Exercise Bike Resistance for Dummies

tension adjustment, exercise bike

Among the more irritating versions of freelance "how-to" help, particularly at the old eHow.com website, were the (many) occasions when someone ignorant of the problem they were supposedly addressing simply reworded the instructions for a specific case. Take, for instance, screenwriter Paul Lin and his attempt to explain "How to Adjust Exercise Bike Resistance" for what is now SportsRec.com. What's worse is that he may not have even understood the question in the first place...

By the time we'd finished Lin's first paragraph¹, we already doubted his familiarity with "exercise bikes":

"Mount the exercise bike and place your feet onto the pedals securing your feet in the belt. Begin pedaling to power on the bike's electronic machine."

Our staffers who, apparently unlike Paul, have used exercise bikes translated that into something like "tighten the strap" and "wake the thing up." The main problem here is that Lin cribbed all his instructions from the user's manual for a LifeCycle, and they aren't general instructions. For one thing, he never mentioned setting the seat height... but, then, there's more: "Choose a workout mode. Most exercise bike machines [sic] will have different preset modes as well as a manual mode." Not necessarily: lots of exercise bikes only have resistance levels, and some (air trainers) don't even have adjustable resistance.

"Adjust the bike's resistance level by using the keypad to increase or decrease the machine's resistance in the manual mode."

Again, a specific instruction instead of general. The resistance on many exercise bikes, especially those sold for home use, is changed with by turning a knob or pushing a lever. Once more, Lin only reworded instructions from the user's manual of a specific brand and model.
Perhaps Lin's biggest sin is that he failed to consider that his instructions are pretty much unnecessary, since even the most basic exercise bikes have some sort of graphical or textual instructions for changing resistance. He never stopped to think that perhaps the OQ wanted to modify the resistance settings at the flywheel; or perhaps the OQ had bought a model without adjustable resistance, such as the Schwinn Airdyne or the Vitamaster. Such is the weakness of letting a Dumbass of the Day answer questions on unfamiliar topics.

¹ His original first paragraph was boilerplate about how exercise bikes help you lose weight, but Leaf Group chopped that off when they ported his instructions from eHow to Healthfully to SportsRec

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