Stationary bicycling and walking are popular forms of aerobic exercise. Both are cardio activities, raising your heart rate as your body increases the amount of oxygen delivered to working muscles. Both sports predominantly use leg, hip and gluteal muscles. Both involve continuous, repetitive movements. However, stationary cycling and walking have beneficial differences as well. Your own needs will determine which activity is best for you.
Stationary Bicycling
Stationary means you don't go anywhere. Indoors, a stationary bike separates you from cars, frees you from bad weather and pollens, and removes constraints such as crowded bike paths, wayward pedestrians and potholes. It gives you total control of your effort because you alone set the gearing and wheel-resistance levels. You, not the topography or wind, decide whether to crank hard or coast easily. Cycling Performance Tips mentions, too, that stationary bicycling tends to increase your overall work-output because it lacks downhill rests.
Stationary Bicycling and Walking: Differences
Bicycling is a weight-suspending exercise whereas walking is weight-bearing. Cycling is a better exercise if you have a leg or foot injury that will not tolerate the impact forces that walking and running generate. Stationary bicycling requires more hip-flexion and knee-bends. As your legs perform the pedal strokes, you lean forward at the hips and incur knee angles of 40 to 50 degrees. Walking involves less-extreme bending. However, bicycling's pedal-action is more fluid than walking's weight-shift based, bi-pedal biomechanics.
Aspects of Walking
When walking, you bear your own weight, and you shift that weight back and forth as opposed to resting it on a fixed bicycle seat. Walking is a balancing act. If one foot fails to land correctly, you will begin to fall. Stationary cycling does not usually pose that challenge. Walking takes you places. Walking creates its own wind resistance. Walking also stresses the bones and ligaments of your feet more than bicycling does, and this is beneficial if you have been cycling to recover from a running injury and need an intermediary activity before running again.
Bone Health
Bones need impact exercise to rebuild itself. This is stationary cycling's rare weakness. Because it does not involve limb-to-surface impact, if you limit yourself to cycling your bone is not optimally stimulated to regenerate itself, leading to structural weakness and fissuring. Bones fortify themselves by a series of physiological reactions to weight-bearing exercise such as walking, jumping and running. As explained by author and physician Gabe Mirkin, even weightlifting builds bone because it generates muscle tension, beneficially stressing supportive bone tissue. Bicycling does generate muscle tension, but with less bone/muscle stress overall.
Calories Burned and Muscles Used
Stationary cycling and walking have similar calorie-burn rates per level of perceived exertion. According to FitPro calculations, a 37-year-old male weighing 167 lbs. performing one hour of moderate cycling, at 8 to 8-1/2 mph, burns 374 calories. For the same male, walking 3-1/2 to 4 mph burns 387. Heavier individuals will burn more calories. Both bicycling and walking strengthen the lower-body muscles, but cycling favors the quadriceps and gluteals, whereas walking favors the calves, hamstrings and hips. Both provide healthful aerobic training.
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