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Beauty, Old Yeller and the Beast IX
I have continued the pump out 10 mile rides at the rate of five a week on the Beauty. I can't tell if it is doing my any good, though my arms and shoulders seem to be toning up a bit.
Flatbroke had a very good question. Do stationary bike miles count? I always counted my miles on Old Yeller because it seemed to me that it took the same effort to crank out a mile on that as it did on the road. Beauty does not quite have the same resistance, but does use the upper body as well. I am taking about 38 minutes now to run off a ten mile on the Beauty. That is almost certainly faster than I could do it on an actual bike, but not by much. I count airdyne miles.
I never felt as secure counting miles on my XR-5 when it had only the original felt brake pads on a rim weighted with a solid rubber wheel. I almost laugh when I see an ad for one of the well known spincycles bragging about its "35 pound flywheel." That particular feature has absolutely nothing to do with resistance after you get it rotating. All the extra weight simply serves to help smooth out the jerkiness inherent in any system which uses mechanical braking to provide the resistance to effort that makes it an exercise machine. In fact the momentum stored in the flywheel of these devices actually helps the user over come the resistance of the brake. These devices also share the characteristic that something is worn away in the process of using them. Usually it is either brake pads or a belt. I could ride the XR-5 twenty five miles in about an hour, which was way faster than I could ride a bike even thirty years ago.
Old Yeller develops a significant amount of rotational momentum. The take-up roller weighs a couple of pounds and it is going around at a fairly high rate for a human powered component. I estimate somewhere between 600 and 1,000 rpm depending on gear and cadence. Those of you who remember high school physics may recall that momentum varies directly with mass, but as the square of the velocity. So a little round chunk of hard rubber can store up enough energy to smooth out the ride even though it weighs only a small fraction of the 35 pound wheel on the $1,000 machine. Airdynes are similar in that the relatively lightweight wheel is boosted up to significant speeds through two step gearing and thus stores quite enough rotational momentum to smooth out the action of the machine.
I confess I don't know much about the electromagnetic braking devices. Reviews indicate that they are fairly realistic in their effect.
To sum up, I would count the miles from airdynes and some other air resistance devices and probably from the modern electromagnetic resistance machines as well. I would not trust the mileage from machines using mechanical braking devices of the caliper or strap type.
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