Exercise bicycles are great for keeping up your fitness levels when the weather is less than favourable or you just don’t have time to get to the gym (or even if you just don’t want to pay monthly gym fees).
Here are my top 5 reasons why I prefer an exercise bicycle over any other exercise machine:
- Safer than a treadmill or cross trainer. You never see gym fail videos featuring an exercise bike! If you haven’t exercised for a while, then it’s simpler and safer to start pedalling rather than risking setting a treadmill to be too fast and getting thrown off it!
- Easy on joints. The circular motion minimises the impact that you would get from a treadmill. This is important if you’re very overweight or have painful knees.
- HIIT. It’s easier and safer to do High Intensity Interval Training – with any other machine you’d either have to gradually slow down and speed up the machine (which is not going to fit in the HIIT timing system, making it more like generic interval training and less full-on HIIT) or jump on and hope for the best! Whereas, with an exercise bicycle, you can just stop pedalling for 20 seconds and restart immediately.
- Multitasking. Try playing a game on your iPad while running. (I can guarantee that as a minimum, you will at some point smash your iPad!) If you’re not a big fan of exercise, then having something else to occupy your mind will make the time pass much more quickly. I, for instance, am bored rigid of repetitive exercise such as running but can easily pedal for hours on an exercise bicycle while ploughing through loads of books!
- Cost-effectiveness. A reasonable one is typically cheaper than other machines. Whichever exercise machine you look at, if you choose one that has the basic functions and feel that you’d want to see in a machine in a commercial gym, the exercise bicycle equivalent is cheapest, for instance, it will have a non-friction resistance.
Examples
The following bicycle is an excellent example of an affordable machine that offers similar functions to a proper gym bicycle, primarily because it has magnetic resistance and monitors various fitness statistics as you exercise. Click to save 60% on an exercise bicycle
My personal favourite, however, is the recumbent exercise bicycle because you can sit up as you would a normal chair and still burn calories, meaning you can more easily watch TV, play with your iPad or read a book! Click to save 40% on a recumbent exercise bicycle
Conclusion
I highly recommend you buy an exercise bicycle machine to help you achieve your fitness goals as it means you have a convenient and effective way of improving your cardio-vascular fitness as well as burning calories.