As with many other standard pieces of exercise and home gym equipment, the origins of the high-performance Assault Bike are much older than many people expect.

The modern Assault Bike is as much an example of evolution as it is of both literal and figurative revolution, enhancing stationary bike exercises with the help of full-body air resistance, portability, a detailed LED screen and the ability to adjust to any height you need.

There are a lot of stationary bikes out there, although few have the same level of versatility in a home gym environment as the Assault Bike, but despite feeling like a relatively new piece of equipment thanks to constant technological evolutions, the exercise bike is well over two centuries old.

In fact, it was one of the first modern pieces of physical therapy equipment during an era when fitness was rapidly changing.

Enter The Gymnasticon

The first-ever device that resembles a stationary bike predates the Dandy Horse by over two decades and the Rover Safety Bicycle by nearly a century.

Invented by Francis Lowndes in 1796, the Gymnasticon was part of a rapid evolution in gymnastics, back when it was treated less as a fitness art and more as a development of physiotherapy and orthopaedics.

As such, the device was designed to enable people suffering from a range of debilitating medical conditions such as gout, rheumatism and various forms of palsy to exercise when other methods would be more difficult if not impossible to execute.

It worked in a more primitive but fundamentally similar way to a modern exercise bike; two sets of cranks for the arms and legs were connected to a series of flywheels, creating a machine that was a rough combination of an elliptical and a stationary bicycle.

Unlike a modern stationary bike, the machine could be operated externally by turning a hand crank; this was to provide active resistance and effectively force someone in the machine to move.

However, whilst the original design intentions were to help people dealing with physical ailments, Mr Lowndes knew the appeal of such a device for people who could not necessarily get enough exercise through their work and their hobbies.

This included students and the growing number of desk clerks and office workers that were beginning to emerge in the early days of the Industrial Revolution. It even had a built-in desk so people could continue to work or study whilst exercising their lower body muscles.

This was the theory, but was it successful in practice?

Why Did A Fitness Cornerstone Fail?

The machine appeared to resemble an effective exercise machine, gymnastics and physical therapy were becoming increasingly popular by the turn of the 19th century, and Mr Lowndes himself had made his name as an authority on electrotherapy when that was seen as a medical revolution.

Unfortunately, the Gymnasticon was still a little too early. There was no upgraded version of the machine, no evidence of similar machinery and little evidence that it was ever made or sold outside of a handful of advertisement and catalogue entries.

This was a time when the medical profession still lacked the fundamental knowledge of the human body that it would possess even half a century later. An exercise bike will benefit people in a lot of ways but it will not directly cure gout, even if it can remove some of its common risk factors.

Swimming and extremely early forms of hydrotherapy were likely to be more popular at the time, and have been replaced by advanced medical developments and specialised physiotherapy.

As far as bank clerks, office staff and students were concerned, there was little understanding of targeted workouts and training regimens, so whilst they were aware that their lack of movement was a problem, they would be far more likely to simply have a brisk walk in the evening.

When Would Exercise Bikes Get Popular?

It would take nearly a century for exercise equipment to get popular, by which point the bicycle had evolved from nonexistence to the relatively modern Rover Safety Bicycle.

By this point, Gustav Zander had taken the core principles of physical therapy developed by the pioneering Pehr Henrik Ling and developed some of the first modern exercise machines using those principles.

Known as “mechanotherapy”, Dr Zander believed in the use of machines to help improve health and reduce injury when exercising by creating a regimented set of movements.

As with Mr Lowndes a century before, Dr Zander’s initial goal was to use physical therapy to fix medical and physical ailments, but his machines quickly caught on and formed the backbone of the modern gym.