Exercise Bikes Fitness

Have you ever considered using an exercise bike? You probably have used one if you have been exercising for some years. Exercise bikes are usually the begginer's entrance to the world of fitness and for good reasons.

Exercise bikes fitness is great for people of all fitness levels due to the exercise bike's high versatility. For beginners they offer a nice soft start where they can adjust the work load according to their fitness level. For more advanced trainees they are great for warm ups, fat burning and stamina.

Exercise bikes are also quite cheap, and you can usually get a good used bike that has all the features you need and more. You can have it in your home standing in your living room without anyone finding it particularily strange, and you can use it when throughout the seasons and in all kinds of weather. The best thing about home gym equipment, like a stationary bike, is that no one needs to know that you have started training and make small jokes about it. The results of the training will show after short time.

When riding a bike the large muscle groups of the legs are used. This results in a high energy expenditure and a good workout. You should progress fast and see your fitness level rise quite rapidly. Used on a regular basis the exercise bike result in big weight losses.

Exercise bikes offer high safety to joints. Contrary to jogging you will not risk destroying your achielles or get problems due to wearing the wrong shoes. Due to the benefits and low risk physiotherapists recommends using exercise bikes as as one of the most important parts of recovery after leg injuries.

I personally recommend three types of training that I have had nice results with in terms of fat burning and increased stamina: Long ride pulse training, interval training/spinning and high intensity interval training (HIIT).

Long ride pulse training (continuous training): You basically aim for a pulse level that you can maintain for a long period of time. Most newer exercise bikes offer the capability to measure your pulse and some even adjust the resistance according to your needs. Say you want a pulse of 100 and the bike adjust the resistance to keep your pulse at that level. A cheaper solution to this would be to manually adjust the resistance and measure pulse by wearing a pulse watch or make sure that the exercise bike you get has the inexpensive addition of a pulse measurement.

To find your target heart rate you can use these formulas:

MAX HR=220-AGE [beats per minute]

TARGET HR=MAX HR x INTENSITY FACTOR (IF)

BEGINNER: IF=0.5-0.6, AVERAGE: IF=0.6-0.7, HIGH FITNESS: IF=0.75-0.85

So if you are say 40 years old with a average fitness level you get:

MAX HR=220-40=180, TARGET HR=180 x 0.6=108 bpm

Interval training: Interval training usually lasts from half an hour to an hour. Interval training is when you switch back and forth from high level to low level intensity. You basically aim for adjusting your reistance according to some preset program. More advanced exercise bikes offer in built programs that can be used where resistance is adjusted continiously. A different and cheaper solution would be to aim for a higher speed or higher resistanse in predefined periods. You could even aim to have a max pulse of something for periods of time and then return to maintainance level.

High Intensity Interval training (HIIT): HIIT is the modern version of interval training. Some remarkable research from Japan lead to what is known as the Tabata protocol / Tabata intevals. The researched shown that bouts of 20 seconds of very high intensity work followed by 10 seconds of low intensity lead to superiour results in terms of fat burning and stamina. The results have been proven later by other researchers as a very good way of gaining fast results. Other intervals has also become popular in the fitness comunity, usually in the same ratio as the Tabata protocol (15, 7.5/10, 5 etc).

If you have reached a certain level of fitness you should include interval training (HIIT or ordinary) as part of your program to progress. It has been shown that after doing medium to low level intensity for a while your body needs some extra stimuli to get higher VO2 oxygen uptake and better stamina. Interval training, and especially HIIT, is quite challenging so you need a good warm up before starting. Aim to increase the time for regular interval training or the sets for HIIT. Don't overdo interval training as it is quite taxing on your body.