With a little extra push, you could bike up tough mountain terrain or zip through commuter traffic…all while getting a good workout. Electronic bicycles, or e-bikes, are the hottest trend in fitness this year.
E-bikes look like a traditional bicycle, but give your ride a boost with electric motor and battery to help you get more power tp your pedals. There are many types of e-bikes, but most riders say that the experience is similar to traditional pedaling…only with supercharged legs!
Adding a motor may seem counter-intuitive if you’re trying to get a good workout in, but an e-bike can be a smart tool to enhance your fitness routine or support efforts to commute to work.
With physical and mental wellness being a necessity in this fast-paced and competitive world, here’s two main ways that an e-bike can help improve your well-being this year:
1. E-Bikes Lead to Longer and More Frequent Rides
The powerful motor and battery is definitely a plus point in an e-bike as it allows the rider to travel longer distances with ease than a regular bike. This motivates the rider to take the e-bike for a ride more often.
A comparative study between traditional bicyclists and new e-bikers showed that most e-bikers could commute faster by applying less effort while meeting the intensity levels associated with a healthy physical routine recommended by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the ACSM.
Another vast study was performed on the physical activity associated with e-bikes and traditional bikes with 10,000 participants across seven European cities. The study showed that e-bikers did more exercise on average every week and also took longer trips! The study also found that the benefits or gains from this physical activity were similar between the e-bikers and the conventional cyclists.
2. E-Bikes Supercharge Your Workout
Exercise and workouts on a motorized bike cannot be more beneficial than a regular manually pedaled bike for obvious reasons. But the comparison mainly depends on the switch or shift you are making.
- Burns Calories with Less Wear On The Body: E-bikes were made to provide a swift and sweat-free ride to users for commuting between places, something that a regular bike fails to provide. Riding an e-bike with pedal assistance and motors helps you burn approximately 80% of your calories compared to 100% with a regular cycle. This 20% isn’t really a huge number as you can easily make up for it by riding longer on e-bikes.
- Improves Cardiovascular Health: Adding in more biking to your routine can help your even prevent heart diseases and strokes! A university team in Colorado, USA, studied and found that people who commuted to and from their office in e-bikes had improved cardiovascular health, increased aerobic capacities, and controlled blood sugar levels when they shifted from cars. The heart rate levels achieved with an e-bike are found to be 94% of the traditional cycling heart rate levels. If you are making a shift from traveling in a car or motorbike to riding an e-bike, then without a doubt, an electric bike will enhance your health because of the increased physical activity.
- Increases Upper-Body Strength: E-bikes aren’t just great for your heart and legs alone. As electric bikes are heavier than traditional bikes, pedaling, balancing, and maneuvering an e-bike acts as a strengthening exercise. It improves your core strength as well as muscle, bone, and joint strength. Since it is heavy, taking the e-bike in and out of your garage or lifting it up and down the steps also increases your upper-body strength.
In Closing
In a nutshell, e-bikes offer numerous health benefits and have proved to be a worthy inclusion in any workout routine. Substituting walking or traditional biking with an e-bike to perform daily errands also improves health in an easy and comfortable manner.
Guest Contributor: Graeme McLaughlin is the Marketing Head at Evelo, a data nerd, and an E-bike enthusiast who is always excited about testing new bikes. After years of riding and coming from a career in cycle sales, he is still passionate about bicycles. Based in Vancouver, he enjoys riding everything from solo adventures in the mountains to big social night rides.