elliptical engineering

You'd have to get rid of the heat though. A trained person is able to keep it well north of 200W for a long time. When a doc tested my fitness for an upcoming oil rig assignment his assistant came storming into the ergometry room and made me stop. A burn stench was wafting off the brake of the bike and my heart rate still hadn't reached target.

The rower I use appears to have magnetic resistance. The gym has two but I prefer the one with magnetic damping because it feels much more like real rowing, where you have immediate resistance once the paddles go into the water. The other more fancy looking rower has an air propeller brake and that just feels weird to me. The resistance increases during the pull and is very low at the beginning of the pull. Plus it's noisy.

The ellipticals they have are big fancy machines with computers and all but I don't really use them. My leg strength is trained using my road bike and on the mountain bike.

Behind "my" rower they have two exercise bikes with huge propeller brakes. Those sound like a jet engine is spooling up.

I wonder why they can't do what one gym did for redearch purposes, using all this energy to generate electricity and feed it back into the grid. Or at least offset their business usage. Then they could also let patrons know "Hey, you generated 517Wh during this visit!"

lørdag den 25. februar 2023 kl. 02.06.41 UTC+1 skrev Fred Bloggs:

the fancier one have computer controlled magnetic resistance, so you can pick, say, a stage from the tour de France. The computer will adjust the resistance to match where you are on the stage and you can watch the road on a TV

depends on your size,

There have been one here, but for the tiny amount of energy it was pointless virtue signalling

500Wh would be alot

you obviously never watched any. It is mostly flat roads or uphill, they do occasionally have fast downhill sections, I think the record is ~100km/h, but they are professionals and rarely crash

That's the one our gym has, sans the screens. I dont like it because it does not resemble real rowing out on the water. their simpler machine does but I can't recall its name right now. I do about 30 minutes on it every time at the gym, then ove to other devices.

I can't do weight lifting because of a bad lower back. That is also the reason for training mostly on the rower.

True, but you burn up tires and chains without getting any real miles. I prefer real miles. In the wind, the trees flying by, the real deal. Even when the weather isn't so great. However, that doesn't do anything for upper body fitness. Since my lower back issues don't allow me to lift a kayak I joined a gym with rowing machines for that.

Not really. I pump out a lot more than that on my all-day rides, especially when riding alone or with just one fast rider. Cycling pros can do that in less than 2h.

Walking never does unless it's up a Himalayan mountain. You've got to go into some sort of run where you break a sweat even in winter weather. Biking is easier on the joints though.

Probably that 500 WH is not too far off. Most adults ues/generate the heat of a 75 to 100 watts while at rest and walking around the house.

I did see a comical fiction movie where the world ran out of electricity and it was discovered that having sex would make electricity. Just imagine an airplane full of people having sex to get it to fly.

sure, about half a tour de France stage

but how many people spend several hours at those power levels at the gym?

I've met people who do two hours full bore there. I can't stand staring at a wall that long but don't need to because most of my watthours get pumped out during bike rides. Real rides, not stationary.

?v=17qtRLCIHZo Wouter Weylandt unfortunately died in such an incident. Downhill at around 50mph, in Italy.

A dissipative varistor load? What/how?

Or a lot more with a headwind and Murphy's law says you'll also have a headwind on the way back :-)

The physics there doesn't add up. A lever provides 'mechanical advantage', but no change in energy/work per cycle.

Whereas, in the elliptical, the user actually burns greater power. Which is the idea - inefficiency is useful -

I remember when Fabio Casartelli died in the 1995 Tour, and yet it wasn't until the early 2000's that helmet were made mandatory

I have a Nordic Track elliptical. It uses a pair of magnets near a large ferrous wheel. Eddy currents do the rest.

-Mark

I have a little quiz, of science, math, economics, which I spring on my friends and lawyer. The results are dismal, sad to say.

One: why is a bicyclist faster than a runner, whether sprint or distance? Nobody yet has answered correctly - they only spew word salads containing 'efficiency' in multiple forms -

something like this:

think of it as impedance matching, making the load maximum through the whole range of motion instead of being too high in some parts of the range and too low in others

Yeah, and especially in Europe there are a lot of hardcore anti-helmet cyclists who think helmets do not save lives. They think they know better than all the trauma surgeons.

I never ride without a helmet, not even the two miles to the gym.