WHICH BURNS MORE CALORIES, BIKE OR RUN; AND WHICH IS BEST TO LOSE FAT?

The real answer is: IT DEPENDS!

It depends on what you are best suited for, what you grew up with, or whether you have muscle imbalances or not. Both activities however, will burn calories to hopefully lose fat, that part of you you don’t want!

If you are a runner and find biking boring, running is your ticket. On the other hand, if you bike everywhere and avoid running like the plague, biking is the way for you. If you’re a gym rat, weight lifting may well be the answer for you.

The truth is there are dozens upon dozens of reasons I can enumerate that will validate one training method over another. I could cite a number of studies that will sway you either way, and I would be right in all instances.

So where does that leave you?

NOWHERE! Just confused and maybe ready to throw in the towel or decide that diet alone is the way to go. GOOD LUCK WITH THAT!

No, instead of citing studies that are biased and skewed, not adequately conducted, or are merely thinly veiled product endorsements to sell you what you don’t want or need; I’d like to show you what I have noticed over the last 40 years of my training life.
To do this, I would like to take a couple of recent training sessions and compare them from the several aspects that apply to the premise of the title of this article.

BIKE DAY:

On May 5th, 2019, I rode a hilly 73Mile bike ride in the hills of Malibu, in SoCal. To be precise, this ride can be found here, on my Garmin site.
The notable statistics beside the distance, are that I gained 5,039 feet over those 73Miles, and that it took 6:40hours of ‘moving time’, in other words, the time I was actually pushing the pedals around.
You can find all the particulars of this ride here, should you want to dig into all the stats.

However, as pertains to our discussion here, the crucial point is that I burned a whopping 4,774 calories during this ride.

This was a training ride, and, knowing it would be long, I took it easy as much as I could. Of course, when I hit Decker canyon, the steep hills made me weep. There would be nothing easy about it after mile 30.

It is worth noting at this point, if you are not one of my subscribers, that I’m a Triathlete, and that I’m 67 years old. I’ve been a Triathlete since 1980, and I’ll be a Triathlete well into the next few decades. It will be helpful to read my history here so you get the context of what I’m saying.

Those 4,774 calories are significant! They represent what someone of my build might eat in 2days perhaps, or 3days if they are on a calorie restrictive diet! I don’t know about you, but to me, 3days of food denial is the absolute definition of hell right here on earth!

In any case, this ride only took 7hours to complete.
It was fun, I had great relax and feeding time by the beach watching Dolphins do the same, I met other riders, I saw great panoramic views, and I had a great sense of accomplishment at the end.

It was a fantastic Sundae, I got back about 1pm and had a great lunch, and the day was still young, totally perfect summer day:) I ended the day with a Margarita and a HUGE dinner.

THE RUN:

July 4th, 2019, Pacific Palisades 5k, just one month after the Decker ride above. Pacific Palisades rises from the Pacific Ocean to the SantaMonica mountains above, the course is very hilly.

The 1st half was a long sweeping downslope across the town of Pacific Palisades, the other was uphill along SV boulevard. We were warned not to go out fast, but rather try for a negative split. The run stats can be found here if you care to look it up.

It was great fun, I met lots of nice people, and had a post race breakfast at Pacific Palisades Legion post 43 right after. All this courtesy of Team RedWhite&Blue, the organization that caters to Veterans of the US military.

The final time for my 5k was 28minutes flat, which translates to a 9minute mile pace. Taking into consideration my conditioning at the time, it was a brilliant tactical effort. I ran a conservative pace until the hills, then I attempted to stay strong to the finish. That, I  accomplished I’m happy to say.

However much fun all this was, the statistic of importance here as relates to this article, are the calories I burned. This 28 minute near maximal effort yielded 428 calories burned! While I was exuberant afterwards and had a tremendous sense of accomplishment, I was pretty much fried for the rest of the day. I couldn’t possibly contemplate running another step.

After the race, I was famished. The breakfast was heavenly, and eggs, bacon, potatoe salad, coffee, pancakes, donuts and pastries just kept showing up on my plate and disappearing.

Even though I drank maybe 3 or 4 cups of coffee, I crashed on my bed when I got home, the caffein was of no help. Laying down just seemed too irresistible, so that’s what I did. I was dead to the  world for the next 3 hours.

WHAT THIS TAUGHT ME

To be fair, I must point out that the bike ride was a training ride, while the 5k was a race. This likely accounts for my constitution the rest of the day. I expended a lot of intense energy on the run in a short period of time, and I expended more energy on the bike, but over a much longer time period. While I was revved after the bike, I was exhausted after the run.

However, irrespective of intensity, the total caloric output over the distances for Bike or Run would not be altered significantly. In other words, the statistics of importance are that:

• in 6hours and 40minutes of actual biking I expended 4,774 calories.
• In 29minutes of running, I expended 428 calories.

Even if I were biking at a faster speed, or running at a faster pace, the caloric output would not be significantly different.

And so, to extrapolate with a bit of math, I burned 712 calories per hour on the bike (4774cal. divided by 6.7hrs.)
On the run that burned 428cal. in 30minutes, I would burn a hypothetical 856 calories per hour (428cal. multiplied by 2.), if I could keep that same intensity for an entire 60minutes.

From what the math tells us above, it would seem that running burns more calories per hour than does the bike.

However, the reality is that there is no way on this earth that I could keep up that running pace for an hour. In fact, with the actual conditioning I had at the time, just running for an hour on flat ground, even at a slower pace, would have been an overwhelming task that likely would court an injury or actually result in one.

Running for longer than an hour would result in proverbially ‘hitting the wall’, and limping home at a crawl or calling an Uber.

On the other hand, the ride that spanned over 7hours resulted in an entirely different experience during, as well as after, the activity. While extremely difficult due to steep hills and length of time, the entire experience was thoroughly enjoyable and exciting from start to finish.
The two breaks I took to refuel and rest a spell, were ‘just what the doctor ordered’.

Without getting into the mechanical, physical, and psychological advantages and disadvantages of each activity and going off topic; I want to come back to what we are concerned with here. And that is the 4,774 calorie expenditure biking and the 428 calorie burn of running.

To burn 4,774 calories running, I would have to run just a tad over 5hours and 30minutes, at ANY speed! Clearly, that is not even feasible, it’s downright scary!

CONCLUSION:

For many reasons beyond the obvious of what I illustrated above, biking is the better activity to incinerate vast amounts of calories and help you dip into your fat stores for energy. However, there is a compelling argument for running to accomplish the same outcome as well when viewed under a different set of circumstances.

Dozens of variables creep into the equation to favor one activity over the other. Things such as childhood, introduction to sports, age, abilities, hormones, circadian rhythms, and other circumstances can influence the validity of biking over running, and vice versa.

In this particular instance, as I presented the above situation, biking is clearly the winner.

But, I would never contemplate, or desire, to minimize the overwhelming and critical importance of running in burning calories, as well as the host of other benefits that are of the most basic abilities of humans from cradle to grave. But that is the province of another article, which if not already written, can be found here.

Running has qualities that no other sport can even approximate. Running is basic to every sport there is, it is the activity from which all others spring. Indeed running, after walking, is the basest of human locomotion developed following crawling.

From there evolves every other sport invented by humankind; tennis, skiing, track and field, gymnastics, boxing, wrestling, etc, etc, etc!

Oh, and cycling of course!