The lazy bike

The recumbent bike.  It's in every gym I've ever been in.  I always refer to it as the lazy bike.  You get to sit relatively comfortably while pedaling at a leisurely pace.  How can that be a good workout?

The regular bike is, itself, one of my go-to "not feeling it today" workouts (the other being the elliptical).  It's a decent cardio and leg workout, but I never work up as much of a sweat as I do running or lifting or doing intervals or something else.  So how could the recumbent bike - with it's lack of core work necessary to keep you stabilized - be a decent workout at all? 

That's always been my thinking.  I think I had been on a recumbent bike once - maybe? - in college. 

So I'm not sure what possessed me to get on the recumbent the other day at the gym, instead of doing my usual elliptical/regular bike lazy day combo.  Maybe the seat back looked really enticing or something. 

But I hopped up on it, and started pedaling.  It took a minute to get the seat adjusted properly, but, unlike the regular bike, I could move the seat around while I was still on it.  Score one for the recumbent!

I set the bike to do a 15 minute hill workout, and turned up the tunes to stave off boredom.  While I kind of felt like an idiot for using the recumbent, I actually think  I got a decent workout, and one that was different from the regular bike.  Given the angle of the seat to the pedals, I my calves actually got a good workout, which is something is usually missing from my workouts on the regular bike. 

All in all, the recumbent bike experiment was a success - I got a good workout, certainly no worse than the regular bike.   The downside?  It was definitely a lower-body only workout, with no real core engagement to speak of.  But hey, that's ok, especially since I had done a lot of core work the two days before.