The bike is one of the few methods of exercise that leaves your hands free.

With so many other seemingly more exciting alternatives to choose from, we’re not exactly clamouring for rides on the old exercise bike these days.

The stationary bike has assumed more of a classic role in today’s colourful and fancy world of fitness.

It is a staple, a familiar sight putting new exercisers at ease, friendly, welcoming and most definitely not intimidating. After all, it’s just as easy as riding a bike, easier in fact, without the risk of bumping into stuff or falling off.

I hate being dependent on equipment, and if I can get away with using none at all, I’m usually much happier for it. I get a buzz out of succeeding to train effectively by making do with limited resources.

But even with this outlook, on the occasions I do use equip­ment, I still catch myself shun­ning the bike and favouring quirkier or more original types of equipment.

For this I felt a pang of guilt last week. What if the bike was all you had? What if you were unable or didn’t have the space to perform any other method of training?

Consider how many exercise bikes there must be scattered around households across the Maltese islands and indeed further afield too.

Some of them may have been relegated to the role of clothes hangers, or even worse, dust collectors. These poor, lonely machines do not deserve such a cruel fate.

Used in the right way, these bikes could all be awesome tools for their owners for the development of cardiovascular fitness.

If you want to lose weight, the bike will certainly be a lot more useful to you as an item of exercise equipment than as a clothes hanger, especially since after a few months of using it properly you’ll be needing to throw out the old clothes anyway as you develop a nice new set of curves.

I received a query recently about how to use a domestic exercise bike more effectively, so let’s cut to the chase and examine just a few of its potentially special features.

Use it for small bouts of activity scattered throughout your day.

You don’t have to cycle hard for an hour non-stop each day, just take any opportunity to crank up 10 minutes or so whenever you can, as guidelines tell us there is an optimum amount of time we should spend being physically active each week, and we are free to put in the minutes however we see fit.

If you find it boring, remember that the bike is one of the few methods of exercise that leaves your hands free. This means you can do pretty much anything else while you pedal away.

To engage the core muscles more, don’t rest on your hands at all, sit up and tighten your abdominal muscles as if you were bracing yourself to receive a punch in the stomach

You can read a book or newspaper, or catch up on work, homework or assignments. You might even find your produc­tivity in such activities expe­rien­cing an unexpected boost.

Interval training, for one, could help you get a more intensive and productive work­out. It involves warming up gradually and then alternating bouts of hard and easy work rates.

This is similar to what happens in a spinning class; you could alternate such bouts every minute, or take a more random approach according to how you feel.

As for actual body positions, there are a few different key movements you can try.

Sitting down and pedalling normally involves mostly the knee joint, which means you are targeting the muscles around the knee and the thigh muscles, particularly the part at the front just above the knee.

This point is worth noting if you are uncomfortable causing any muscular development in this area, as many women indeed are.

Should you stand up on the pedals, you will increase the involvment of the hip joint, which means the large muscles around the hips are also more involved, specifically the gluteus maximus muscles, or as they are better known, the butt.

Larger muscles mean more energy expended and a potentially more fruitful work­out, not to mention the more evenly distributed mus­cular involvement and therefore develop­ment. So do include bouts of standing cycling too.

To enhance this effect even further, instead of your hands, rest your elbows on the handles instead. This will lower your shoulders and decrease the hip angle even further, involving the hip muscles even more.

Also, keep your lower back tightly arched, or in other words, stick your butt out. In short, butt up if you want to target it, or down if you want more direct leg work.

To engage the core muscles more, don’t rest on your hands at all, sit up and tighten your abdominal muscles as if you were bracing yourself to receive a punch in the stomach. Cycle this way for a few minutes and you will soon feel your abdominal muscles responding.

And finally, if you want to work the upper body, sit up straight, keep your chest up and perform any upper body move you could otherwise perform with a pair of dumbbells while sitting down on a bench.

If you don’t have light dumbbells or any other two small objects of equal weight, try holding your arms directly out to your sides like you’re im­personating a plane for a minute at a time.

Don’t worry, you won’t take off, but your results might.

matthew.muscat.inglott@mcast.edu.mt