Upright bike with panniers, about 22 minutes each way, completely flat route, ten trips a week. I never get properly out of breath and I do nothing else in the way of exercise. Part of me thinks two hundred minutes a week of moving must count for something, and part of me thinks I am just a slow pedestrian with better equipment. What did it actually do for people who rode like this for a year or more?
It counts, and the reason it counts is precisely that you do it ten times a week without thinking about it. Consistency at a modest intensity beats intensity you skip. The thing people underrate about commuting specifically is that it is not competing with anything in your calendar, so it survives busy weeks, illness recovery and bad moods in a way that a gym membership does not.
That sentence right there is worth more than any training plan. The exercise you keep doing is the one that works.
That is the part I keep coming back to. It is the only physical thing I have ever done for more than three months.
I would gently push back on everyone who is about to tell you to add intervals. I did that. I turned a pleasant twenty two minute ride into a training session, started arriving sweaty and irritable, needed a change of clothes at work, and within two months I was driving on the days I could not face it. The commute stopped being transport and became an obligation, and then it stopped entirely. It took me a year to start riding again and I now deliberately keep it easy. Protect the habit before you optimise it.
That is a fair warning and probably the more common failure mode. One hard minute on one bridge is about as far as I would push it for exactly that reason.
Two hundred minutes a week of moving your legs is more than most people manage. It is not training. It is a floor, and a floor is worth having.
One thing that made mine count for more without making it harder: I stopped taking the flattest, most direct route home. Same effort, slightly longer way with a couple of gentle rises, about seven minutes more each evening. It never feels like training and it added roughly an hour a week of riding that I do not resent. Going home the long way is a lot easier to sustain than going home fast.
The benefit that surprised me was not cardiovascular at all. Two years in, the difference is in how my back and hips feel after a day at a desk, and in the fact that I sleep better on days I ride than on days I do not. Neither of those shows up on a fitness tracker. If you have a specific health target you are chasing, that is worth a conversation with your doctor rather than a forum, but for general everyday function, ten short rides a week is not nothing.
@kerf_wander · 2mo ago
I wore a heart rate strap on my commute for a month out of curiosity, similar route to yours, flat and unhurried. My average came out in a zone that is genuinely light, and my ride sat around a hundred and ten beats a minute for most of it. Over ten rides a week that added up to a meaningful chunk of the general activity guidance without me ever feeling like I had trained.
When I added one deliberately hard segment, a two minute effort on the one bridge on my route, my average heart rate for the ride barely moved but my fitness measurably did over a couple of months. So the answer is that your commute is doing real but modest work, and that a very small amount of intensity on top changes the picture disproportionately.
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