›› Exercise Bike
It is usually around
the New Year that I begin noticing how fat I've become. The holiday
season goes very well for me, in fact so well, that towards the draw of
the New Year, I often have to deal with a spare tire around my midriff.
It is at times like these that I am tempted to buy an exercise bike.
I got my first exercise bike over a decade ago. It was a fairly simple
piece of machinery. It looked like one half of a regular bike. And it
was mechanically operated, with a simple belted-up gear contraption
that you tightened by hand as you went along. I spent more time staring
at that first exercise bike than actually using it for what it was
meant and it slowly but steadily faded away from my memory. Until this
New Year came about and I decided to get myself another exercise bike.
There's a health and
fitness store just around the corner from where I live and I went there
to seek out my exercise bike. Upon entering and asking the manager
where the exercise bike section was, I was guided to the second floor
of the store, where – I'm not kidding – the entire
floor area was devoted to exercise bikes! Boy had I missed out on the
exercise bike trend or what! But what I discovered next convinced me
that I was too far removed from the exercise bike culture to ever hope
to stage a comeback.
You see the exercise
bike I used to own was an antique now, doomed to a musty life in some
fitness museum. The new age exercise bikes were radically different
beings. For one thing, the word simplicity or the phrase ease of use
seemed to have been thrown out of the window when these new age
exercise bikes were designed. None, I repeat, none of them were simple
to understand, much less operate. There were exercise bikes with
motorized resistance, bikes with magnetic resistance, even more
exercise bikes with wind load resistance and even friction-free
resistance! What ever happened to the plain old resistance belt?
Anyways, that was just the tip of the iceberg. Seems most of the new
age exercise bikes needed to be plugged up to the power source as they
came with in-built computers which monitored everything from your heart
rate to the rate of your toe-nail eroding on the tread (I'm kidding!).
Anyways, they needed a power source to run the array of sensors that
the exercise bike employed to monitor various bodily functions and
rates. Most of them had a digital display LCD, electronic monitor
charts for time, speed, distance and calories, pulse monitors,
heart-rate monitors and a whole range of allied equipment.
This made me wonder. If I was going to spend all my time hooking up
these allied monitors to various extremities of my body, where was I
ever going to find the time to actually get on to the exercise bike and
exercise?
››
A Healthy Dose of Good Advice
