The equipment can do more for your body beyond improving cardiovascular health.
Do More With is a series highlighting equipment around the Club that can help you reach your fitness goals. In this installment, we highlight the fan bike, available on the Club floor.
They may look similar to the untrained eye, but no two styles of stationary bikes create the same workout experience.
A standard stationary bike — like the ones you’d ride in a cycling class at the Club — mimics the feel and posture of the two-wheelers you’d take out on the road. Then there are recumbent bikes, which put more of the workload on your leg muscles. But if you want a full-body, muscle-building, and cardiovascular-training workout, turn to the fan bike, aka assault bike.
While you’ll fight magnetic resistance on other indoor bikes, you’ll battle a fan “wheel” with your lower- and upper-body effort on the assault bike. That means the more you give, the more you get. If you want a nice, comfortable ride, push a little lighter and go easy on the RPMs. Looking to train so hard, you’re left dripping in sweat and gritting your teeth? Pedal faster and pump your arms even harder.
That’s the straightforward game plan. But if you’re curious about the other benefits of the fan bike and the various ways you can nab them, here’s the low-down.
Why Train with the Fan Bike
Whether this is your first time working out in years or you’re recovering from an injury, the fan bike is an ideal piece of equipment to train without stressing your joints. It’s non-impact, saving your joints from aches, and can be used for lower- and moderate-intensity exercise, in which you pedal and push at a conversational pace. In the Club, fan bikes are usually put side-by-side in groups of two to four, so you could get in a workout while catching up with a friend. (The talk test is also a great way to gauge your intensity.)
Of course, there’s a cardiovascular benefit to training with the fan bike. Pedaling away at a moderate intensity for 20 minutes at a time (read: aerobic training) can strengthen your heart, improve circulation, and lower blood pressure over time. But there’s value in performing true sprints, too. These short, high-intensity efforts — 10 seconds of all-out effort, a type of anaerobic training — make your heart need to work even harder to get blood, which supplies oxygen and removes waste, out to the muscles. Over time, the heart becomes more efficient at this process. Similarly, those quick efforts can help improve ejection fraction (a measurement of how much blood the left ventricle pumps out with each contraction), which tends to decline with age.
But unlike other indoor bikes, the fan bike is global; you're going to be using that upper body just as much as you use that lower body. Plus, it targets multiple muscle groups in movement patterns you perform every day — in and out of the Club. As you move the bike’s “arms,” for instance, you’re strengthening and improving power in your upper body with horizontal push and pull movements. In your day-to-day routine, you’ll call on that training to, say, push your kid’s heavy stroller up a steep hill and pull open a hefty door. If you combine that fan bike workout with a strength-training session focused on the other patterns that are missing — hinging, vertical upper-body pull and push, horizontal lower-body pull and push — you've got a complete workout. Whether you're entry-level or advanced, this tool is a really easy access point to make sure we get in these essential patterns.
That said, if I had to call out a specific muscle group that gets put through the wringer, it’s the quads. The fan bike is a knee-dominant piece of equipment, so I often hear members say something along the lines of, ‘Oh my gosh, my quads are getting destroyed on this thing.’ There’s carry-over for this training, too. Literature shows that after eight weeks of using the fan bike twice weekly, participants' experienced significant improvements in their back squat strength — without ever squatting during this time. In other words, the power and the strength development of the upper and lower body extend beyond this machine.
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How to Use the Fan Bike
Before you even strap in, you need to make sure the bike is adjusted for your body. So many people use the equipment with the seat too low and pushed too far forward — and it's a big reason why they end up not enjoying cycling. For a comfortable fit, you want to start with the seat pulled all the way back from the handlebars and adjust the seat so you’re able to pedal with soft knees (about a 10-degree bend). When holding onto the handles, you should be able to sit with a nice, tall posture — that’ll allow you to push and pull the arms with full force. You’ll hinge forward slightly from the hips, making sure not to round the back. If you’re stretching forward, that’s your cue to scooch the seat in slightly.
Once you’re perfectly adjusted, there are plenty of ways you can incorporate the fan bike into your training: You could use it for a short warm-up, a 20-minute aerobic burner, or — one of my favorites — a quick-hitting high-intensity interval training workout.
For a HIIT workout that leaves you breathless (in a good way), try biking for 30 seconds, rest for 90 seconds, and repeat six to 15 times. Your rating of perceived exertion during those work efforts should be somewhere around a seven and a half to an eight and a half. If you’re using your heart rate to guide your intensity, you might jump up into zone three or low zone four after the first few reps then peak at zone five by the end of your set. That’ll give you a true, 25- to 35-minute HIIT session that leaves you fatigued from a central nervous system and muscle standpoint.
You could program the fan bike into your strength days, too. One of my favorite ways to do so is with circuit training. You could stand next to the bike and do five reps of the world’s greatest stretch, heavy farmer’s carries, then 30 seconds of fan bike work. That workout will blend multi-directional strength and conditioning into one easy-to-follow circuit. You might start as low as four rounds then work all the way up to eight.
The fan bike can even help you determine if your workouts are paying off. For instance, you can do an aerobic power assessment, seeing how much distance you can accumulate and how high of an average wattage you can achieve in a 12-minute blitz. You can also measure anaerobic power by looking at your average power (read: wattage) output in an all-out, 30-second effort. You can revisit either of these assessments every four to six weeks to see if you’re actually getting more powerful or if your endurance is truly building.
Ultimately, the fan bike is a very undervalued tool. It may leave your butt a bit sore when you’re first starting out, but the cardiovascular, strength, and power gains make it well worth the initial aches.
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Mitchell Bernier is a COACH X and PT Educator at Equinox Highline. Former amateur boxer and career-changer, Mitchell has been a full-time personal trainer for 13 years. Over that time, he has built a business of avid marathoners, triathletes, student athletes in track and field, first-time strength clients, and rehabilitation patients who are looking for the long recovery that helps them lead an injury-free life. He is passionate about diverse movement strategies within program design. Mitchell is a master class nutrition coach with Precision Nutrition and holds running coach certifications from USATF, VDOT, and NASE. He’s finishing his undergraduate degree in Human Performance and Wellness from Pennsylvania Western University.