what’s better for you, running or cycling?
i know these are very polarizing subjects, especially across new york city and greenpoint brooklyn in particular, each with a plethora of devout followers on either side convinced their side is right. to be clear, I’m not picking sides here, Instead I’ll do my best to explain the pros and cons of each and allow you to decide for yourself. This article will look at running and cycling from the view of using them as a tool to improve your cardiovascular system —heart, lungs, blood flow, etc— and overall health by improving your aerobic capacity. If you are training for a race or competition and are curious about cross training I’ll probably write another article on that down the line. Let’s start out with the basics.
Why is cardio necessary for me?
cardio is any form of activity that elevates your heart rate for a sustained amount of time. cardio doesn’t only have to be the traditional activities we think of like running or cycling; it can be literally anything. you can jump on a pogo stick for an hour if you’d like and if that gets your heart rate in your zone 2 range (60-70% of your max heart rate) then that’s a valid form of cardio training. running or cycling are usually easier to sustain than pogo jumping, which is why they are thought of initially, but hey if you like pogo jumping and can do it consistently then have at it. cardio can be further broken down into low intensity and high intensity, each having benefits of their own.
low intensity cardio is classified as an activity that elevates, and sustains, your heart rate between 50-80% of your max heart rate. You can find your approximate max heart rate by taking your age away from 220 (if you’re 30 years old your approximate max heart rate would be 190). This type of cardio is excellent for training your body to use fat as fuel, improve the volume of blood your heart can pump out with each stroke (good for lowering your resting heart rate), builds cellular engines that are capable of creating long term energy improving your stamina, and this form of exercise has a low rate of fatigue so you can accumulate more work with less recovery time between (helps you progress faster).
high intensity cardio is the opposite of low intensity cardio. high intensity cardio is any activity that briefly spikes your heart rate to 80-100% of your max. With low intensity cardio you want to spend a good amount of time with your heart rate between 50-80% of your max; usually 20-120+ minutes per session averaging around a 60% heart rate for that time, equaling roughly 2+ hours in this zone total per week. For high intensity cardio you want to spend no more than 12 minutes in this heart rate zone, per interval. you should not do all 30 minutes of your session, let’s just say, in zone 4 or zone 5. if you do a high intensity session you’re likely to do repeat bouts of high intensity with prolonged rest in-between versus trying to sustain that intensity for an unbroken duration. This type of training improves your rate of oxygen uptake (necessary for increasing your healthspan and longevity), trains type ii muscle fibers, and trains the body to process and shuttle lactate more efficiently.
long story short, cardio is important and you need both easy long duration days paired with short high intensity sessions to get the most benefit. So, running or cycling?
should i cycle or run?
let’s take a relatively untrained cardio person as an example. They lift weights regularly but do not do any form of cardio and would like to start, is running or cycling the answer? when it comes to accessibility running is way more accessible than cycling, all you need to start is a pair of $30-$100 athletic shoes versus a $1,000-$10,000+ bike and gear. Not even mentioning the learning curve if you’ve never ridden a bike.
now looking at the amount of load each activity has on the body, and the effort required, this is where the separation becomes more individual.
running is extremely intense on the body, this is why it has such a high rate of injury. when you break it down running is essentially jumping and landing on one leg over and over and over and over again. the faster your run the more intense the load with step is, sometimes equaling 3-8x your bodyweight. if you have never ran before or haven’t run in months to years jumping into running can cause more harm than good. cycling is very low impact as the motion is much more fluid, you’re seated the entire time, and never experience loading forces to your body. Cycling can be more core intensive compared to running depending on the geometry of your bike, but this can easily be adjusted with less aggressive geometry to start.
typically what I see with people who start running is within the first month of running their heart and lungs feel great seeing improvements every run, their muscles may be sore but they bounce back relatively quickly and feel stronger week after week, and they might feel some tenderness in their joints but that usually goes away once they stop their run. They feel great initially and are stoked on their newfound love with running. then overtime that joint tenderness they ignored earlier becomes sharp and begins to persist days after their run and things may even start hurting too much to even jog or walk. this doesn’t happen for everyone but in my experience I’ve seen way more of this type of person versus the latter. the reason a person may experience this is, as mentioned, running is a high load activity which requires not only mobility but strength and precise tension through a persons joints to absorb the load of each step. Tendons and ligaments are also stubborn as they are much slower to adapt and recover compared to muscles and are usually the first to go if pushed past what they are used to. so, in this case, if you have no prior experience running or know you are injury prone I would suggest cycling overall or if you want to run, start very slow and easy when you begin running and add light plyometrics (pogo hops, depth drops, etc) to your strength training routine.
When looking at calories burned per minute, running wins out over cycling; since you are using your full body when you run you use more energy when compared to cycling since you’re seated and using mostly legs and little to no upper body. In this case I would say if you’re short on time running would probably provide a better bang for your buck. to visualize this, very roughly, the energy to run a 5k is about equivalent to biking 11k. Of course this is highly dependant on speed and terrain and other factors but you get the point. if you’re interested here’ a great deep dive on this topic. In a previous article I wrote about why calories burned isn’t what you should be looking at, but generally speaking if you are trying to achieve similar volume across biking and running you’ll need to bike longer to do this.
can I do both, bike and run?
yes, you can have your cake and eat it too by using certain activities to accomplish a result that it’s more intended for. here’s what I’d suggest, since we need a high volume of low intensity cardio and short bursts of high intensity cardio why not use the bike for our long slow cardio sessions and run for short powerful sessions?
the bike is very low impact so the chance of injury when the low intensity volume is high is quite low compared to running and you can get the same benefit as running for a fraction of the risk. Since running is high impact and more energy intensive than biking use that to your advantage when performing quick bursts of high intensity. this formula is much more sustainable and drops your risk of injury dramatically.
overall, do what makes you happy because you’re way more likely to stick with an activity you enjoy versus the “optimal” one, even if that’s jumping on a pogo stick at varying levels of intensity.
