What is the difference between cycling and indoor cycling?

Without strapping on a helmet and dodging heavy traffic, there are plenty of indoor cycling options. If you are health conscious and want to take advantage of cycling through an indoor cycling bike, there are 2 options available.

•       Using a smart exercise bike or indoor cycling bike at home
•       Indoor cycling bike or classes at the cycling studio or gym.

You may become confused as both are exercise bikes. So, what is the difference between cycling and indoor cycling? Here we will discuss only indoor differences between these two category bikes. So that if you are in a dilemma about indoor bike vs. exercise bike, this article will help you find out the perfect one for you.

Again depends on your fitness goal, age, schedule time, and budget, you can decide accordingly. Suppose if you are young and pass extremely busy days with lots of activities, and more importantly, you want to lose weight within the shortest time, you can prefer a indoor cycling bike without any confusion.

Why? Because indoor cycling bike helps you join in a group class and offer you cycling as a sport. However, instead of joining gym classes, you can use an indoor cycling bike personally in this pandemic situation. As it provides relatively low-intensity training and you can do your daily cardio perfectly, a regular indoor cycling bike is more than perfect for you.

Furthermore, the indoor cycling bike offers better quality, high performance, and a more durable upgraded version than other traditional bikes. However, I agree that indoor cycling bikes are expensive and not available in the fancy model. But you can also get a reasonably priced best indoor cycling bike under $500. Sounds crazy, right? You can make your smart home gym by simply looking into indoor training.

Photo courtesy of Spinning®

On the other side, if you are young or middle-aged and can manage at least 30 minutes to exercise, you can prefer a cycling bike or exercise bike. The main benefit of using an individual exercise bike is enjoying your progress and moving forward slowly. I mean, there is no hard competition. Also, you can get it in several types like Upright bike, recumbent bike, semi-recumbent bike, and so on. With lots of price variability, you can choose the best one and enjoy your exercise.

Now let’s see from a better health perspective. indoor cycling vs. cycling bikes?    

Although both are primarily designed to improve cardiovascular fitness and weight loss journey as a real-world cycling performance. But still important to know before making a final decision.

Injury Risk:

Compare to a traditional exercise bike indoor cycling bike has less injury risk. It’s because of its heavy flywheel and lower handlebar. Flywheel keeps the bike moving in a constant position and produces less impact on the body joints. 

On the other hand, for doing cycling faster, if the user prefers standing while ride it may increase the injury risk. It’s applicable for cycling bikes too. So, it’s better to do cycling or indoor cycling in a sitting position or even on the exercise bike and get a greater range of movement from start to end.

Muscles Worked:

In both bikes, your muscle worked nicely. Using a normal exercise bike will work on your hamstrings, quads, calves, gluts, etc. the core will also work to keep you balanced while riding.

By using a indoor cycling bike, your whole body workout is also possible. But here, the condition is you have to be in the standing position. Else your lower parts will only work if you do work out in a sitting position. But that should not be an issue. Because you can do exercise in both sitting and standing way to make muscles workout most.

Calorie Burn:

Usually, more and more calories will burn in a indoor cycling bike workout Because it has a heavy flywheel and incorporates more muscle exercise. That’s why it takes more energy to ride. 

Exercise bike produces less calorie burning because it has a light flywheel and doesn’t need to push more energy. But by changing the resistance, the user can perform more calorie-burning exercises.   

Final verdict:

It’s clear that from weight loss to cardio exercise, even for toning muscles, cycling helps us directly. Indoor cycling and exercise bike both provides killer workouts. The most important thing is nowadays everyone is doing a desk job, and minimal movement is needed. So it’s highly necessary to give your body movement not only for weight loss and muscle tightening but also to lubricate your body.

Now you determine which one is suitable for you. Don’t feel overconfident or excited while choosing a bike between a indoor cycling and a normal exercise bike, as this may not be long-lasting.

Still, I can say by using an exercise bike. You will enjoy every training session by burning calories slowly. In a indoor cycling bike, you will burn more calories and lose weight faster by pushing yourself in the body’s capability.