Peter's Blog

Another session on exercise bike:

• It's very noisy: will need to chock it on something to try to absorb vibrations. I think the vibration comes from the chain mechanism, more recent models use belt drive.
• It does the job: 24 minute program (longest) left me dripping, had to wipe it down after. Legs felt much better.
• It has three programs, random, hill and manual. I've only used hill so far. It starts off with gently increasing difficulty, an easy bit, a plateau of a couple of minutes of moderate difficulty, then interval training, minute on with greatly increasing resistance, minute off, followed by a few minutes cool down. The hardest bit is like slogging up hill in a high gear. The programming is crude, you can select 6, 12, 18 or 24 minutes which relates to the scaling of the program: 24 minutes = 20 seconds/division, 18 minutes = 15 seconds/division etc with the difficulty of each division shown as a vertical line of leds on the display (thought for the day: how easy would it be to hack the firmware??? Will it run linux???).
• I'm doing it on level four out of twelve, with the aim of increasing this gradually. On four the 'easy' bits are not that easy, I have to work to maintain the rpm. Other machines I have used have coasted on the easy bits, even at higher levels. Could be because it's an old machine, could be because I am not strong, could be both. Not being too easy shouldn't be a problem, it's supposed to be exercise.
• The original ebay picture that swayed me. It's bigger than it looks here, the top of the console is level with my shoulders.