Peloton has surged in popularity, offering a convenient way to stay fit and connected from home. But how effective are Peloton classes for weight loss? This article explores the effectiveness of Peloton classes for weight loss, considering various factors such as workout types, intensity, timing, and the importance of nutrition.
Understanding Peloton and Weight Loss
Peloton offers in-home spin classes with well-built bikes, instructors, a tight community, and technology. But if you're working out hard and you’re not seeing fat loss results or losing weight, it probably has less to do with your workout and more to do with your nutrition. While Peloton can assist with weight loss, it's not solely based on the bike. Diet is a key factor that impacts weight loss, exercise performance, and accounts for time spent outside of exercise classes.
The Role of Nutrition
Actual weight loss requires a consistent calorie deficit, repeated over a period of time. How long of a period of time that is depends on how intense your calorie deficit is. It’s more than possible to overeat foods that we view as healthy.
Calorie Output and Estimations
Calorie outputs are estimations based on power, your weight, time, and a few other factors. Calories burned estimates aren’t a perfect science, and while that science might be improving, the estimates of how many calories you burn while exercising can still be wildly off base.
Exercise as a Health Tool
Beyond those numbers being a general estimate, it’s important that we recognize that exercise in itself isn’t a weight-loss tool. It’s a health tool. Can working out consistently help you lose weight? Definitely. But the help it provides typically comes from helping us stay motivated to eat well, sleep regularly, and be more mindful of how we treat our bodies. The more quickly you can start exercising for the health and wellness benefits instead of the calorie benefits, the better off you’ll be.
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The Importance of Calorie Deficit
Our eating habits are the most important factor when it comes to weight loss. Specifically, how much we eat. Most of us understand that we have to eat less in order to lose weight. Eating plenty of fruits, vegetables, and exercising is a good recipe for improving your health. But weight loss in itself still comes down to creating a calorie deficit.
Food as a Reward
It’s easy to think of food as a reward. For many of us, we’ve been taught since we were children that’s exactly what food is: a reward. And that thought follows us into adulthood. But that’s not how the world of weight loss works. Like we’ve established, creating a calorie deficit usually involves a very small margin of error. For plenty of people, that might only be 100-200 calories. Which means even if you have a great workout, you’re only a heaping serving of peanut butter away from eliminating your calorie deficit for the day, which might undo any weight loss you were going to see that week.
Hunger and Exercise
The double-edged sword of working out is the fact that working out, by its very nature, is bound to make you hungrier. Think about it: you’re pushing your body, you’re sweating, and you’re doing that for around an hour or more. As we’ve already seen, the whole hunger/exercise relationship is incredibly complicated, and it feels impossible to separate the two. But one of the things that we have to accept is that working out will inevitably make you hungrier at some point during the day. Maybe it’s because you’re implicitly viewing food as a reward and not even conscious of it, so you desire more food. No matter the reason, if you’re not actively paying attention to how much you’re eating on a daily basis, working out regularly can accidentally lead you to overeating.
Protein and Satiety
Speaking of hunger, because protein is important for satiety, not consuming enough each day can leave you feeling hungry and hence, eating more of other foods.
Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis (NEAT)
NEAT can be thought of as all the movement you rack up during your day to day life that isn’t exercise. Your daily steps, the fidgeting you do while you’re waiting on a meeting to start, and the work you do to prep your food? But here’s where things get tricky: when you work out really hard, the constrained model of energy expenditure says that you will then start moving less over the rest of the day, bringing your NEAT down from where it previously was. Not all bad, right? NEAT accounts for around 30% of your daily energy expenditure. Calories burned during exercise pale in comparison to that number due to the fact that exercise tends to happen for drastically shorter periods of time. After all, if your workout takes you an hour, there are still 23 hours in the day that your body can be moving around and burning calories.
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Optimizing Peloton Workouts for Weight Loss
To maximize the effectiveness of Peloton classes for weight loss, consider the following:
Class Types
- HIIT and Hills Ride: This format alternates between high-intensity intervals and challenging hill climbs.
- Tabata Ride: Short bursts of maximum effort followed by minimal rest periods-Tabata rides are efficient fat burners.
- Bootcamp Classes (Tread or Bike Bootcamp): These classes alternate between cardio segments and strength training.
- Intervals & Arms Ride: Burn calories with intervals, then tone your upper body.
Incorporating Strength Training
Weight loss is about more than just cardio. Lifting weights helps build muscle, which increases your resting metabolic rate. Consider incorporating these classes:
- Full Body Strength:
- "Total Strength" with Andy Speer: A progressive strength training plan designed to build muscle and burn fat.
- Core Strength Classes: A strong core improves posture, balance, and performance in other workouts.
Structured Programs
- "You Can Run" Program: For beginners who want to build up their running endurance.
- "Discover Your Power Zones": Ideal for riders who want to tailor their cycling to their fitness level.
Combining Workouts
After a year of using Peloton during a period when I wanted to cut fat and improve endurance, I found a winning combination: three HIIT rides per week, two strength sessions, and one long Power Zone ride. Tracking my food, staying consistent, and mixing intensity levels made all the difference.
Workout Duration and Intensity
According to the United States Department of Health and Human Services Activity Guidelines, adults should get in at least 150 to 300 minutes of moderate-intensity exercise or 75 to 150 minutes of vigorous activity every week. Doing so has been shown to improve health and longevity in a number of ways, including lowering the risk for heart disease and diabetes, and improving mental health. Your ride doesn’t need to be long to provide an instant mood lift and improve your sleep.
Measuring Effort and Intensity
If you’re pressed for time but you want to optimize your fitness, shoot for two 40 to 60-minute hard interval workouts a couple of times per week. Generally, unless you’re doing an easy recovery ride, the shorter your workout, the harder it should be.
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There are a number of ways to measure your effort level:
- Heart Rate (HR): This is a measure of how many times your heart beats per minute. If you train with a heart rate monitor regularly, you’ll develop an intuitive sense of how you feel at different heart rate zones.
- Cadence: Also known as Revolutions per Minute (RPM), this is a measure of how many times your pedal turns over per minute.
- Resistance: Think of your resistance dial as a way to instantly change the “terrain” you’re riding and/or gearing. Dial it up and you’re simulating a climb (or shifting into a harder gear). Take it down, and it feels like you’re downshifting, or even pedaling downhill, depending on how light you make it.
- Wattage: Wattage is a measure of power, and is determined by a combination of your cadence (or revolutions per minute) and the gear you’re in (or your resistance). A higher gear and faster cadence translate to higher power output, or wattage.
- Rate of Perceived Exertion (RPE): Peloton utilizes an RPE scale of one to 10. Focusing on RPE “teaches you to be in touch with the physiological sensations of what happens in the body as you move from aerobic (oxygen based) work to anaerobic (without oxygen) based work,”
Setting SMART Goals
When determining your goals, it helps to keep them “SMART.” That means they should be:
- Specific
- Measurable
- Attainable
- Realistic
- Time-bound
For a cyclist who typically rides for 45 minutes three days a week, a goal like “Complete my first 90-minute ride within four weeks” is perfectly SMART. You know exactly what your target is, it’s easy to measure, it’s reasonable given your current fitness level, and you’ve given yourself a deadline.
The Best Time to Work Out
Your best workout time is largely impacted by your body’s circadian rhythm, which influences daily activities from sleeping to eating to-yep-exercising. On top of that, our chronotypes (whether we’re early birds or night owls) and our biological sex also play a role, since both influence body temperature, hormone levels, and preferred exercise times.
Morning Workouts
If you’re looking to lose weight, target visceral body fat, and more, morning workouts are where it’s at, especially for women, according to Dr. Arciero’s research. Women who exercise in the morning have much greater loss of total body fat and belly fat. Their blood pressure was also significantly reduced compared to women who performed the same workout at nighttime.
Afternoon Workouts
A seven-year U.K. study of more than 92,000 men and women published in Nature Communications in 2023 found that people who worked out between 11 AM and 5 PM were less likely to die prematurely of heart disease or other causes (with the exception of cancer) than those who exercised outside that window.
Evening Workouts
According to Dr. Arciero’s study, men lost more weight and eliminated more visceral fat when they worked out between 6:30 PM and 8:30 PM. Those nighttime workouts also lowered systolic blood pressure, cholesterol levels, and feelings of fatigue.
Additional Benefits of Indoor Cycling
Beyond weight loss, indoor cycling offers a multitude of benefits:
Efficiency and Convenience
One of the benefits of indoor cycling-especially when done at home-is how convenient it is, no matter your schedule. With no commute required, you can roll out of bed and onto the seat in a matter of minutes…and in whatever outfit you like.
Cardio and Strength Combined
Indoor cycling also delivers impressive strength-building benefits. The resistance levels on indoor bikes allow you to tailor the intensity to your fitness level, challenging your muscles and promoting strength development.
Scalability for Beginners and Injury Recovery
Another benefit of indoor cycling is that in comparison to many weightlifting programs or long-distance running races, it’s very scalable for those who are new to exercise or coming back to it after a break. The fluid motion of pedaling minimizes the risk of injury, making it an ideal choice for individuals with joint issues or those recovering from injuries.
Cross-Training
Research suggests that cross-training-that is, regularly switching up your workouts from your main form of exercise-is one of the best ways to reduce the risk of injury.
Physical Health Improvements
From improved heart health to stronger bones, indoor cycling improves your health metrics across the board. Research suggests that three weekly indoor cycling classes may help increase bone density in the arms, legs, pelvis, and spine. Indoor cycling has also been proven to support balance.
Personalization
On days when you’re not feeling like pushing to the limit, indoor cycling is one of your best exercise bets. You can customize your intensity by adjusting the resistance on the bike, increasing or decreasing your pedaling speed, and modifying the duration of your session to match your fitness level and goals.
Community and Accountability
Peloton’s Leaderboard-as well as a supportive instructor and a group full of fellow riders from around the world-offers extra motivation to stick to your indoor cycling training schedule.
Mental Health Benefits
Exercise, including indoor cycling, has a profound impact on mental and emotional well-being. Cycling releases endorphins, the body's natural mood enhancers, which can alleviate stress, reduce anxiety, and decrease symptoms of depression.
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