Exercise Bike

By: John Glick

It is usually around the New Year that I start 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 elementary piece of machinery. It looked like one half of a normal bike. And it was mechanically operated, with a mere 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 whole 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 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 term ‘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 reiterate, 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 simple old resistance belt? Anyways, that was just the tip of the iceberg. Seems most of the new age exercise bikes required 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 corporal 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 complete 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?