Exercise bike after 65: minutes, resistance and how often

An exercise bike is usually the first machine people reach for after 65: it is gentle on the knees, it ignores rain and ice, and you cannot fall off it the way you can trip on a kerb. What nobody tells you is how long to pedal, how hard, and how many times a week. These are the numbers to start from, and how to adjust them yourself.

How many minutes you actually need

General guidance for adults, including those past 65, lands at around 150 minutes of moderate aerobic activity a week. That is 30 minutes five times, or 50 minutes three times, whichever suits your week. Time on the bike counts in full.

If you are riding nothing at the moment, 150 minutes is not the starting line. It is the target for month two or three. Start at 10 minutes and see how you feel the next day. If your legs are normal and there is no unusual afternoon tiredness, add 2 to 3 minutes per ride each week.

Short rides add up. Three lots of 10 minutes across a day are worth roughly the same as one 30 minute session. For a lot of people past 65 that is easier on the knees and easier on the attention span, because half an hour on a stationary bike gets dull well before it gets hard.

What resistance, and how to judge it

The number on the display means nothing outside that particular machine. Level 8 on one bike is not level 8 on another, and watts are measured accurately only on the more expensive models. What does transfer between machines is your own sense of effort.

The simplest check is speech. At moderate resistance you can talk in short sentences but you cannot sing. If you are chatting away in full paragraphs and breathing as though you were sitting in an armchair, the resistance is too low. If you cannot get five words out without stopping for air, it is too high for the main body of the ride.

If you prefer a figure, use an effort scale from 0 to 10, where 0 is sitting still and 10 is the hardest thing you can imagine. Most of the ride should sit at 4 to 6. Give the first five minutes to a 2 or 3, and the last three to five minutes as well.

Cadence, meaning pedal revolutions per minute, should be somewhere between 55 and 70 for most riders. If you have to rock in the saddle and shove the pedal down with your whole body weight, the resistance is too high and your knees pay for it. If your legs are spinning and your thighs feel nothing at all, it is too low. Set the resistance so the cadence stays steady to the end of the ride.

How often, and what the first month looks like

Three to five times a week. Below three, progress accumulates very slowly. Above five there is little extra benefit if every ride is moderate, and a greater chance of fatigue piling up.

A workable first month:

• Week one: three rides of 10 to 12 minutes, all moderate.
• Week two: three or four rides of 15 minutes.
• Week three: four rides of 20 minutes.
• Week four: four rides of 20 to 25 minutes, with short harder efforts added to one of them.

Those harder efforts are straightforward: one minute at about 7 out of 10, then two minutes easy, repeated four to six times. Once a week is plenty. If your blood pressure is not well controlled or you have known heart disease, agree the harder efforts with your doctor before you add them.

The sign that you have pushed too far is not sore muscles. It is tiredness that carries into the next day, broken sleep, and losing any desire to get on the bike at all. When that happens, drop back to last week's ride length rather than stopping altogether.

Saddle height and knee pain

Set the saddle so that, standing beside the bike, it sits roughly level with your hip bone. With the pedal at the bottom of its circle, the knee should stay slightly bent, somewhere around 25 to 35 degrees. Never fully straight, and never sharply folded.

A saddle set too low is the most common reason for pain at the front of the knee in people who have just started. If that is where it hurts, raise the saddle by a centimetre or two and drop the resistance one level. Pain behind the knee, or hips rocking side to side, usually means the saddle is too high.

A recumbent bike, the sort you sit back in as though in a chair, is the better choice if your balance is unreliable, your lower back complains, or swinging a leg over a frame is awkward. After a hip replacement there are limits in the early weeks on how far the hip may bend, so check what is allowed after a hip replacement before your first ride.

If the knee still hurts when you are not riding, on stairs or getting out of a chair, that is no longer a question of machine setup, and it is worth reading why knees hurt under load in a bent position.

What a bike will not do for you

A bike does not carry your body weight. That is exactly why it is kind to joints, and also why it does little for bone density and almost nothing for balance. The two things that most determine independence past 70, leg strength and the ability to catch yourself when you stumble, improve only partly from pedalling.

So two things belong alongside it. First, strength training twice a week, because muscle mass drains away after 60 regardless of how well you ride, and how much weight that actually takes is covered in the piece on sarcopenia after 60. Second, walking on real ground, which no machine replicates, with the pace and distance set out in the guide to walking after 70.

What the bike does superbly is work the heart, build endurance, help with blood sugar control, and give you a safe way to do something every single day without excuses. It is not a substitute for weights, and it is not a substitute for walking.

When to see a doctor

Stop pedalling and get urgent help if you develop pressure, tightness or pain in the chest, neck, jaw or left arm, breathlessness out of proportion to the effort, a racing or skipping heartbeat, cold sweat with nausea, sudden weakness down one side, or slurred speech.

Speak to your GP before you begin at all if you have known heart disease, blood pressure that is not under control, a recent stent or heart surgery, diabetes with complications in the feet or eyes, or if you get light headed when standing up, which is covered separately in the article on dizziness on standing after 65.

One more thing worth knowing: many blood pressure medicines, beta blockers in particular, change how the pulse responds to effort. The number on a heart rate monitor can stay low while you are genuinely working, so the talk test and your sense of effort are more reliable than any heart rate table.

The short version

• Aim for about 150 minutes a week; start at 10 to 15 minutes per ride and add 2 to 3 minutes each week.
• The resistance is right when you can speak in short sentences but not sing: effort 4 to 6 out of 10, cadence 55 to 70 rpm.
• Ride three to five times a week; once a week you can add four to six one minute harder efforts.
• Saddle level with your hip, knee slightly bent at the bottom; pain at the front usually means the saddle is too low.
• Cycling builds neither bone nor balance, so pair it with two strength sessions a week and some walking.