Thanks for you good information.

I think we also have to take into consideration that there is a maximum speed a cyclist can maintain. For it is between 32 and 33kmph on a 12.5 distance that has a couple of nice hills and some other up and down grades.

So when it comes to running a person may be able to burn more calories when they try to run themselves out than if they try to cycle themselves out. Also depending on the fitness level a person is at it may be more possible to sustain running longer than cycling and hence do better in burning calories running than cycling.

Cycling has a lot to do with the fitness level of your legs where running seems to have more to do with cardio.

Thanks!

Bob.

The power required to overcome the drag increases proportionally to the velocity times the drag – ie. the cube of the velocity – and since energy is power times time the answer is YES you will burn more than twice the calories (actually 8 times the calories).

Now for the caveats: 1) it doesn’t really scale perfectly since you will only burn more than twice the calories you would have burned on top what you would have burned had you not been cycling thus there is an offset, 2) transmission losses and friction between the tires and road surface also scale with velocity, 3) in the results there is a cubic scaling present but given the sparsity of the data points it is hard to justify a particular fit, 4) it may be worth considering that cycling at lower speeds may be fairly inefficient and thus the lower speed data points could be mis-representative and 5) technically, for this to be true the rate of energy consumption must be constant.

So cycling at double the speed will theoretically use at least 8 times the calories – this is the minimum according to the laws of physics and to suggest otherwise one must present more than out of context data.

Here’s an interesting link comparing calories per hour and rider’s weight.

http://www.nutristrategy.com/fitness/cycling.htm

Hope this helps.

I thought the question was clear. The person wanted to know if you double your speed do you double your calorie burn per mile or km. In most cases the answer is no. While I don’t have numbers that go past 30mph or 48kmph it appears the way the graph is going in higher speeds this would be the case. How ever when you get into 30mph or 48kmph average we are then into the pro circuit. I can hardly do 32kmph average over 25km.

I would agree that calories/hour is the rate people want to know but calories per distance for a certain speed can be changed to calories per hour very easily. Again when you get above 30mph or 48kmph you are into the pro circuit and far above what a normal person can do.

I see you point about 1hr at 20mph would burn 760 calories. I think I will review my numbers as there seems to be something off in them. That’s for pointing this out!