Cycling is fantastic exercise, benefiting your overall health and fitness. As an endurance sport, cycling can be exceptionally good for cardiovascular fitness, as well as toning muscles, improving physique and boosting body image. And it can help to improve the muscle tone of your legs, glutes and core.
Legs
It’s your thigh muscles, specifically your quadriceps, that engage with a pedal when horizontal with the ground, in the pull-upstroke phase. The cycle begins when the hip and knee press down on the pedal. This action is helped by the glutes and quadriceps and, later, by the hamstrings (back of the legs) and calf (lower leg) muscles.
Pedal faster or increase resistance for great legs:
When your legs work against resistance, they build muscle and help you get stronger and more toned, so simply pedalling on your e-bike or exercise bike will do that but you can also up the intensity in a few simple ways…
- The first and most obvious is to pedal faster.
- Another way to add intensity is to increase the resistance when pedalling – and the best way to do that is by cycling up a hill.
- You can also try a form of interval training in which you find multiple hills, or you do hill reps: cycling up the same hill five (or ten) times, with a rest on the downhill.
Glutes
Cycling is an exceptionally good activity to lift and strengthen the glutes, which are responsible for the initiation of the downward phase of the cycling pedal stroke and are therefore worked whenever you're pedalling.
Head for the hills to strengthen and tone your glutes:
- You can help to improve your muscle strength and tone by heading for the hills and getting out of the saddle. Steep hills force you to work harder to start each pedal stroke.
- Riding uphill is hard work and will place large amounts of stress on both your glutes and quadriceps, giving them a hard workout.
- It also stimulates muscle fibre damage: each time we train on our bike, we facilitate small tears in the muscle fibres of the body. These microscopic tears are how we build the muscles; as the body works to repair the muscle tears, it becomes stronger each time (given proper recovery).
Core
Cycling is a great exercise for building your abs and strengthening your core, which in turn improves your balance and coordination.By constantly needing to engage your core to keep balanced on the bike, you strengthen the muscle around the trunk. The instability of the bike means that the core is constantly fired to keep you in equilibrium.
