Stationary bikes watts or rpm?

Crossection

Ive been using the stationary bike in my local gym lately. I was advised to keep my RPM around 100. Someone has since advised me to forget about RPM and moniter my "Watts", and I need to keep them at about 100 watts. When I use calorie count or fitday I get crazy low figures for calories burnt at 100 watts. Compared to general use of a stationary bike.So which should I be watching and how do I calculate the calories burned.

**Timbuk2**

I would say forget about either. Just do whatever gives you a tough workout.

What I do is pick a good workout song on my iPod, that has a beat (there are 1000s of them). Match your feet to this beat, and then keep increasing your resistance/tension until it is difficult, but still possible, to maintain this beat. The music then serves as a motivation to keep at the speed, and the resistance makes it difficult.

The Guvnor

The bikes in my gym require your age and weight and therefore wattage and calories are altered accordingly.

Personally I aim to keep cadence at 100 on the bike and increase the level every 2-3 minutes.

The Davestator

Watts is used much more by pro cyclists as it is the power you are producing so it is a better indication of your workload than rpm.

Dont stick to 100 watts if its too easy, like Timbuk 2 says, make it tough and then the next workout, make it tougher (repeat every workout!)

Mellor

The Guvnor wrote: »

The bikes in my gym require your age and weight and therefore wattage and calories are altered accordingly.

Even with that info, all machines tend to over estimate calories burnt, on purpose.

Crossection wrote: »

Ive been using the stationary bike in my local gym lately. I was advised to keep my RPM around 100. Someone has since advised me to forget about RPM and moniter my "Watts", and I need to keep them at about 100 watts. When I use calorie count or fitday I get crazy low figures for calories burnt at 100 watts. Compared to general use of a stationary bike.So which should I be watching and how do I calculate the calories burned.

100 watts is vey low, and is less than 100 calories an hour (in terms of power and enery, not body use)

Bikes vary a lot. Resistance, level, rpm etc etc, and even two identical bikes can be different due to wear.

Don't worry too much about the numbers, just go hard and tough and listen to your legs

Crossection

Mellor wrote: »

100 watts is vey low, and is less than 100 calories an hour (in terms of power and enery, not body use)

Im not sur what you mean by body use???
Only 100 calories. When Im pumping out 100 watts. The bike tells me Im burning appox 450 calories. WOW

**Timbuk2**

450 calories over what time frame? I wouldn't pay any attention to the machine output for calories burned - they overestimate, and are quite inaccurate.

I have a twin brother, who is a roughly equal weight to myself and the same height, and age obviously. If we both did the same workout on a treadmill, for the same time at the same speed and incline, the treadmills would tell us that we burned the same amount of calories. However, my brother is a lot better at running than I am, so to run the same run as me it would take him a lot less effort, hence I would probably be burning more calories. A heart rate monitor would pick up on this, but the treadmill has no way of knowing. Similarly, I am a much more experienced cyclist than him - so I would be burning less calories on a bike than him, although the exercise bikes wouldn't know this.

Moral of the story - forget about watts, and don't heed too much by how many calories the machine says you have burned (you can use it as a guideline to compare with previous workouts, perhaps, but don't put too much emphasis on it, it's usually higher than it should be). Just do whatever feels tough. And mix it up - don't just have your legs at the same speed the whole way through at the same resistance.

For a 30 minute workout, do a 5 minute warmup, 5 minutes of climbing, 5 minutes of sprinting (intervals), then 10 minutes of a continuous climb, matching your feet speed to a good song and increasing resistance every minute, then 5 minutes of sprinting to finish off. Cool down afterwards.

Crossection

Thanks

AntiVirus

Watts is a good indication of the amount of effort you're putting in, RPM on its own doesn't tell you much.

rubadub

AntiVirus wrote: »

Watts is a good indication of the amount of effort you're putting in, RPM on its own doesn't tell you much.

Yes, Watts are directly related to calories as it is all energy/power -but using calories in regards to humans is only a rough estimate anyway.

100W in 1 hr is 85.9kcal http://www.unitconversion.org/power/watts-to-calories-it--per-hour-conversion.html

Use these figures like a computer game and just try and beat your last "score"

Mellor

Crossection wrote: »

Im not sur what you mean by body use???
Only 100 calories. When Im pumping out 100 watts. The bike tells me Im burning appox 450 calories. WOW

By body use I was refering to the fact that keeping the bike at 100 watts requires more power the 100 watts, as moving the self weight of your body about requires power too

as mentioned, trest the calories output as a best score