Does riding a stationary bike make your thighs bigger or smaller? Yes and no. It all depends on how you use the stationary bike and what food you are taking while exercising. If you need slender yet strong thighs, you can get them using this exercise machine. On the other hand, if you are trying to bulk up and looking for muscles, you got it!
Strong legs do not always mean big thighs. They can also be small and yet demonstrate strength when you work them up in the right manner. Leaner legs are particularly important for women to achieve their dream silhouette.
While there are certain ways you should follow to achieve this, it gives astonishing results once you start the exercise routine. Using a stationary bike, you can easily melt the fat from your thighs as it focuses completely on the legs. Especially the thigh muscles benefit a lot from this exercise.
You can start using the stationary bike without worrying about making your thighs bigger. You need to remember that thighs get bigger only when you train using heavy resistance and for a long period.
Otherwise, stationary bikes are well reputed for improving the strength of your legs’ muscles and making them leaner as you train. This aerobic activity not only helps you achieve your fitness goals but also gives you low-impact exercise.
Using this exercise bike, you can lose weight, strengthen your lower body, slim your legs, and burn calories. By using apt resistance, you can slim your thighs, flatten your abs, achieve an overall healthier look, and make sure you follow a balanced diet.
Cycling itself can’t give you bigger thighs
Renowned cycling competitions such as Tour de France feature bike riders, both men and women, with hefty thighs, and if you are discouraged seeing that, please don’t be. Those large thighs are not simply the result of riding a stationary bike.
Such gigantic thighs are not possible by cycling alone and require more effort and dietary intake to support muscle building. Moreover, the time you spend cycling is also a factor for achieving massive thighs.
Professional cyclists spend hours together on their bikes, building up their muscles. They not only cycle but also lift weights to improve the overall strength of the body. Strength training is the culprit that makes these athlete’s thighs massive and not just working on a stationary bike.
Stationary biking is an aerobic activity rather than strength training which encourages the burning of fat. Your muscle fibers are worked up for gaining endurance, making them prone to muscle fatigue which further makes them fatigue resistant as you train. While this process happens, there is no chance of your thighs getting larger.
In other words, you can bulk your muscle only when you affect the power-strength muscle fibers and not endurance muscle fibers. These power-strength muscle fibers are activated only when you lift heavy weights regularly, that too in many sets and not during aerobic activity.
How to make your thighs smaller using a stationary bike?
Using a stationary bike, you improve your endurance, focusing on toning your muscles and losing weight rather than making them bigger, like in strength training. It implies that as you work with your stationary bike, your thighs become slimmer than what you started with.
However, you should not expect spot reduction using stationary bikes. As you lose weight all over your body, the same happens to your thighs, and they become thinner. It is impossible to target a certain part of your body to lose weight or become smaller using any exercise.
Though certain exercises can target few muscles and make them stronger, here on a stationary bike, you get to target your thighs, glutes, and quadriceps particularly. You lose weight all over your body as you will burn calories using this aerobic activity.
Your body does not change as soon as you burn calories, meaning you cannot see the results overnight. If you exercise by keeping your resistance low by riding for more than 10 minutes at a speed that keeps your heart rate up, you can give your body the required endurance activity.
Riding with higher assistance for shorter durations, your workouts come under strength training which increases the size of your thighs. Taking care not to fall into the strength-building category and consciously keeping up with endurance activity can help you slim down the fat.
If you are concerned that low resistance levels do not burn fat efficiently, then you can use the climbing feature offered with stationary bikes to make up for this. Using this option, you can expend more energy yet not bulk up your thighs, giving you a greater scope of quickly losing weight.
Another advantage of using a stationary bike is even the front of your upper legs, i.e., quadriceps, and the muscles in your buttocks, i.e., glutes, are toned better than the thigh area. Your thighs become slim due to the calorie loss that happens during the aerobic exercise process.
The non-impact exercise makes the stationary bike a perfect choice for individuals worried about straining their knees, hips, and ankles. While biking supports your slimming efforts, it alone cannot help as you need to combine it with a proper diet.
A healthy, nutritious diet will keep your body active and help weight loss and supply your body with the necessary nutrients to make it strong. A healthy and strong body has a better metabolism, which helps combat fat quicker than a non-conditioned body.
Importance of healthy diet and calorie deficit
You need to maintain your calorie intake based on your requirement. For instance, you want to build lean muscle for toning your body, then consume exactly what you burn. On the other hand, if you want to lose weight, you need to expend more energy and consume fewer calories.
To lose a pound of fat, you need to burn 3,500 calories more than your consumption. So, let us see how a stationary bike exercise can help you lose what number of calories per hour based on different criteria.
| Weight | Moderate intensity | Robust intensity |
| 160 pounds | 509 calories | 826 calories |
| 200 pounds | 626 calories | 1,032 calories |
These approximate calorie values are for one hour of stationary bike workout for two different weights at two different intensities. The table indicates that a person weighing higher tends to lose weight quicker than a person who weighs less.
While it is important to maintain calorie count, it is also mandatory that you include healthy foods into this intake. These numbers will stand true only when you follow the calorie target, and if you do not maintain a proper diet, all your effort will be wasted.
Role of gender in muscle building and weight loss
Apart from weight, another important factor to consider is gender, as both men and women burn fat differently. They both lose weight and tone their body differently because hormones play a major role in toning their muscles.
Attaining slimmer thighs is easier for women as they have more body fat than men, which is expended during the stationary bike workout. Men build muscle due to the testosterone hormone leading to more muscle percentage than women.
As muscles burn a greater number of calories, it allows men to lose weight quickly. To gain muscle, you need to have less body fat or higher testosterone levels, which is not the case with women. However, it is important to gain muscle to lose weight quickly.
Using this aerobic activity of stationary bike, women can gain enough muscle to burn extra calories but not make them large. So, they need not worry about bulking up while using the stationary bike at low resistance as it burns only the extra body fat but does not form bulk muscles.
As you keep using the stationary bike, you will lose fat from your lower body making your thighs look smaller. Nonetheless, if you want to be safe and do not want to take a chance with your thighs, then consider cross-training.
You can alter your workouts with stationary biking and other activities such as running, walking, or swimming that work different muscle groups. You can choose to work on a stationary bike for three to four days a week and use the other activities for the rest of the days.
Final words
Limiting the resistance and choosing to write for a long period by keeping it at a moderate intensity will make your stationary bike activity fruitful to slim your thighs. Remember to combine it with a healthy diet and exercise to burn the target calories.