UKC

I have an old exercise bike used only by my wife recovering from injury. However the time/speed/distance/calories display is non-functional. The 8 setting tension control knob to make pedaling harder/easier is OK.

Please can anyone suggest the best way to use the bike to keep general fitness?  It needs to be short duration stuff or I won't keep it up (in fact I've never previously kept up any exercise for more than a couple of days, except for walking/climbing itself).

FWIW its a Pro Fitness Magnetic cycle from Argos. I'll try again to check connections and clean battery contacts but doubt if I can get display to work.

You could use rate of perceived effort scale, coupled with a timer or stopwatch (wrist watch would work). Google will explain it. 

So classic turbo training sessions would be 8-10 repetitions of 40 seconds hard /20 seconds easy. With the 40 seconds at level 8 to 10 on the scale. The time off would be level 1.

That would be a quick session if you included five minutes either side for warm up/down.

https://www.britishcycling.org.uk/knowledge/training-plans/supporting-docum...

Lots of stuff on the BC site. 

It's important to remember that a 15 mins session at RPE 10 would mean lots of resistance. An RPE 10 at 30+ mins would require less resistance than the 15 mins session (else you'll break!).

​​​​Of course this is just information.

A cheap heart rate monitor can make it more useful and interesting, set the effort level to maintain a given heart rate for a given time.  There's lots of information on lie on max heart rate, % of max HR training zones etc

I'd second that, although "interesting2 can sometimes be a bit worrisome.

I've recently dug my stuff out and I've noticed my max. heart rate is about 165 ish, from regularly 185 ish only a year ago. I don't really know what that indicates, if anything, but it's quite a big difference. nine years ago I would quite regularly go into the 200+ region, not for very long but it did get there.

Having done no aerobic exercise, or owt else other than climbing indoors for about 12 months, I'm not surprised things have changed, but still!

Leave it high in Mint Blanc. We're setting up a gym

Thanks, I'll start off basing my exercise on that and examine the website.

Thanks. My wife may have one for when she was diagnosed with high blood pressure (in fact the doctor agreed she was OK, helped by info from the monitor).

Incidentally I thought "lie" in your reply must be a training website or something, Googled and found "will lie within a range of ±20 beats/minute" and "Maximum heart rate ... This involves sitting or lying .." before realizing there was an 'n' missing. Doh. Will be ordering puzzle books on lie to improve brain power.

Edited to put second 's' in missing.

I went with RPE because it doesn't require much in the way of kit. Great if you have a HR watch as it helps line up the efforts (RPE can be very effective but as you can imagine it's easy to kid yourself).  If you have tech (presuming this since you're on here) and it's viable, the GCN site on YouTube has some great virtual workouts - misery loves company and all that!

https://www.globalcyclingnetwork.com/category/train-with-gcn

Keep it simple...

10min warm-up

5x 3min hard, 1min easy

5min cool down

Thanks, Good, simple suggestion. I've never warmed up or down in my life. Have suffered many annoying muscle strains in recent years so perhaps now would be the time to start.