Beginner's Guide: Recumbent Bike

Alright, so you caught me on one of my favorite pieces of cardio equipment, the recumbent bike. A lot of reasons why I love this machine. Let me start with a couple of the really important ones. A lot of the activity we do, we do on our feet, which is called ground-based. Running, hiking, basketball, tennis, all of those things are on the forces of gravity and they're really good for us. But if we do that all the time, especially with our cardio in the gym, those patterns start to get overloaded. We literally call it pattern overload and they can actually jeopardize our joints. What's beautiful about this bike is that it takes us out of the constraints of gravity, it unloads those joints, so it's really good for people with knee, ankle, or hip issues and it's a really good supplement for people that are super active. It's a real simple setup on this, which is the other thing I love. It's two points really. One, there's a foot strap. Make sure it's secure. Get your foot all the way up on the pedal. Follow the foot on that pedal and then it's your seat adjustment. Usually there's a handle. You know you're in the right spot when your knee's just a little bit bent when that pedal's all the way extended and you have some freedom with how far you go with that. Make it your own. To get started, just grab that handle, start pedaling. Keep your chest up. You'll see a button that says quick start. Hit that button. All the numbers are going to come up. The only one you need to worry about is the level of resistance that you want. This has 1 to 20. I'm going to go up to 7 for myself right now and I'm going to take a few minutes to feel my way through this, see how it feels in my legs, how it feels in my lungs. Let myself adapt to the exercise. Great for a warm-up, great for a cool-down, great for cardio. Now speaking about cardio, if your cardio in the gym is always done in such a way that we could talk like this with each other without a difficulty in sharing conversation, then our cardio isn't quite doing all that it can for us. We want to get it to a place where scale of 1 to 10, 10 being the hardest or around a 6 or 7, so that if you wanted to talk to me, I'd say, hold on one second. I'm kind of just pushing a little bit and then I would relax and be able to talk to you. That is so good for your heart health, for your brain health, for your overall body. We need that in your cardio. So this is a great place to start. Friendly for the joints, friendly for your cardio, super effective. you