On your bike! Cycling for fitness

Cranking it up
The easiest way to add oomph to your workout is to change it up. In the start-and-stop pace of city biking, where you're dodging traffic and racing stoplights, it's still possible to ramp up your heart rate for an inner-city workout. "I take a hillier route or an extra-long route to work," says Dana. The lengthier route has a payoff -- cycling can torch approximately 250 to 1,000 calories per hour depending on "how hard you work."

Beth Mansfield, a registered dietitian and exercise specialist in Ottawa, also suggests adding intervals to your ride. "A lot of runners interval train by picking up their pace until the next telephone pole, for example, then slowing down once they hit it, then trying again with the next pole," says Mansfield. "You can do the same thing in cycling."

She also suggests pushing yourself by changing gears, which adds more resistance -- moving into a bigger gear means it will take more work on your part to get the wheel around.

Or invest in a cycling computer so you can keep pumping to keep your heart rate at its best level.

"If you have one of those cycling computers on your bike, then you can go at a given speed and try and maintain it," says Mansfield. "If you have a heart rate monitor on it, you can say you'll keep your heart rate up to a predetermined zone of X beats a minute."

She also offers up a tip to tell if your body is actually learning to work harder on your ride. "To monitor how fit you're getting, do one long, slow hill once a week and time yourself," says Mansfield. "Go comfortably up it in whatever time it takes. As you get fitter, you'll notice that for your same effort, you'll be going up in less time."

Making your workouts more intense
For a more serious bike workout, try road biking on a stretch of stoplight-free road or tackling mountain biking across rough terrain.

"There are different philosophies about how many calories you burn, but in some studies done comparing road riding to mountain biking -- excluding variables such as your fitness level, wind and distance -- you'll burn more calories mountain biking because you're always fighting the terrain," says Jourdain. "There's more resistance when you're mountain biking."

Bolster your bike workout by adding indoor strength training to complement your exercise.

"Cyclists forget about their upper body," says Mansfield. "But you need good upper body strength to climb hills. So do some upper strength training to strengthen your back and your arms as well as core work to fortify your abdominals and lower back. A stability ball is good for working on core muscle groups."

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