^^^lately there has been a problem with Glee - the plot has gotten thicker and there are less singing numbers, ugh!

as for swimming, I have one problem with it - very few people have the technique and stamina to swim hard enough to get the same cardiovascular/toning benefit of running and cycling, IMO. Most people you see in the pool do very casual laps. Unless you're very disciplined to do hard lap workouts on your own or are in master class clinics, nobody ever gives their all when swimming, IMO. That's why you see a lot of fat swimmers. People think they have worked out a lot so they go gorge themselves, while in reality they only burned like 100 calories...

welle wrote:as for swimming, I have one problem with it - very few people have the technique and stamina to swim hard enough to get the same cardiovascular/toning benefit of running and cycling, IMO.

Dude... I am so there. My butt must be made of lead, because I sink like a stone in the pool. I kick and kick and kick until I'm completely exhausted and I go nowhere. I can only make it about one pool length.

Would you say that swimming 2k in 50 minutes is a sufficient workout?

I'm pretty sure that's all I have in me

welle wrote: That's why you see a lot of fat swimmers. People think they have worked out a lot so they go gorge themselves, while in reality they only burned like 100 calories...

Fat swimmers

An excellent point and worthy of comment, not like it has anything to do with the topic. People who exercise for weight loss are out of luck. An hour of running might burn 800 calories. A couple of Bagels can blow that away in 5 minutes. Cycling would again depend on whether you gave it your all or not, but the general rule is 2 - 3 miles of cycling equal 1 mile of running.

I'm a daily cycling commuter (17 miles round trip) and do about 10,000 feet of climbing on the bike per week (mountains in our back yard here in Santa Barbara). So I'm in pretty good shape. Just got back from four days of backpacking in the Sierra. The 30-mile route (Mineral King loop in southern Sequoia Natl Park) involved lots of altitude gains and losses between the 8,000 and 11,600-foot levels. My aerobic fitness was fine, but cycling uses the leg muscles in entirely different ways than hiking does. The first two days, after 3,000-foot gains and losses on both days, I was dying at the end of the day. When we hit an unexpected climb late on day 1, I had no legs left and took baby steps to where we camped. Similar day 2, with different terrain profile. But by the third day, I felt good during just under 8 miles of heavy climbing with another nearly 3,000-foot gain. The lake where we were going to camp was packed, so we walked the additional 4.3 miles out to the car, and aside from the pounding on the feet while descending 3,000 feet or so, I felt good and had plenty of leg strength. Takeaway: at least for an older guy like me, the underlying baseline fitness and strength are there from cycling, but it takes a couple of hard days to kind of transfer that strength over to hiking with a 30-pound pack. That's probably much faster, I'm sure, than someone who doesn't work out regularly would be able to do. So cycling helps, but if you're only cycling, don't plan to kill it on the trail for a couple of days. Might be different if you're in your 20s, 30s, 40s. Also, after all that hiking, I find that my climbing legs are not working well on the bike this week. Seems I now have to "teach" the legs how to be productive on the bike again.

FWIW, I have been cycling for many years, for just as long, if not longer than I have been hiking/climbing. I have always found it very beneficial for training for hiking up steep long hills. I feel like I started developing strong calf muscles early on from the biking, which then in turn carried me further in the hills once I started doing more of that, which would develop more for biking, and so on. Kind of a symbiotic relationship for me.

As of recently I have really upped the ante and bike commute about 36 miles roundtrip (with ~1000 feet of gain) a couple times a week, and my physical performance is probably the best it ever has been when it comes to alpine approaches.

I have never been much of a runner, but within the past year I have slowly gotten more in to it, and now am capable of running moderately uphill and decently quick going downhill, which I never was able to do very well.

I think biking/hiking/running complement each other very well in the realm of training, but like anything else, you need to be very wary of not over doing it.

The common benefit in doing cycling and hiking is it improves our endurance and cardioid performance that is why if you are doing cycling, it is alternately get benefits for hiking as well.