Watt Bike Workout – Wheely Wonderful!

What is a Watt Bike? And why would you want to go on one?

Matt from The One Show is cycling from Edinburgh to London on a rickshaw  for Children in Need and this evening he was shown training on a Watt Bike!

I’m not going to or from either of those places and definitely not planning on riding a rickshaw but I had my first Watt bike session last weekend.

Basically, if you want to cycle indoors in the winter, improve your technique, get ALOT fitter or simply have fun… wattbikes are brill.

Here is one:

The fun bit is having 15 of these in a room all linked up to one another, to a computer and a data projector so everyone can see everyone else’s speed, cadence, power.  And if that’s not competative enough, you can then ‘see’ all the bikes on a course and you can actually race one another. Cool, huh? It’s a bit like a spinning class but you are more connected to the other riders.

Actually I can imagine with a room full of very sweaty blokes, it would be anything but ‘cool’. There’s a reason for the lino floor, the perspiration collects in puddles!

Brilliant workout though. Another fun bit was the little graph in the centre of the display that you had to keep ‘sausage’ shaped by pulling evenly up and down on both legs. Pull too hard or too little with one or other leg and your sausage graph become more like a cornish pasty. Even worse, if you don’t pull/push evenly all around the circle, your cornish pasty develops dents. It’s amazing how much trying to keep the dents out of your pasty, improves your technique! I probably shouldn’t have been thinking so much about sausages and cornish pasties, but burning that many calories, you could reasonably justify consuming the occasional pastry object.

Check out Watt bikes near you, or if you are near me, go to Lutterworth Cycle Centre.

Here’s the link http://www.bikestudio.co.uk/