I’ve been meaning to write about some weird stuff that happens with the cardio machines at the gym. Aside from the rowing machines, all are made by a company called Lifefitness. They all have some interesting features and all allow you to connect your iPod and record workouts on a usb key. We went out a bought a couple of very cheap usb keys to do this and use it any time we used the machines. Anyway, on to some weird stuff.

1. The day the gym opened, not even a couple hours after we got our keys, we went to try out the machines for the first time. They have one upright and one recumbent bike available. I went to try out the upright bike and it didn’t work. The start up screen for the computer it uses would never come up after the machine started. I understand a succession of repair attempts were made on it and I think it was finally replaced. Not a good sign on day one though.
2. I’d used the recumbent bike a few times and recorded each workout on my usb key ver the first week or two. Maybe it was coincidence but about the same time the upright was fixed/replaced (about a week or two later) the recumbent bike started recording workouts as being on an upright bike. It still does this two months later. The two bikes are right next to each other so I think maybe it has an identity crisis or something.
3. A month or so back I started back to using my Polar heart monitor. The benefit of this was I didn’t have to hold the handles to get a heart rate reading. I found this really good on the treadmill as my hands go numb if I keep them on the handles too long. So that was a good thing. But when I started using the heart rate monitor, I found the cool down times after any workout on any of the machines suddenly switched to a ten minute cool down. This is never necessary as my heart rate always drops sufficiently within five minutes. And on the treadmill you are nearly at a standstill, going at 0.8kph. This had been consistent until a week or so back when a couple of the machines had reverted back to more reasonable cool down times. This isn’t consistent across even the same type machines. The cross trainer I used today was correct but the treadmill and bike both gave me ten minutes. I will just add that the Scientist doesn’t have a heart rate monitor and never finds the cool down times are increased to ten minutes.
4. On one occasion, I wanted to use a treadmill and had to go through about four before I found one that worked. The first one lacked a tv monitor for the cable, which wasn’t an issue since I listen to music on my iPod. But when I started working out, it started giving me some bizarre readings from my heart rate monitor. Even though my heart rate was low, it had me at 123 and the workout moved to another heart rate without me doing anything yet. Then it started showing my heart rate up around 200 and I knew that was totally wrong. After about three or four minutes I stopped it and tried another one. The second one didn’t work either and now I cannot recall what the issue was but I moved to a third one. This one just didn’t pick up my heart rate at all so I’d have had to hold on the whole time and made the heart rate monitor kind of pointless. Finally on the fourth try I got a machine that was willing to cooperate and I got through my treadmill routine.
5. There are six treadmills at the gym and I had trouble with three on that one occasion. I chose the ‘good’ machine on my next treadmill workout. I put the usb key in at the beginning and did my workout as normal. When I went to save, the usb key wasn’t recognized as being there. I’m pretty sure it was picked up when I started. At the time I was recording all these workouts carefully so it was pretty annoying. Now it wouldn’t bother me as I don’t tend to use that information regularly but still save it when possible. I more recently tried to use it again and it refused to recognize the usb key right from the start. I now don’t use that machine. There is one machine I can rely upon to work properly for me so I have to hope it’s not in use when I need it.
6. Going back to the cool down on the machines…my experience has generally been that the cool down continues for the full time allotted unless I quit the program before that. However on one occasion one treadmill decided my heart rate was low enough and stopped the program for me. And today the same thing happened on the cross trainer.
7. The same cross trainer mentioned above also seem to have a problem with using metric units. Every time I use it, I have to change to metric. This one, I am sure is related to default settings somewhere but I don’t think I have access to those.

I find it fascinating there can be so many issues on so many machines already. These aren’t even the mechanical issues you expect on gym equipment and instead of related to the computers on board. Very weird stuff indeed.