You Can Get as Much or as Little Exercise as You Like

The beauty of electric bikes is that you can get as little or as much exercise as you like on an ebike. It has been proven that it is possible to get effective exercise on an ebike, if you use it in pedal assist mode – and of course, also if you use it without assistance. You can choose, for example, to only use assistance on uphills. You can also choose to use a low level of electrical assistance, so that you still have to work hard to keep the bike going. Bear in mind that ebikes are heavy – anything between 35 and 80 pounds.

Electric Bikes Exercise Your Core Muscles

Because ebikes are heavy, your entire body, and especially your core, will have to work to ride it. Your core muscles will engage as you balance it and maneuver it around corners. Also as you wheel it in and out of your garage or elevator! Similarly, your joints and bones will be strengthened by what is essentially weight-bearing exercise.

Research Proves that You can Get Fitter and Healthier with an Electric Bike

Riding an electric bike will improve your cardiovascular fitness, improving the efficiency of your heart, your lungs, and your blood vessels, while improving your blood pressure. Like all exercise, it will also improve many other aspects of your health, including your blood sugar processing, and resistance to cancer. 

In fact, researchers were often surprised at how much exercise people got on ebikes, as compared to regular bikes. Some started off skeptical, and admitted to being surprised by their research findings. In short, riding an electric bike brings with it all the many benefits of exercise, which has been described by researchers as a miracle cure for most of the ailments that eventually kill us (and can make our lives not worth living before that).

#1: The Best Way to Get Fit with an Electric Bike – Use it for Transportation

Almost all researchers agree that if you get an adequate amount of moderate exercise, it will have an extremely good effect on your health. Specifically, the US Government recommends that we all get at least 2.5 hours of moderate-intensity aerobic exercise – or 1 hour and 15 minutes of vigorous-intensity aerobic exercise – per week. Of course, it can be hard to fit this into a busy schedule. That’s why so many people are turning to active transportation, such as walking, cycling, or riding an electric bike.

When you ride a bike to work, for example, you get exercise twice a day, five days a week. That adds up to a whole lot of exercise very quickly. This happened to me when I started commuting to work every day on an ebike – 30 minutes twice a day added up to 5 hours of moderate exercise per week. This was double the recommended minimum, and it made me fitter than I had ever been before.

Use Your Electric Assistance Wisely to Get Fit

With great power comes great responsibility! In the case of the ebike, that means do not get a bike with a throttle controller and just sit on it, without pedaling. Obviously, that is not going to make you fit. Of course, if you just wanted transport, that would be fine. But if you also want to get fit, you are going to have to pedal. The beauty of an ebike is that if you get a Pedelec, the assistance only kicks in when you pedal. You can choose varying levels of assistance to kick in once you start pedaling. This means that you can choose how hard you want to pedal. And let’s face it – we don’t need researchers to tell us whether we are getting a workout. We can feel it for ourselves as we ride, and – often more so – after we ride. If you feel tired after a ride, you have had a workout! So all you need to do is to choose a level of assistance that is low enough that you can feel your body is getting a moderate workout.

When I was commuting on an electric bike, I used my own power as much as possible, and usually only engaged significant assistance when I needed it – for uphills, and when sudden bursts of speed would make me safer. Also, because the bike was heavy, I would often engage a low level of assistance on flats, to compensate for the weight of the bike. Some of the hills were very steep, which meant I had to pedal as hard as I could, as well as use maximum assistance, to get up them.

Use Electric Power Plus Your Own Power for Thrilling Speed!

To be honest, there were also times when I used maximum assistance on flats. However, this was when I was in places where it was safe to go really fast. On those occasions, I would use maximum assist, plus pedal like a mad man, just for the thrill of getting up to as fast as 25 to 30 miles per hour on my bike.