How to Get Moving on a Stationary Exercise Bike
How to get moving on a stationary exercise bike may sound like a simple action but actually requires a lot of complex movements from the human body. All of these carefully choreographed actions begin with the thought processes of the brain. First, you must make this decision in your head. When you actively decide to walk over to your stationary exercise bike and sit down, there are a number of processes that have been happening long before you even stood up.
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The brain begins to send signals to the muscles of the body telling them to move in order to get you from point A to point B. The frontal lobe will have minimal involvement at this point as it will only deal with your emotions as you think about what actions you are about to perform. As your brain fires signals to the different areas of muscle, the body starts to move and you stand up and walk over to the bike. This is a simple yet highly organized process that the body performs but most people will never give it a single conscience thought. Let’s take a moment to understand how the brain does this. Our brain is like a factory and all the sections must work together to achieve a goal. The brain stem is the core of this factory and acts as the power supply to the entire factory. Without it, the whole factory would shut down. As all the parts of your brain works to form the necessary functions, the brain stem makes sure all the proper communications are in order.
Now let’s sit down on the bike. Lift one leg up and over the bike while placing your butt firmly and comfortably on the seat and facing the front of the bike. After we sit down on the stationary bike and place our body in the proper position, we now will involve physics and gravity to this equation! Place each foot on the pedal closest to it and make sure that you’re secure and that straps or belts are provided. The stationary bike is designed to only move in a certain direction and we must use our muscles to essentially copy the movement of rotation. This process requires much more activity from the right hemisphere of the brain to look at the machine and decide which muscles and how much force to exert to press down on the upper pedal and begin moving the bike. We begin by pressing down on one pedal and then down on the other pedal to make complete rotations. Each time you press down on one pedal, you will notice that the opposite pedal begins to rise up. When that pedal reaches the top, you will then use that leg and foot to push it down. Now, we are properly riding a stationary bike.
As we ride the bike, we may choose to hold the handlebars for extra stability. This is a good way to ensure safety and proper balance while continuing to make fill rotations using the pedals. Firmly gripping the handlebars will allow us to make faster rotations on the bike. The faster we make our rotations, the easier it is to make the next rotation. The force that your muscles exert on the pedal while pressing it in a down and forward motion will cause the pedal on the opposite side to rotate farther upward on its own. This means it will take slightly less energy to bring it back up to the top before pressing it down again. The faster the energy is exerted, the faster we will make rotations on the stationary exercise bike.
Now that we have a great understanding of how to ride a stationary exercise bike and what is required from the human body to perform these actions, let’s move on to your bike’s tension device. This device uses a type of braking system to place force on the spinning wheel of the bike making it harder for you to make rotations. As you increase the tension, a set of foam like pads will touch the sides of the bike wheel and press into it harder and harder. The point of this device is to make you exert more energy while making the same forward rotations. This will in turn cause the muscles in your body to work harder, burning more calories and the heart will pump faster. The heart beats faster to move the blood more quickly to the areas that need oxygen. Now we have the brain, blood, heart, muscles, bones and many other parts of the body involved in this not so simple action of riding a stationary exercise bike.
As we continue along on our exercise experience, we reach the end of our workout. Let’s cool down by decreasing the tension device on the front tire making the rotations easier to make. After several minutes, we will slow down the speed of our rotations while our body begins to slow the heart rate and return back to normal. Now, let’s come to a complete stop on our bike, remove our hands from the handlebars and stand up. Now turn your body to the side and step away from the bike. We will finish our cool down session by doing a bit of light stretching so that we reduce the possibility of muscle injury. We have just put many of the muscles in our body through a lot of stress and this will help to keep them healthy for our next round of exercise.
We have just fully and safely finished our work out session and learned to understand how the human body performs some basic everyday functions. Finally, let’s get a cool glass of water to replenish the fluids that our body lost in an attempt to keep our core temperature from rising. This is your body’s natural cooling system and it is very important to keep it sufficiently supplied with water. Hopefully, you have enjoyed your experience on how to get moving on a stationary exercise bike and will continue to safely and properly add physical exercise to your daily life.
September 16th, 2011 at 1:04 am
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