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I’m struggling to understand why a fully fit 21 year old needs an ebike to ride the downhill trails at Aston Hill.
Well you don't. But getting twice as many downhill runs into a day is often thought of as a plus. I always ride up, but that's to keep the dad body at bay...not something that's going to bother a 'fully fit 21 year old'.
Perceptions differ. I like ebikes (pedalecs)
I don’t have one, and understand they’re not for everyone just like regular bikes aren’t for everyone. The thing with internet fora etc is that all of a sudden every pub bore of yore found their way into the room and now they/we are all banging on all day every day because there is quite literally no coat to get.
NOt sure how this post and your other post are related in any way at all.... or indeed related to my reply.
I’m struggling to understand why a fully fit 21 year old needs an ebike to ride the downhill trails at Aston Hill.
You should have been with me on Sunday when I encountered 4 under 30 year old men all on full suspension e-bikes riding around the gravel roads of the New Forest. You really wouldn't be able to understand that.
They were enjoying themselves "coasting" up the hills at 15mph, I was enjoying myself by using them to pace me up the hill at 15mph. All good in my view.
The acoustic/electric bike arguments on here remind me of the riser/flat, and vee/disc wars of days past, just as illuminating and pointless.
“You’ve pretty much shown how little effort an ebiker user has to go to by showing lower energy expenditure of the rider.”
Actually, that study shows that the net energy consumption is pretty much the same, whether that energy comes from mains electricity to power the motor via the battery or from food to power your muscles to drive the pedals.
“That’s in-line with the other study that came out with they do bugger all for your fitness.”
As I’ve already pointed out, on mine there are some buttons on the handlebar which adjust the assistance in various steps, from off to full power. Despite doing 95% of my commuting and MTBing on an ebike this year I’ve had no problem keeping up with the group on my hardtail the few times I’ve taken it out - in fact it’s a fair bit easier than the ebike because I’m not hauling around a switched off battery and motor when I’m with my mates. It is annoying how much longer it takes to get home on the hardtail though... Maybe I should drive home after the ride instead of pedalling back, would that be better for my fitness and the environment?
Last week I had to sprint to the station to catch a train. Despite having the bike on full turbo I was knackered when I got there. How can that be? Maybe it was because I averaged 17mph over 3 miles with a 200’ climb in the middle, and according to the law my bike provides no assistance above 15.5mph (and it’s a 6” full-sus with a 2.6” cut spike up front and a 2.3” knobbly on the back)?
i had one for a whole 3 weeks until it was stolen
Anyone get charged for that?
Awww diddums @chiefgrooveguru
"Actually, that study shows that the net energy consumption is pretty much the same, whether that energy comes from mains electricity to power the motor via the battery or from food to power your muscles to drive the pedals."
Yeah - energy consumption on an ebike comes from the mains electricity grid. So if the net energy consumption is the same then *almost* all the power used to propel yourself on a commute is coming from a power station.
Out of your own mouth. And equal to the only scientific study that says commute ebiking doesn't really offer health benefits. 🙂
(And so what if you did a climb on a sprint? Sprinting is hard period. Nobody is saying zero-effort. Just massively reduced)
Is anyone else getting really tired of this debate?
I don't own one nor plan to in the next couple of years. But i'm sure i'll probably get one at some point.
^^^^, what, disc brakes, suspension, 26 or 29 ?
This is just another of those areas of opposing opinions based on personal preference isn't it ?
“Out of your own mouth. And equal to the only scientific study that says commute ebiking doesn’t really offer health benefits. 🙂“
There are plenty of scientific studies which have later been shown to be deeply flawed. Unless I am extremely anomalous individual then I believe that is the case with this study.
And if you’ve never spent a reasonable amount of time riding an ebike then your opinion on them is as valuable as that of a car driver on cycling who can’t ride a bike.
I get fitter riding mine for an hour each way than I would sitting on the train for 20 minutes.
I don’t need a “scientific study” to know that.
And if the study says I don’t, then it’s total horse shit 👍
@Nealglover - you *do* need a scientific study to know that because it's the only tool we have to measure things. Hammers for nails, science for truth.
Walking to the train station / bus stop is covered under the study - and the walk to the public transport does the average ebiker commuter more good than the ride.
Not counting fun, or mental health. But the fact you don't have to press hard on the pedals (and, as ebikers accuse cyclists of being 'masochists' - that's proof enough that ebikers don't voluntarily press hard on the pedals) means you don't reap the health benefits.
I certainly put in the same effort when riding my ebaike. for slightly shorter periods as it takes a few mins less to get to town on it but I am either riding hard at 15mph with motor assistance uphill or riding hard at 30mph without downhill
“Not counting fun, or mental health. But the fact you don’t have to press hard on the pedals (and, as ebikers accuse cyclists of being ‘masochists’ – that’s proof enough that ebikers don’t voluntarily press hard on the pedals) means you don’t reap the health benefits.”
Have you ever ridden a production non-DH mountain bike of the last 20 years with gears? Only in exceptional circumstances do you HAVE to press hard on the pedals because the gear range is so large that you can twiddle along gently spinning all the time. But curiously most people prefer to use a higher gear and push on the pedals harder because it gets them places more quickly and is more satisfying.
Is anyone else getting really tired of this debate?
Yes, me.
I have no problem with E-Bikes when they are used in the same way an unassisted bike would be. Whether it’s enabling riders to complete loops faster, or help those who need it, all great stuff.
Where I often ride we have some tucked away trails (that walkers don't use) that have always been descents because they are too steep or loose to climb or because there is an easier climb or fire road nearby. Now, for the first time, I have seen E-bike riders climbing up them. We can argue all day about 'it's not a trail centre’, or 'you should be in control/able to stop' etc, but it increases the chances of a collision occurring in a manner that had never previously existed. Secondly, bike wheels, motor assisted or human powered, going up hill under load result in levels of trail erosion far greater than those caused when freewheeling down hill, particularly in woodland areas where the ground is soft, loamy or muddy. This behaviour will most likely lead to resentment and conflict with other riders and landowners in the future if it continues.
I always try and put the effort in whatever I'm doing, bike, ebike, gym, ironing.
Its going to be difficult to say these competitors wont.
https://www.enduroworldseries.com/news/1371-enduro-world-series-launches-ewse/
UCI President David Lappartient said: “The UCI is looking forward to the introduction of an electric-powered version of Enduro with the launch of the EWS-E from 2020. Based on the experience and know-how of the Enduro World Series (EWS), this innovative format of competition will offer spectacular racing while ensuring the highest standard of sporting integrity. This new series confirms the current status of E-MTB as a fast-moving cycling discipline.”
Akers - I think your example falls into the 'don't be a dick' category which applies to everyone, regardless of e-assistance.
How long does a fully charged battery tend to last on say a Lake District ride or one of the 7Stanes? Do you just unclip the battery from the bike and take indoors to charge or is the battery semi permanently attached to the bike and you have to run a cable to it?
@Nealglover – you *do* need a scientific study to know that because it’s the only tool we have to measure things
No. I really don’t.
I know my own experiences and results.
Driving to the train station and getting a train to within 500 yards of the office does not get me fit.
Riding 24 miles/day on an ebike does.
(Not exactly surprising to anyone with a bit of common sense, but you obviously know better)
Lol @tracey - was waiting for someone to bring up racing as a justification.
Racing is racing - you always give maximum effort on competetive sport otherwise what's the point? (I can also say what's the point of an ebike series because of this - maximum effort is maximum effort - whether there is additional power from a motor or not - so it's transparently about sales).
But the argumemt is about normal use by normal people, who (unless they're masochists, as non-powered cyclists have been called in various threads on this) don't artificially stress themselves.
The science is clear, even @chiefgrooveguru quoted an energy study (undermining himself).
Why don't ebikers just admit it?** 99% of the time, in terms of fitness, it IS cheating.
For everything else, knock yourselves out. 🙂
**we know why - a) people don't like to feel like cheats and would rather lie to themselves and; b) if the perception with the public was that ebikes were cheating then sales'd plummet - which means less money for the entire industry and tough luck for the magazines that have frown up around it. - so damn the fact that n00bs are tearing down snowdon between walkers, knocking people off in trail centres and the peak (three times - once me, twice my o/h), eroding the trails more and requiring rare earth metals and energy gen.
Despite my (obvious) hate for them I think they've definitely got their place - if they take cars off the road / enable people who otherwise couldn't (great!) etc. But stop kidding yourselves that they're not cheating when it comes to fitness - it's precicely because they are that makes them fun.
But stop kidding yourselves that they’re not cheating when it comes to fitness
I’m not trying to get fit. I’m already fairly fit.
The increased fitness and weight loss is just a byproduct of cycling roughly 2 hours/day on an ebike rather than sitting on a train.
How am I cheating exactly ?
And your granddad smoked 50 a day and lived until 100 too I bet, @nealglover 😉
(and apart from that - the answer to your question is already contained in my post above)
if the perception with the public was that ebikes were cheating
this whole conversation is beign framed incorrectly.
most people don't ride for fitness - they ride for transport. The more that e-bikes encourage people to get out of their car and ride to work or the shops the better.
My wife's drive to work was 15 minutes, it's a 20 minute ride and a 50 minute walk. No way would she be walking to work and back every day. She would ride but there's a massive hill and she found an e-bike enabled her to get up the hill and to work not in a sweaty mess - she can get off the bike and start work. So she has an ebike. It enabled her to stop driving. As far as I'm concerned that can only be a good thing for a whole host of reasons.
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How long does a fully charged battery tend to last on say a Lake District ride or one of the 7Stanes? Do you just unclip the battery from the bike and take indoors to charge or is the battery semi permanently attached to the bike and you have to run a cable to it?
How long is a piece of string? My ebike add on kit is a 375 whr batter so smaller than some. I have flattened it in 8 miles. I couldn't complete my usual pentlands loop on it which is 35 miles and 2000+ ft of climbing without range anxiety but I was certainly climbing much faster than I usually would ( no granny gear). I have also done 35 miles of easy offroad on half a battery
Most you can do either - charge on the bike or off it.
So with mine when I’m in the Alps I’ll regularly ride up a couple of peaks in a morning to hit some descents.
Those rides wouldn’t be possible in the timeframe on my Capra, so I wouldn’t do them.
I ride up trying to keep up over 10mph on the climbs, which means I’m sweating buckets and blowing hard.
But hey, I’m a cheat and not a real rider.
^^^^ 2020 eMTBs with 625 or 700 batteries would typically be good on regular trail mode for 4-5 hours of xc riding, so a decent day at a trail centre, or a proper natural loop with some decent hills. Range anxiety much less of an issue with the new breed of technology
“The science is clear, even @chiefgrooveguru quoted an energy study (undermining himself).”
I didn’t undermine myself, your poor comprehension undermined yourself. Read it again. Doesn’t matter whether you pedal hard or not, the CO2 per mile is within 10%.
I shouldn’t rise to this as it’s the pathetic words of someone with deeper issues:
“Why don’t ebikers just admit it?** 99% of the time, in terms of fitness, it IS cheating.”
But another reason I got an ebike was so I could balance the demands of commuting, MTBing and trying to get stronger - measured in terms of squat, bench and deadlift. At 41 the body has less ability to recover from training and the eMTB means that I can still push hard on rides but if my legs die on me due to all the commuting and weight training then I can turn on the assistance and keep up and still (relatively) enjoy myself. (I’m writing this in between five sets of eight of high bar squats).
So exactly how do you measure fitness? By some measures quite a lot of strong pedallers are otherwise pretty feeble...
When I was commuting across town on by ordinary bike I had no energy left to go out riding at weekends. When I used the ebike I did. So I actually rode more when using the ebike
this whole conversation is beign framed incorrectly.
most people don’t ride for fitness – they ride for transport. The more that e-bikes encourage people to get out of their car and ride to work or the shops the better.
I agree, people should always differentiate between e-bikes in general and e-mtb's. Issue's people might have with e-mtb use for leisure in the countryside have nothing to do with e-bike use as transport.
"this whole conversation is beign framed incorrectly. most people don’t ride for fitness – they ride for transport. The more that e-bikes encourage people to get out of their car and ride to work or the shops the better." @wwaswas - if the argument was about this I'd be 100% behind you m8. In fact - I'm completely for this. We'd be mad not to be.
But this isn't a general transport forum. This is an enthusiast website for a (niche) sport.
Edit: Ah, post above 🙂
@chiefgrooveguru - sure. Widen the terms to include fitness from <insert wherever else you get fitness from>. Of course, that makes the conversation pretty much irrelevant about specifically ebikes, and of course, the point has already been addressed in other posts.
If you go to 100 hours of zumba a week that doesn't mean ebikes make the average joe fitter. Period.
A lot of posts on here seem to come at the argument from the narrow view of someone who already cycles. Sure, an e-bike generally demands significantly less power from its rider.
But it still demands some. And it doesn’t use much unsustainable energy. And it doesn’t demand much road space. And it doesn’t demand much parking space. And it doesn’t demand rails or stations or tunnels. And it doesn’t demand a vehicle to be driven from where it is to pick you up. And it doesn’t add much to the level of danger on city streets. And it doesn’t act as a physical and psychological barrier between its occupants and the public at large. And so on.
So if you take the wider view of someone who sometimes, often or always uses cars, taxis, buses, trains, tubes and so on, then just about every damned thing about e-bikes is a win.
Three studies which show ebikes are beneficial to fitness, to a similar order of magnitude as normal hikes:
https://ijbnpa.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12966-018-0751-8
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S259019821930017X
Bez - ebikes ar dangerous if you are dutch and over 65 however - maybe thats a win? I am not sure
I presume chevy goes out on bike rides without a bike as he's so concerned about how fit he thinks he is.
I couldn't give a flying **** about how fit or unfit I am.
I just like the buzz of riding, always have done and hopefully always will.
Ebikes/non Ebikes love them all.
Just seems the same old same old that some people don't like anything new.
OK @chiefgrooveguru. Been on a cherry pick hunt have you?
In reverse order of the articles you posted:
First: based on an online survey measuring minutes on the bike - not fitness gains. - so false equivalence, since minutes on an e-bike aren't the same as minutes on a bike.
And in that very study they say this "e-biking being an active mode, positive health impacts from physical activity can be expected, but net impacts may differ from conventional bicycling due to lower intensity of activity< as well as potentially different travel patterns as shown below.
Few studies have associated e-biking directly with health outcomes""
...underwhelming eh? Lets carry on...
Lets have a look at the second:
Ah - broken link. (So unlikely you read it beyond a google cherry-pick search). But I found it - and it was based on 30 totally untrained obese volunteers. So a tiny not-relevant sample of a group of people who never move. Any activity would produce meaningful change - so again not relevant to this discussion (and not statistically significant).
Third: Again, three hundred people across 17 studies - and they say this:
"There was moderate evidence that e-cycling provided physical activity of at least moderate intensity, which was lower than the intensity elicited during conventional cycling, but higher than that during walking. There was also moderate evidence that e-cycling can improve cardiorespiratory fitness in physically inactive individuals. Evidence of the impact of e-cycling on metabolic and psychological health outcomes was inconclusive. Longitudinal evidence was compromised by weak study design and quality"
Only moderate evidence that ebikes might help the health of physically inactive individuals.
It pays to read your links before posting them old bean 🙂
I'll counter that "reasearch" with this study (again)..
And as I CBA retyping - I'll copy paste: In that study: “Transport Mode Choice and Body Mass Index – Cross sectional and Longitudinal evidence from a European-Wide Study” – in terms of BMI benefits the choice comes out like this, in order:
1) Riders of normal bikes.
2) Walking to work.
3) Bus/public transport (inc. walking to the bus stop/station)
4) Motorbikes.
5) e-bikes
6) Cars
Basically, because you don’t have to push hard on the pedals whilst commuting you’re probably better off walking to the bus stop. (In health terms). Study was based on 10,722 participants (just for those who will discount it out of hand because they don’t like the message).
Of course, for *enjoyment* of your commute that’s a totally different kettle of fish. 🙂
“Transport Mode Choice and Body Mass Index – Cross sectional and Longitudinal evidence from a European-Wide Study” – in terms of BMI benefits...”
Any study which analyses fitness and health based on BMI has been conducted by fools with no real understanding of fitness. Utterly moronic.
Funny @chiefgrooveguru - knew BMI would be the next thing you'd have a pop at (because you've nothing else against a well-designed 10000+ people study by actual scientists). People who have a pop at BMI as a measure are denialist morons with no real understanding of population-level monitoring and it's incredibly useful accuracy. 🙂
I've ridden them. They're great fun indeed. But 5 hours out on my bike makes me sweat like a bitch because I'm doing it under my own steam. 5 hours out on an ebike means I'm out of battery and the only real effort I've had to put in is pushing the bastard back.
But indeed they're fun. If I can easily concede that, why can't you just concede the fitness point to the actual (real) evidence?
(I think I've already answered that a few posts ago)
EBikes are great because it turns a fairly average rider (myself) into someone who can get up hills faster than the KOM holders on regular bikes! Without even trying hard! Without relying on a tail wind!
I've hired a few but I still haven't bought one yet as the tech is still improving fast, I can't wait until I own one though.
500 watt hours just isn't enough. That's why I've held back.
Already we're seeing big improvement in battery range with the 2020 models.
However E-Mountain Bike life can't be that easy, technical sections are just as hard, the downhills can still be brutal and they must be a complex machine to maintain.
It’s quite incredible that none of the 21 authors of that paper pointed out that BMI is the wrong metric to use for assessment of health. Even hip to waist ratios are more useful, but aerobic tests, strength tests and body fat analysis are what’s really needed. Just a simple grip strength test is a better indicator of health than BMI.
Furthermore the statistical analysis seems to show we have a classic garbage in = garbage out situation with regard to the ebike users. Really poor. If the focus had been on assessing ebike’s health benefits any peer review would have rejected the paper.
@chevychase go and ride some ebikes and stop being such a blinkered cretin.
E-bike thread become the new brexit thread. 🙄🙄
“But 5 hours out on my bike makes me sweat like a bitch because I’m doing it under my own steam. 5 hours out on an ebike means I’m out of battery and the only real effort I’ve had to put in is pushing the bastard back.”
You’re weird. All that happens when I ride an ebike is I go further and faster with the power on or work harder with the power off. I’m also one of those ebikers who doesn’t care about lifting it over gates, it’s the same weight as my six year old daughter and she isn’t exactly hard to pick up.
My BMI is 27 and it’s taken a fair bit of effort to get it UP to there. Overall I’m fitter than I’ve ever been.
BMI is a good measure for analysing the obesity of a large population. As soon as you apply it to individuals or small groups, which is what’s happening with this study once you break it down, then it fails. If you want to use BMI to measure health you need to compensate by also measuring wrist or ankle size to assess skeletal structure and natural muscle mass, and that’s ignoring those with hobbies or jobs that build strength.
Just to recap, sorry, they have walk mode? Seriously?
😄
I'm not convinced they are building the eco-friendly athletes of the future.