[Closed] What sport is more demanding than mountain biking?

How many other sports can get you to the top of a mountain and back down again whilst sitting down?

🙂 I know this is a joke, but it does quite accurately express how MTBing can be as easy or as hard as you make it.

If your going to run up a mountain you have to run, you cant run slower if you do your walking up a mountain and thats a totally different sport/hobby.

Bull fighting.

OP- You are SurferMatt and I claim my £5

I was up at 02.30am for work yesterday AND I cycled in. I'll have another £5 for that or a Bluepeter badge at the very least.

Water polo, toughest sport in the world, simple as!

Matt

Bull fighting.

Underwater chess-boxing.

Or Octopush. I was always knackered after a game of that when I was learning to dive.

Be good if they did mind u...

Fight bulls I mean.

Oh yes... 😀

I think you'd defiantly need Bombers..

What was it? "Mountaineering, motor racing and bullfighting are the only real sports, all the others are just games"

Running is way more nackering than biking.

Triathalon - yep Iron man is close but not the exposure to possible death

Is drama queenery a sport? I think we've found a world champion.

crikey - Member
Just tell her you've been reading 50 shades of grey and you've got some ideas for a date. Bish bosh, job done!

Urm supposed the beating her up is quite hardwork

also for those girls playing rugby league it must be hard running away from the ball, and you have to admit pushing a pack weighing over 130 stone up a field isn't easy

"Mountaineering, motor racing and bullfighting are the only real sports, all the others are just games"

Moto X is way tougher than Mountain Bike on the majority of muscles in the body.

I'm not doubting the aerobic fitness levels of top MTB riders, but as far as strength and mental endurability . MX Enduro beats all.

yeah - motorbike enduro. Done some 2 day events at an okay level and never felt so physically trashed. I think because it is so hard to train for - you trsain for cycling on a turbo / commuting etc. It's difficult to get out on the motorbike and emulate enduro conditions

And when you get stuck you are really stuck. If you're up to the seat in a bog you just have to haul yourself out somehow. on a mountain bike you can pick it up...

Sort of like one continuous DH eh?

To me MTB isn't about distance (unless you're competing/willy waving/ competitively willy waving). I would only mention distance to a fellow cyclist if it was relevant.

You can have a demanding session just playing about in the same small area or a relaxed long XC ride. There are too many variables to isolate distance as the factor of difficulty. Much like rock climbing; bouldering is super concentrated climbing but not too high and there are routes over 100m which are dead easy but continuous. An outsider may be more impressed by the 100m slab, a climber would be more impressed by the 8a 3metre bouldering problem.

It's all about the crux 😉

singlespeeding

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+1 for motorcycle enduro. The bike's more sluggish to steer, hard to pick up when you fall off, bogs itself into mud and has lots of power you can get into trouble with, especially when you're tired. The course designers put in lairy obstacles that test your trials skills but put them on the uphills as well as on the downhills. You're putting in the same effort and concentration going up as down.

You're timecarded, meaning that you have a start time and a set of times to do each lap or series of laps within. On shorter courses, your times might look like this:

Start: 10:04am
1 lap - 50 minutes
2 laps - 65 minutes
1 lap - 25 minutes
1 lap - 23 minutes
1 lap - 14 minutes

If you finish a lap early, you're not allowed to cross the line and start your next lap or you're penalised, as you are for being late. If you do come across late, you have to "carry" that lateness into the next lap's time, and so on. So, you have to get good at mental arithmetic, while riding fast.

There's an MX style individually timed "special test" that directly affects your overall result. Very often, you have to include this in one of your timed laps, including the queueing to start.

And notice how the lap times shorten throughout the race. So, while you're riding hard and trying to stay on top of the machine and the maths, you're given shorter and shorter times to complete a lap. You end up utterly knackered and having to ride a trashed course in a faster time than at the start.

But it's damn good fun.

I just can't think of a sport that challenges legs, core, upper body, aerobic ability, endurance and mental stanima to the same level am happily proved wrong.

Boxing
Tennis
Rugby

to name three

MTBing is not technically that difficult in the grand scheme of sports - obv the top men are on another planet but as far as getting generally proficient it's plain sailing. You could take it up at 25 and get to a decent standard no problem.

Something like football is far more difficult - not a sport you can get a late start on IME. Stuff like gymnastics or some of the martial arts are in a different solar system to mountain biking for aerobic / technical challenge.
It wouldn't be termed a sport, but I used to do a traditional Kung Fu style that was half awesome, half totally depressing at how hard it was to do properly. It would take total dedication over many years to get to mediocre.

For me, the hardest thing has been long-distance motor-cycle reliability trials. I can honestly say that I have never been quite so done in after anything as much as I have riding them.

Nothing like being completely unable to put a sentence together after 100+ miles and 12-15 observed sections in the freezing cold / wet / dark mud of a December Sunday ... and having to be helped of the bike at the end. 'Bonk' doesn't come into it.

Tho' Water Polo comes a close second.

I always found the 2-3 games of football a week I used to play pretty easy by comparison ... (hmm, tho' we did seem to loose a of our fixtures, thinking back 😉 ).

Another vote for Enduro.

I got my first MTB to help with a bit of fitness training before my first ISDE.
I entered a race on it after i'd had it a few weeks and came second.
My first thoughts were this is a bit easy. 😉

I'd say motocross. Your body takes an absolute pummelling from the terrain, to the point where on occasion you can end up pissing blood as your kidneys hve been rattled around. Arm pump after 2 laps is like nothing I've ever experienced cycling. The intensity of sitting on a startling with 40 other riders all hoping to get to the first corner in the lead beats the start of an xc race hands down. After an xc race I would often have a slight cough and aching legs, but after racing motocross, everything would ache. Not to mention the size your balls need to be if you want tot b competitive.

XC sking - that could be on par - is there upper body work out- never done it...

So essentially you're ignorant. The upper body demands of MTBing are insignificant compared to XC skiing. In fact I'm still not sure why you think MTB particularly gives you an upper body workout - if you find it tires out your upper body then that's only because you don't do any sports which do provide that workout.

Oh, and if you don't think triathlon is dangerous enough, how about its close cousin, multisport - check out the Speights NZ Coast to Coast with whitewater kayaking and mountain running.

multisport - check out the Speights NZ Coast to Coast with whitewater kayaking and mountain running.

Is that a bit like those "tough mudder" and "rat race" events for IT types who're too unfit for tri?

*lights touch paper and leggs it*

I've XC skiied a bit, I did not find it as hard as MTBing hard. The effort seemed to be distributed nicely all over rather than concentrated in the thighs. Hard to explain, but I was able to go flat out for an hour or two without feeling the need to grimace in pain like I do on the bike.

However I'm sure aracer will tell me how wrong I am in a few minutes 🙂

Running OTOH, that's much harder for me than MTBing - a 10km run has me in as much pain as an XC race.

Don't get me wrong, the Trans-Provence is a tough week but it's a million miles a way from the benchmark for a tough sport event.

Climbing is less than 2000m per day (some days more like 1000m) and untimed. If you're reasonably fit then you can cruise this without too much effort at all. It's incredibly scenic.

The special stages are amazing riding, some of the best trails on the planet, but they are not tremendously technical. Sure, they're physical and riding them fast uses all your skills (and more) but they're certainly not pushing the boundaries.

Trans-Provence is an amazing holiday and something which every serious biker should aspire to do but completing it doesn't make you an extreme sportsman.

The most obvious sport which is "tougher" than mtb is road riding.

Is Willy Waving a sport?

Surely its more about what you actually enjoy and what fits around your own lifestyle etc,

I've always quite admired people competing in those multi-day/multi-sport adventure races; a bit of cycling, bit of swimming, kayaking, climbing, running, sleeping in a tent in between all conducted over several days of pretty much constant activity... But I doubt I'd actually enjoy the training for one, let alone actually competing...

I am a mountain biker, I like Mountain biking, if someone is un-impressed/un-interested by this it doesn't really matter, I'm the only one who has to enjoy it.

Edit:

The most obvious sport which is "tougher" than mtb is road riding.

Per mile covered? not sure I'd agree there easy enough to expend the same amount of energy per hour on a Road or MTB and cover very different distances... So they're really on a par IMO...

It's difficult to relate to someone how physical it is. A combination of aerobic fitness, leg strength for climbing, upper body and core and mental concentration for descent for extended periods of time.

Seeing the general state of the average mtber who rides past my house, I'd say Nordic Walking is probably tougher.

How about cage fighting or karate?

Running or climbing tire me out loads more. I guess it depends on how fast you ride.

I've XC skiied a bit, I did not find it as hard as MTBing hard. The effort seemed to be distributed nicely all over rather than concentrated in the thighs. Hard to explain, but I was able to go flat out for an hour or two without feeling the need to grimace in pain like I do on the bike.

Probably because you're not trained enough in XC skiing to be able to push so hard - limited by technique (I'm assuming you're talking about classic skiing, where it is pretty hard to put serious power down without good technique). I've raced both, and the difference is that after riding a bike it's just your legs aching, after an XC ski race your whole body aches (though that's skating - my classic technique isn't good enough to be able to tire myself out in the same way).

However I'm sure aracer will tell me how wrong I am in a few minutes

Apologies for the delay.

I would say that rowing really can't be beaten for a cardio-vascular workout. It has the same demands as TT'ing but it involves all the body. Nothing I've done on a mountain bike comes close..

Few sport in themselves are demanding, it just depends how hard you push yourself. Your heart can only be worked so hard and in MTB a combo of extended high-level cardio and risk-taking is rare, I guess Nico and his ilk are closest? The TDR must be toughest cycling event as endurance goes. Yet Alpine-style mountaineering even at a moderate level is pretty unique I think, at the top level it's off the scale in terms of toughness / difficulty etc. It can be open-ended, uncertain, mentally and physically way more demanding than anything else simply because it's so committing. Get it wrong, go too slow or make a bad judgement call under fatigue or stress and there's plenty of opportunity to kill yourself and others.

Maybe a RLJing, no moves-barred, rush-hour in London, 48hr TT on a tandem would be getting closer 🙂

every one wailing on mtbing?

Football is not harder at sunday league level than xc/dh mtb at wc level.

Conversely riding Cannock chase once on a Sunday morning before drinking seventy five lattes is not harder than premier league football.

To those saying that you can take up mtb late and become an elite racer you are talking rubbish. You couldn't take up dh racing/xc racing/cycling at 25 and make it to elite level. Just like you can't take up any sport at 25 and become a professional/elite.

[i]Mountain biking/cycling ([s]un[/s]like a number of sports) is as hard as you make it[/i]

You can't compare like for like. What a silly game.
Boxing is much harder... unless you get knocked out, or knock the opponent out in 10 seconds...

To those saying that you can take up mtb late and become an elite racer you are talking rubbish. You couldn't take up dh racing/xc racing/cycling at 25 and make it to elite level. Just like you can't take up any sport at 25 and become a professional/elite.

What about that Irish truck driver who's gone from being 17stone fatty to raceing the tour of Ireland in 3 years, or that guy in his 40's who rode for a pro team in either Quatar or Oman erlier this year after only taking up cycing in the last few years. Cycling's one of those sports it's very easy to come into late. Even in DH, Peaty proves you can be 40 and still on the Podium.

I think there are sports that are more demanding that mtb BUT I am always interested and pleased (from a weight loss perspective) at the difference between my HR when MTB and road biking. Leaving aside the obvious reasons, it always makes me feel much better to look at effort spent on a 2-3MTD ride in comparison with hilly road ride of same duration.

So let's not knock MTB too hard!!

Leaving aside the obvious reasons, it always makes me feel much better to look at effort spent on a 2-3MTD ride in comparison with hilly road ride of same duration.

You're not trying hard enough on the road then 😛

Possibly 😉 but always struggle to get my HR up on my road bike even in a triathlon and I am mashing it then!