Exercise Bike
Monday, 10 July 2006
Again, look how skinny my legs are! I have always had a love/hate relationship with this damned bike. Just when I think I am getting it, he'll change the exercise slightly and it'll slip away from me again.
It has a passive setting, yes, but it's the active one that concerns us. Working our way up through the gears. In the beginning we did whatever we could to get the pedals turning, as you can see. Later on it becomes more organised. But the great, or horrid, thing about gears is just when you think you're improving, Hratch is there demanding more!
Everyone always asks me with the bike: how do you do that? I don't know! However I damn well can. How do you bike? I use my body more on the heavy gears, I guess, but then, that's a good thing. I mean, it's normal. Watch a cyclist going up a hill and you'll notice how he uses his body too. Then little by little, a gear that was difficult becomes easy and a higher one becomes the difficult one instead. It's all training.
The stopping, going forwards and backwards, going slowly then fast then back down to slow, is all about control. He says, I do. The brain has to work with the legs to do what I (or Hratch!) want them to.
Whereas pushing hard on a higher gear is all about getting energy right down into the legs and using such effort that the brain has to produce some reaction.