Peter's Blog

Following my shock discovery that the tunturi rowing machine only counted strokes and that length of stroke made no difference to "distance" travelled (here) my latest outrage concerns my exercise bike. I was peddling away last night and realised that the calories/hour display showed the same number however fast I pedalled. This explains why the end total is always 190 calories with little variation. Now I know that the calories display is highly inaccurate as a measure of absolute number of calories burned but it ought to be useful as a relative measure of effort expended, e.g. if I work harder I should get a higher number.

It has a total distance measurement and presumably that will vary with speed (haven't checked this yet, there is no speed display just total distance) and should indicate effort expended but when I change the difficulty setting I cannot compare the numbers between sessions.

Does everyone spend their time on exercise equipment figuring out the programming of the clocks? If not then what stops you getting bored?

I am still enjoying it, the 24 minute program seems to take 10 minutes where half an hour on a rowing machine felt like a hour. Sudden thought: better check it against a clock.

Update: either I always manage exactly 13.88 km on every session or the distance accrued is based on time rather than revolutions of the pedals. Since it has an RPM display it must be able to measure pedals going round, how can the firmware be so primitive??? There's nothing to measure relative effort expended, nothing to show you that you worked a little bit harder than you did last time.