Comment by ant6n
1 day ago
How do you get exercise without sweating. Or asked another way, of you don’t get your heart rate up while riding, what’s the point.
Or put a different way: I use electric Lime rental bikes all the time, it’s super fast and convenient. But I’m keenly aware they don’t give me any exercise, so I do want to go back to unpowered bikes as much as possible.
Biking does not have to equate to cardio! You can commute to work on an e-bike with your heart rate similar to walking quickly (what I do). And you can go exercise later.
Not sure how these two things got tied together in the common culture. Something I hear all the time is "but you have an electric bike, what's the point, it doesn't get you any exercise" and people saying that commute to work sitting in their cars.
> How do you get exercise without sweating.
Do you sweat a ton when you walk? Yet walking is exercise. The point being, of course, there’s a correlation between how hard the exercise is (plus other factors like clothing and weather) and the amount of sweating, but to claim that not sweating equals no exercise is incorrect.
you'd get more exercise walking to the bus stop than on ebike
Depends on the ebike and the setting. In Europe (at least; I'm not so clear on rules the US) in most cases the motors on ebikes respond to pedal input, so riding along purely by electrical power isn't usually possible. As such, you can choose from different levels of assistance, from lots to very little or nothing at all, which also correspond to different ranges.
This may be true for your average pizza-delivery rider, but it's not an automatic property of e-bikes. I recently crossed a mountain range on a regulation e-bike (i.e. a pedalec with capped motor and a limited battery) and I can confirm that it took some effort.
This is a typical comment I get from people who don't use E-bikes. Also from people from the US, who get sold POWERFUL E-bikes that are not pedal-assist type. You click a button and you ride, like on a scooter. That's not what I mean by E-bike.