanest athletes. Robert Smith / Our MediaĪs intensity increases, the proportion of fat to carbohydrate your body resorts to in order to fuel cycling decreases. How can I burn fat by cycling?īoost your Fatmax to help endure long days on the bike. “The average cyclist doesn’t need to worry too much: the basic things of improving diet quality, not eating mindlessly, training smart and progressively are going to do a lot more than doing ice baths to shed brown fat or what have you,” he says. He adds that it’s easy to “get stuck in the weeds” of fat loss and forget the basics. “Cyclists tend to have leaner legs than upper body, so anytime you do whole-body aerobic exercise you will lose fat everywhere, but it is more concentrated in the areas where the muscle is active.įor example, if you want to lose fat on your arms, Fitzgerald recommends swimming, which will activate your arm muscles. “People doing sit-ups to lose belly fat was scoffed at but more recent research has shown that there is site specificity,” he says. Matt Fitzgerald, author of Racing Weight: How to Get Lean for Peak Performance and co-founder of 80/20 endurance sport coaching, says “anatomically specific weight loss” is possible, but not from the belly. However, a more recent study concluded fat loss can be localised. A 2013 study found localised muscle resistance training led to the whole body becoming leaner, not specifically the area of the body trained. Scientists have examined what happens when participants lose weight while performing resistance and endurance training with a certain muscle group. Whether you can target weight loss remains hotly disputed, but it’s arguably irrelevant. Abdominal exercises are better at strengthening your core than blasting belly fat.
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