Fitness - An Exercise Bike Can Be Fun

If you're anything like me, you may need to lose a few extra pounds. As hard as it is to admit at times, getting a little more exercise is something we could all use, and an exercise bike is a perfect way to do it.

It's 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 not 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.

The new exercise bikes makes staying in shape a much more enjoyable experience. I think it's time to hop back on one of these newer model exercise bikes and start pedaling those extra pounds away!

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