How to Calculate MPH for Bikes

Riding a bicycle is excellent cardiovascular exercise and a workout that can help you lose weight. At just 10 miles per hour an individual who weighs 200 lbs. burns over 360 calories in an hour of riding. Most people find tracking their exercise helps in achieving exercise goals. It’s not difficult to do this by converting time to miles per hour in biking. However, you must know how much distance you cover. That’s easy to do if you ride a route of known distance or get a bike odometer.

Record the starting and ending times for your bike ride. If you are using an odometer to measure distance rather than traveling a course of known length, record the starting and ending odometer readings as well.

Subtract the starting time from the ending time and write the answer down in minutes. Then subtract the starting from the ending odometer readings to find the distance covered. For example, if your starting time is 6:30 and you finish at 7:42, that’s 1 hour and 12 minutes, or 72 minutes. If the initial odometer reading was 125.5 miles and the ending reading was 137.5 miles, you have 137.5 minus 125.5 miles, or 12.0 miles.

Divide the distance by the time in minutes to find the miles traveled per minute. Suppose you rode for 72 minutes and covered 12.0 miles, you have 12.0 divided by 72 minutes, or 0.167 miles per minute.

Multiply the miles traveled per minute by 60 to find mph for biking. Continuing the example above, you would multiply 0.167 miles per minute by 60 to get your speed of 10.0 mph.