The allure of both road and mountain e-bikes is obvious. With the pedal-assist, which usually can be adjusted up or down to suit someone’s fitness and preferences, they make hills feel flatter and distances shorter. The extra boost may encourage people who are out of shape, inexperienced or entering or exiting middle age to cycle.

A few small past studies have found that riding a road e-bike also constitutes hearty exercise. In a small 2016 study in Boulder, Colo., researchers found that commuting on an e-bike for a month increased new riders’ fitness and improved their blood-sugar control. Most of the volunteers also accumulated more time in the saddle than had been asked of them for the study, presumably because they were enjoying themselves.

But little has been known about whether e-mountain bikes likewise provide a robust workout or whether riders will like them. So, for the new study, which was published in August in JMIR Formative Research, researchers at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, determined to find out.

They began by recruiting experienced local mountain bikers, in part because, should these riders work up a sweat on an e-mountain bike, newcomers to the sport would likewise be expected to get a meaningful workout. The researchers also were interested in the riders’ attitudes toward pedal-assisted mountain biking and whether the riders felt that e-bikes might make the activity somehow too easy.

They wound up with 33 riders, mostly men, from age 18 to 65, all of whom turned up on separate days at the trailhead for a rolling, six-mile, single-track loop. There, they completed several questionnaires about their beliefs about e-bikes, strapped on a heart rate monitor and activity-tracking watch and rode the trail astride either a standard mountain bike or a comparable e-version. After a rest, they repeated the loop on whichever bike they had not ridden before. At the end, they filled out the questionnaires again.