Exercise Bike

Have you ever wonder if the exercise bike is right for you? What is the best exercise bike for your age, budget and needs? Exercise bike has been exploding in popularity in recent years because of its ease to use and the health benefits you get from using it. This article will discuss the differences and benefits between an upright VS recumbent exercise bike. You will soon discover that there’s no one “best” type of bike but it all depends on your needs.

First I’ll dive into an introduction to upright and recumbent before I compare both of them.

What’s an Upright Bike?

An upright exercise bike looks just like a normal road bike. The seats are straight and even the handlebar looks like a road bike, this means you get to ride an upright exercise bike just like a regular road bike. You can stand up to sprint, hunch your back in front to stimulate sprinting the bike and even move from side to side when sprinting real hard.

This unfortunately also means that you will sprain your neck and back if you’re not being careful because there’s no support and the standing up causes a strain to these muscles. It also means that your knees would be easily injured since you’re pounding your joints when you’re standing up.

An Upright bike is also not comfortable especially the cheaper models (under $400) because of insufficient padding. (you’re sitting upright when the gravity is putting some weight on your butt)

How about a Recumbent Bicycles?

A recumbent bike is a different animal altogether from the upright bike. It doesn’t look like a normal road bike at all. In fact it looked more like a rower than a bike, that’s why Stamina has a recumbent exercise bike combined with a rower. Ok, who recumbent bike is for you ask?

Recumbent bike is famous for its comfortable seating, in fact most brands focus solely on marketing their cutting edge seat technology that takes comfort to the next level and their superior backrest support. The reason why the recumbent bike is so comfortable is because you’re actually “lying down” on a heavily padded and comfortable seat that has a backrest while your legs is pedaling in front.

So the huge differences are comfort and you’re “lying down” instead of seating in an upright position which also means you can’t stand up and pedal furiously.

Upright VS Recumbent Bike

With the upright bike you can stand up and sprint furiously while you can’t do that with a recumbent bike. This means with an upright bike you will actually burn more fat and have a more intense workout. But on the other hand standing up to cycle is actually “cheating” on your exercise so if you’re standing up just to “use your weight” to exercise then a recumbent bike is better because it prevents cheating.

If you have joint and back pain problem then you definitely want a recumbent bike because of their safety and comfort feature.