The Basic Exercise Rules

The Bicycle Diet, as its name implies, is one which requires you to ride your bicyle every day. If you cannot ride outdoors for some reason, that might mean riding an exercycle at home or at a gym. Either way, you have to ride every single day, unless very unusual circumstances make it impossible.

If you are travelling on business or you're on vacation, for example, plan ahead to find a gym which has an exercycle available for your use. If you normally ride your bicycle, but a windstorm or rain or snow or some other weather problem makes it impossible, have a back-up plan involving a stationary bike.

HOW MUCH TO RIDE

The ideal amount you need to ride every day is one hour. If you are a slow rider, that might mean only 12 miles or so. If you are fast, and you probably aren't if you're fat, that could mean 20 miles or so. As you get into better shape, as your legs get stronger and you lose weight, it gets easier and easier to go faster. Three months into the Bicycle Diet, you should be going at least 2-3 miles faster per hour.

As I start this program, I have no trouble riding for one hour. However, if that is too hard for you, then start out riding for just 15 minutes. Do that every day for a week. Your second week, add 15 minutes, so you will ride (at a comfortable pace) for 30 minutes. Your third week ride 45 minutes a day. From your fourth week on, ride one hour.

If your goal is to eventually ride a long ride, say 100 km or 100 miles, you will have to slowly increase how much you ride 6 days a week, and add in a longer ride one day each week. For example, if you start out riding 16 miles a day, you might ride 20 miles on Saturday. Then every Saturday thereafter, you could add 4 miles to your long ride. After 10 weeks, you would have added 40 miles and your Saturday ride would be 60 miles (which is about 100 kilometers).

That's the same basic method for training for a marathon, having one long run day each week and adding to it slowly. Yet one great advantage of bicycling over running is that you can add mileage and not take time off to recover from your longer rides. As you run more and more, you need to take more and more days off to recover. When I was training for my marathons and my long run got up to over 20 miles, I would usually only run 3 days those weeks.

The Bicycle Diet program does not involve any long rides. To follow it strictly, you simply need to ride one hour each day. Keep this in mind, though: being on the bike for an hour and riding for an hour are not the same thing. If you end up hitting red lights and stopping at stop signs or you see a friend and stop for a chat, you are not riding during that time. The hour, regardless of your pace, is only counted when you are pedaling.

Because you want to keep pedaling, you want to burn calories, my recommendation is to ride in a place where there is no traffic and no stop signs. Where I live, we have good bike lanes in town. However, in town I have to stop every few blocks. My preference is to bike out of town and ride on untrafficked rural roads.