If you’ve spent any time reading about fitness, you’ve probably heard that your workouts aren’t the only movement that matters. The rest of the day matters too — the fairly boring stuff: walking around the grocery store, taking the stairs, doing laundry, gardening, standing at work, or walking a few blocks to pick something up.
There’s a term for the energy used during much of that activity: NEAT, or non-exercise activity thermogenesis.
The name makes a very ordinary idea sound much more complicated than it is. NEAT is the energy we use for activity outside of sleeping, eating, and intentional sports or exercise. The concept has been studied for decades, particularly by researcher James Levine, whose work looked at how much everyday movement can vary from one person to another. His overview of non-exercise activity thermogenesis is a good place to start if you want the science rather than the social-media version of it.
NEAT is only one piece of daily energy expenditure, and it shouldn’t be treated as a way to burn calories or squeeze a workout into every free minute. What the team here at SEB actually find useful about NEAT is the attention it brings to the rest of the day. Most of us spend far more time going about normal life than deliberately exercising, and our choice of transport is part of that.
That’s where our e-bikes enter the picture.
Some trips have a very low bar for becoming car trips
Around Alexandria and the rest of the DMV, it doesn’t take much before driving becomes the default. 3 or 4 miles is an easy example. It’s probably farther than you want to walk when you have somewhere to be, but still close enough that you might spend almost as much time parking as you did getting there.
An e-bike works particularly well in that range.
We see people use them for work, errands, lunch, appointments, and trips into DC that they previously would have driven. None of this requires calling the ride a “workout.” We can reframe it as just transportation that happens to involve pedaling.
That distinction is important when talking about NEAT because an e-bike ride isn’t automatically NEAT. Someone heading out for an hour-long “cardio” ride is exercising. The connection is that owning an e-bike can change how much movement finds its way into the rest of your routine.
A grocery run that used to involve sitting in the car waiting for pickup might now involve a few miles of riding. Meeting someone in Old Town can mean riding there and walking around the shops once you’re all locked up. Someone who rides to work a few days a week has changed a recurring part of their routine rather than adding another appointment or exercise goal to it.
Over a week, those choices can make a meaningful difference in how much time a person spends moving.
QUICK CHECK: WHERE COULD A LITTLE MORE MOVEMENT FIT?
What does the research say about e-bike riding?
The obvious question is how much physical activity you’re getting when a motor is helping.
Researchers have studied this fairly extensively now. A 2026 systematic review indexed by PubMed included 31 studies and 11,890 participants. Across the research, e-bike riding commonly reached at least moderate physical-activity intensity. Riders generally exerted less effort than they would on conventional bicycles, as you would expect with pedal assistance.
An earlier systematic review published in the International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity found similar results. E-cycling generally produced physical activity at moderate intensity, with effort typically higher than walking and lower than conventional cycling.
That makes sense if you’ve ridden one. Pedal assist doesn’t pedal the bike for you. On a typical pedal-assist e-bike, the motor responds to the rider and reduces the amount of effort needed to maintain speed, climb a hill, or cover a longer distance.
For everyday transportation, reducing that effort can be a life-saver. Showing up to work late and sweaty is a legitimate reason someone might avoid cycling as their go-to means of commuting. So is a large hill between home and the office. A destination may be well within someone’s ability to reach on a conventional bike, but considering the round trip and how much time you have on your hands… that’s enough to make driving more appealing.
Distance starts to look different after a while
This is something we’ve noticed through Ride Club.
Our routes have gradually become more ambitious because people learn what they (and their bikes) can comfortably handle. 5 miles feels different once you’ve ridden 10. A 20-mile morning gives you a better sense of your battery, your preferred assist level, and what you actually want to bring with you (some ideas here).
Our September route from Alexandria to Bethesda is a good example. By car, those two places belong to different parts of the DMV. By bike, there’s a surprisingly logical connection between them: Mount Vernon Trail toward Georgetown, then the Capital Crescent Trail into Bethesda.
That route is long enough that battery management matters. We covered the practical side of that in Maximizing Your E-Bike Range: What to Know Before the Next Ride Club, including tire pressure, gearing, assist levels, and the effect of repeated stops and starts.
You don’t need to ride 30 miles to get anything out of this, though. The same change in thinking happens closer to home. Once 4 miles feels easy by bike, places within that radius can become realistic go-to destinations.
That gives you more chances to choose an active trip without having to invent somewhere new to go.
The best use of an e-bike may actually be the boring stuff
E-bikes tend to photograph well on mountain overlooks and scenic trails. But the inside-look into real ownership includes a lot more grocery bags, custom options, and making it (and the routine of riding) truly yours.
A bike becomes useful when you stop waiting for an occasion to ride it. It’s there when you need coffee, when you’re meeting someone nearby, when you forgot one thing at the store, or when sitting in traffic sounds particularly unappealing on an already lazy day.
Some of those rides can qualify as exercise. Some can contribute more to the everyday activity that researchers describe when they talk about NEAT. You don’t need to sort each trip into the correct category before leaving the house.
Here at Strictly, we keep it simple.
If an e-bike helps turn some of the time you used to spend sitting into time spent moving, you’ve changed something meaningful about your day. And because you were already going somewhere, it has a decent chance of happening again next week.
For us, that’s a much more interesting health benefit than trying to turn every ride into a workout.
Curious whether an e-bike could work for the trips you make every week?
Stop by Strictly E-Bikes at 683 N. Washington Street in Old Town Alexandria. Tell us where you normally drive, how far you’re going, and what the route looks like. We can help you figure out what kind of e-bike actually makes sense for it.
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