Bicycle Calorie Calculator

Cycling or biking is one of the most effective and healthy exercises for fitness. It offers many health benefits, including cardiovascular health, weight management, and stamina building. But you're curious to know how many calories you burn while cycling? In this article, I will explain everything about it, whether your goal is weight loss, performance measuring, or monitoring overall fitness.

What is the Calculate Calories Burned Calculator?

When you're cycling, understanding the calorie burn is important, as it gives you insights. Our calculator is designed to helps you quickly determine and understand how many calories you're burning based on your speed and how much distance you cover.

Let's dive deeper into this guide: How do you calculate calories burned using a calculator? Why do we need to track it? And some faqs.

How to Use the Bicycle Calorie Calculator?

Our calculator is simple, easy to use, and user friendly. Due to the bidirectional nature of the calculator, you can fill out any two fields you know, and the logic will compute the results for the other fields based on the fields you filled out. Here is a step-by-step guide on how you can use the calculator:

1. Enter your weight and choose any weight unit; by default, kg is selected (this field is required for calorie calculation).
2. Now, you can fill any two fields of these three fields and also choose their respective units while by default is selected already:
   • Distance
   • Speed
   • Time
3. For uphill cycling, you can enter the incline percentage (optional):
   • The incline field will be found under the "▼ Show Incline Options"
   • Enter a valid value between 0 to 45% to represent the hill grade.
   • Higher incline values will significantly increase calculated calories burned.
   • The incline option provides more accurate results for hilly terrain or mountain biking.
4. The calculator automatically will calculate the third field as mentioned above, and all other fields, calorie burned, weight loss, and cycling intensity options will also auto select, or you can adjust intensity.

The good thing is that our calculator is highly flexible. You can enter the values you know others will auto calculate, and you can explore others' fields and it's bidirectional feature to utilize it.

How the Cycling Calories Burned are calculated?

The Basic Formula

The calculator uses the MET (Metabolic Equivalent of Task) formula, which is the method for calculating the calories burned while cycling:

Calories (kcal) = MET × Weight (kg) × Time (hours)

• MET: Metabolic Equivalent of Task - represents the energy cost of physical activities
• Weight: Your body weight in kilograms
• Time: Duration of cycling in hours

Understanding MET Values for Cycling

The MET (Metabolic Equivalent of Task) can vary depending on the intensity of cycling:

• Leisurely cycling (<16 km/h): 4.0 METs
• Light effort (16-19 km/h): 6.0 METs
• Moderate effort (19-22 km/h): 8.0 METs
• Vigorous effort (22-26 km/h): 10.0 METs
• Fast cycling (26-31 km/h): 12.0 METs
• Racing (>32 km/h): 15.8 METs
• Mountain biking: 8.5 METs
• Stationary bike: 5.5-14.0 METs (depending on intensity)

Understanding the Incline Adjustment

For uphill biking or cycling, the calculator allows you to add the incline adjustment. Here’s how the incline adjustment works:

1. The power is required to overcome gravity which is calculated as a formula you can see:
   • Power = Weight (kg) × Gravity (9.8 m/s²) × Speed (m/s) × Grade
2. This power is converted to additional METs:
   • Additional METs = Power / Weight / 1.162
3. The adjusted MET value becomes:
   • Adjusted MET = Base MET + Additional METs

Understand better a with real world example

If a person of 70 kg weight is cycling at moderate effort (8.0 METs) for 1 hour on a flat terrain:

Calories = 8.0 × 70 × 1 = 560 kcal

If that person is cycling on a 5% incline at 20 km/h (which is 5.56 m/s):

1. Power = 70 × 9.8 × 5.56 × 0.05 = 190.85 watts
2. Additional METs = 190.85 / 70 / 1.162 = 2.34
3. Adjusted METs = 8.0 + 2.34 = 10.34
4. Calories = 10.34 × 70 × 1 = 724 kcal

The calculator uses your entered inputs to automatically compute and accurately estimate the calories burned and all other fields.

Why should we track the calories burned while cycling?

Tracking the calories burned while cycling offers various benefits and insights, from achieving weight loss goals to increasing motivation and accountability. Beyond just tracking the number of calories burned, this calculator helps you plan:

• Ideal Weight Management
• Fitness Goal Setting
• Exercise Optimization
• Motivation and accountability
• Nutritional Planning
• Training Progression and Health monitoring