A New Dawning for the Exercise Bike

It is usually around the New Year that I begin noticing how the holiday eggnog has migrated to my waistline. I tend to have a really great time during the holidays and because I usually take a holiday from my exercise routine, I often have to deal with an extra five to ten pounds to lose. It was during one of these times that I bought my first exercise bike.

The very first exercise bike I got was 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 looking at that first exercise bike than actually using it for exercise until I finally moved it out of the room so I didn't have to look at it and feel guilty that I was not using it to exercise on. 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 paid a visit to them to research the models of exercise bikes that were now available. 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! I couldn't help wondering how I missed out on the exercise bike revolution. But what I discovered next convinced me that 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 or perhaps it might make a nice eclectic garden piece. The new age exercise bikes were radically different. 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! Where did the plain old resistance belt go? Anyways, that was just the tip of the iceberg. The exercise bikes that I was now shopping for 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!). The bottom line is that 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?