Here’s How Many Calories I Burned Riding an E-Bike Compared To. Regular Bike

I love e-bikes – they introduce non-cyclists to the sport, keep cars off the road, and most importantly, riding an e-bike is crazy fun. But is this really an exercise? If so, how much training do you actually put into traveling with a chaperone?

E-bikes , or electric bicycles, look like regular bicycles but have a motor (and battery) on board to help you pedal. This extra assistance can help you get up hills without breaking a sweat, or just speed up an easy ride. If you want to know more about what it’s like to ride one, here’s my review of the Propella 7S , an e-bike that I tested to see if riding an e-bike actually counts as exercise.

The answer depends on what you mean by the question: on the one hand, conventional bicycles provide a significantly better workout in terms of calories burned and effort expended than electric bicycles, but on the other hand, studies show that cyclists on e-bikes generally get more, or even slightly more, total exercise than people who ride bikes unassisted simply because they ride more often and travel longer distances.

How many more calories do you burn on a regular bike compared to an e-bike?

It seems obvious that riding a bicycle will require less effort from the rider with an electric motor helping to pedal, but what is less clear is how much less energy is used. E-bikes still require pedaling to maintain movement, and sometimes the calorie burn may surprise you. Like anything that involves burning calories, figuring out exactly how much an e-bike is cheating is difficult, but I wanted to get a rough idea, so I tried the following informal experiment.

I rode the same bike —the Propella 7S, a simple Class 1 throttle-free e-bike—with three different assist levels to compare calorie burn rates using data provided by my Apple Watch. This is based strictly on heart rate, with no indication of activity, so the fitness tracker doesn’t make any assumptions about anything.

I rode the same five-mile route with 40 feet of elevation gain three times at an average speed of 13 mph—once unassisted, once with moderate assistance, and once with as much assistance as my bike could provide.

Obviously, the number of calories burned while cycling is influenced by many factors: wind speed, temperature, size and condition of the cyclist, gearing, the bike itself, etc. This is an approximate figure, not something precise.

Calories burned while riding unassisted: 270.

I was surprised by the number of calories my Apple Watch said I burned on this just under half-hour ride, but I’m quite heavy, and riding an e-bike unassisted also means pushing a fairly heavy bike. I tracked the same ride on Strava without the heart rate monitor and with the outdoor cycling mode and came up with the same number: 263 calories.

I also rode the same route on my “analog” bike, an old 1990s hardtail mountain bike replacing “just a regular old bike,” and found that I burned 284 calories according to Apple and 293 calories according to Strava.

Calories burned with medium: 143

The Propella has six power levels if you count “unassisted,” so I set the middle level to “level 2.” At the medium power level, my Apple Watch showed that I burned 143 calories, which is about half as much as riding unassisted. My Strava agreed. Strava estimates that with e-bike riding mode enabled and no heart rate monitor, my ride burned 128 calories. (I got similar results when riding fully assisted: Strava’s e-bike calculations seem to assume you’re riding with a medium level of assistance.)

This is completely anecdotal, but the ride seemed twice as easy as riding without assistance. Lower level assistance on e-bikes typically works by “smoothing out” the acceleration as you pedal, giving more power as you get the bike up to speed, and then providing a little assistance to keep it at the speed you’re at. cruising, which helps you maintain something like a constant speed. So it’s easy to get started, but it takes a little effort to keep going.

Calories burned with maximum assistance: 97.

My Apple Watch showed that at the highest level of pedal assist, it takes less than 100 calories to ride an e-bike for five miles.

I would guess around 50 calories. With maximum pedal assist, riding requires minimal effort. Pedaling is essentially cranking the crank a turn or so and feeling the engine start to kick in, then coasting so you don’t go too fast. I spent most of my half-hour bike rides doing nothing but concentrating on not derailing the experiment by picking up speed. If I didn’t try to maintain a low speed, I would pedal more and thus burn more calories and make a longer trip.

And that’s the good news about e-bikes and exercise: Even if you get less fitness benefit in a lab mile-for-mile comparison, that’s not how people ride in the real world.

Comparison of “metabolic equivalent task minutes” between cyclists and e-cyclists

Researchers from the University of Zurich surveyed 10,000 cyclists in a study published in the journal Transportation Research Interdisciplinary Perspectives and found that e-cyclists and traditional cyclists ended up doing the same amount of moderate-intensity physical activity per week. Not because these two modes of transport are the same in intensity, but because e-cyclists ride more often.

Consistent with my anecdotal evidence on “desire to ride further,” e-cyclists on average reported longer ride distances than their unassisted counterparts—9.4 km vs. 8.4 km—and longer average distances traveled per day — 8.0 km. per person per day versus 5.3 km. Even though riding an e-bike with assistance requires much less effort, people tend to do it longer with similar results.

The study also looked at people switching between modes of transport. As you might expect, people who switched from cars, motorcycles or public transport to e-bikes saw an increase in physical activity. Those who switched from old-school bikes to e-bikes saw a slight decline in overall fitness, but the drop was mitigated by an average increase in total distance traveled and time spent on an e-bike.

In other words: ignore the fitness freaks who look down on e-bikes. The only effective exercises are the ones you actually do, and if you enjoy riding an e-bike (who doesn’t?), keep riding – it’s much more like a workout than sitting on the couch.