What Is The Right Way To Train Using An Air Bike?
Air bikes can play a huge role in building up your fitness in two ways: By improving your cardiovascular function and building up your muscles. However, it helps to know exactly how best to use such an assault fitness air bike, as well as how not to do it.
The most notable benefits of using such a bike highlight the advantages over using a real bike on the road or a traditional fixed exercise bike.
An obvious benefit over a road bike is that you can use it at all times in convenient circumstances, not needing to be concerned with whether it is roasting hot or pouring with rain outside, or any safety issues that arise from using busy roads or riding after dark.
What Are The Main Benefits Of An Assault Air Bike?
However, there are also advantages over a fixed exercise bike:
- The pedal powers a fan that generates wind resistance, making it more of a challenge to pedal and therefore helping you build up your leg muscles more
- This extra effort produces a more strenuous cardiovascular workout
- The overall effect burns more calories
- It is very useful for short bursts of high-intensity training, which is a particularly effective form of cardiovascular training
- It can be used by beginners and experienced fitness fanatics alike
- This full-body workout is still a low-impact activity, which means it is ideal if you are on the comeback trail after an injury
As a result, you can lose weight, enjoy better heart health and enjoy bigger and stronger leg muscles from using such a bike.
Like any other exercise bike, an assault air bike is also a compact device that will not take up too much space in the confines of a home gym.
However, it is important to know how and when to use such a bike, both for the best results and from a safety perspective.
Why Should You Avoid Wayne Rooney’s Approach To Bike Training?
For an understanding of how not to do it safely, we may consider the case of former Manchester United and Everton footballer Wayne Rooney.
While his huge talent was apparent from the earliest days, it is also safe to say that he hasn’t always been the most committed to maintaining supreme fitness in the manner of former teammate Cristiano Ronaldo.
Apart from smoking and drinking, his pre-season involved very little training and he admitted this in an interview with Men’s Health Magazine, in which he primarily outlined how he had recently managed to lose lots of weight after letting himself go following retirement.
However, while the article mostly focused on the three steps he took to get fit again in his early 40s (better diet, regular exercise and cutting down on alcohol), he also talked about how as a player he would turn up after summer training around 3kg overweight.
His solution was to use the exercise bike in a rather unwise manner, commenting: “I used to take the [exercise] bike in the steam room the day before we were back in.”
Rooney added: “Honestly, the night before we had to get weighed, I'd sit in there for 90 minutes fully clothed. I wouldn't eat a thing, I wouldn't drink a thing.”
Men’s Health was quick to point out that this approach is not to be recommended, for multiple reasons:
- Being dehydrated before strenuous exercise can be dangerous, especially while also going without food and undertaking the activity in a hot steam room
- Any weight loss is likely to be down to reduced water, rather than burned-off fat
- It won’t actually make you any fitter
How Can An Air Bike Be Part Of A Balanced Training Regime?
Therefore, it is important that you are not using the air bike as a means of trying to do too much, too soon. Hydration and not starving yourself is important when you exercise. The key lies in using your bike (and other fitness equipment) regularly.
Fortunately, it seems that Rooney’s modern regime is rather more balanced. The article did not state exactly what his fitness regime involves, although at least some of it isn’t gym work, as he and his wife Colleen recently climbed Yr Wyddfa (Snowdon).
Of course, getting fit in an indoor gym, particularly using an air bike, will make such activities much easier to undertake.
Some people did aim a little criticism at the Rooneys for wearing trainers rather than walking boots, which would increase the risk of ankle injuries, which might also be taken as a general reminder that you should always have the right equipment for any exercise.
However, if the Rooney household does have an assault air bike, the fact that it can be used after an injury does mean that it will still come in very useful for keeping Wayne and Colleen fit even if they do find themselves limping off a mountain.