Are Air Bikes Good For A Beginner? + Starter Workout

You want to start working out at home and are wondering if an air bike is the right choice? Let’s find out if air bikes are suitable for you and which options are the best.

An air/fan bike is suitable for beginners because the resistance is always perfectly matched to your power output, the movement is easy to perform and it provides a full body workout that can help you improve cardiovascular health, lose weight and tone your muscles. 

A more in depth explanation and recommendations for specific models can be found below.


Are Air Bikes Good For Beginners?

An air bike (sometimes known as an “assault” bike) is a stationary exercise bike that creates resistance by spinning an air blade. Most models have foot pedals as well as arm levers for a full body workout.

Moving the foot pedals and levers spins the fan blade. The faster you try to spin the fan blade, the higher the resistance becomes. The fan blade will spin up to where the resistance is the same as the effort/power you put into it. This makes it a great machine to improve your conditioning and lose body fat.

Suggested: What’s an air bike and what’s it good for?

But is it suitable for beginners? Let’s look at a few different factors;

Image of an exhausted man in front of an air bike
Air bikes have a way of exhausting you.

Resistance

Air resistance goes up exponentially with speed so when you try to go faster, it becomes exponentially harder. This means you have pretty much ‘infinite’ resistance because you’ll run into your limits of how much power you can put out when going fast. And unless you’re superman, you’re not going to overcome air resistance on your air bike.

That might not sound like it’s suitable for beginners but it actually is. Because the maximum resistance is always matched to the maximum power output you can produce, it doesn’t matter how much power you can actually produce.

And beginners are not beginners for a long time. After a few weeks of regular workouts, you’ll be able to produce way more power than in the beginning. So then it’s nice that the maximum resistance of the machine just scales with your capability.

Of course you don’t always work out at maximum effort. But because there is no resistance setting you just start moving slightly slower and it will become easier because the fan blade has less resistance.

Suggested: Why are air bikes so hard to work out on?

Because the resistance is so flexible, fan bikes are amazing for High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) This is a great way to burn more calories in a short period of time and also improve your cardiovascular health. A good interval timer is going to make HIIT workouts much more enjoyable. Check out the GymNext Flex timer. It’s super easy to set up and control contrary to most other interval timers making the set up for any workout a breeze.

Movement pattern

For beginners, there shouldn’t be any complicated movement patterns. If it’s difficult to do, it’s more likely you’ll only try once or twice and then put the air bike in the corner to collect dust.

The movement pattern of an air bike is very easy to get. There two main parts to the movement;

  • Lower body
  • Upper body

The lower body pushes on the foot pedals just like a bicycle. And you don’t even have to know how to ride a real bicycle because you don’t have to worry about stability.

The upper body alternatingly pushes and pulls on the lever arms. That’s also not a difficult part to get right. Combining the two at the same time might feel a little weird in the beginning but after a few minutes, you’ll get the hang of it.

Learning to work out on an air bike is much easier and faster than learning how to properly run on a treadmill.

Suggested: 4 best alternatives to a fan bike

Results

Of course we all work out for a reason. Sure, you feel good afterwards but most people want to see more results than just that.

Most people work out to;

  • Lose weight
  • Improve their overall health
  • Improve cardiovascular health
  • Build some muscle

An air bike can do all of those things if used properly. If you work hard, an air bike gets your heart pumping and burn a lot of calories. Because an air bike uses both the upper and lower body, you use a lot of muscle mass at the same time. This means more blood has to be pumped around which is good for cardiovascular health and burns a lot of calories which helps with weight loss.  

If you work out at a very high intensity you can see some muscle growth as well. It’s not like you can get a bodybuilder physique just by working out on an air bike but you’ll see some toning in your arms, legs, chest and back and a flatter belly.

Image of a man on an air bike

Price

As a complete beginner, you don’t want to spend too much money on something because you’re not yet sure if you’ll stick with it.

There is a difficulty there though. You don’t want to spend too much but at the same time you also want to get something you don’t have to immediately replace when you do keep using it.

Air bikes are available from $200 to about $1500. The $200 ones work but aren’t something you’d expect to last a long time. If you’ve got the money, getting a bike around $700 is a good idea. For that amount of money, you get a high quality bike that will last you a very long time and can grow with your abilities.

At the same time, a bike for around that price is much easier to resell if you would want to get rid of it. Getting an air bike from a well-known brand helps a lot with selling later on.

Suggested: Is an air bike too loud for a home gym?


Beginner Air Bike Workout

Starting off with High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) is going to be too much for most beginners. If you’re starting off, it’s better to get started with some steady state cardio or medium intensity intervals. HIIT is quite tough to do right and while you could start out with that, it might put a lot of people off.

Luckily an air bike can also be used perfectly for steady state or medium intensity intervals. One thing you should use is a heart rate monitor. Air bikes usually don’t have one built in and it’s a great tool for monitoring your effort level.

The first time, just do 10 minutes. Warm up for about 5 minutes and then do 5 minutes at about 70% of your max heart rate. Then every workout after that, add a couple of minutes to your workout until you can do 30 minutes.

After you can do 30 minutes, you can try some HIIT type training. There are many ways you can do HIIT but it’s best to start with short intervals. Try 15 second high intensity (go as hard as you can) and then return to low intensity for 45 seconds. Do that for 5-6 minutes.

Then start cutting down the low intensity time. You could reduce it by 5 seconds every workout until you reach a 1:1 ratio for high and low intensity.

After that you can start increasing the high intensity time and the total workout time. However, by that time, it’s really not that suitable for beginners anymore.

Matt

Hey, I'm Matt. Welcome to HomeGymResource.com. After working out in many different gyms for almost 20 years and helping people build their own home gyms, i've learned a few things i'd like to share with you.

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