Help! Are there health benefits to unicycling?

General
23

Mile for mile, unicycling is harder work than biking at the same speed.

But I don’t ride my bike at the same speed as the unicycle - I just can’t ride a unicycle at > 20mph. On the bike, you have a lot of control over how hard it is - because as you get faster, it becomes less efficient, so you can make it really hard to do 10 miles, which is harder than unicycling, or just pootle along at 15mph for 10 miles which is easier than unicycling.

On a road bike, you can choose exactly how hard you’re exercising at any point. That’s why most fast mountain bikers train for fitness on road bikes.

So yeah, I think mile for mile, unicycling isn’t as any harder than road biking (and is probably less hard), assuming you ride hard on the road bike, and for a given time, you can do more exercise on a road bike.

The big advantage of unicycling, is that it is super fun. I like my road bike, but, 9 times out of 10, if I’m out for a fun ride, I’ll go for a muni.

Joe

24

Joe, we already knew commuting wasn’t great exercise on a uni. :roll_eyes:

I’m sure some of the avid road racers may disagree (mr. geared 36er fan!).

Depending on what I’m doing I get anywhere from less aerobic exercise than if I were walking to about the amount achieved from jumping rope, from less resistance training than if I were sitting watching TV (not including core balance corrections) to more than if I were pumping it at the weight room.

Unicycling includes too many different sports for this question to get a clear answer.

25

That’s exactly the problem in terms of aerobic exercise, on a unicycle you can’t just go out and consistently go at a certain intensity for a certain distance, unless you’re just road unicycling on the flat - in which case you’re limited by spinning rather than fitness as to how fast you can go, unlike on a road bike where you can just change up another gear. You hit a hill, and you have to work harder, you hit a downhill, and you have to stop pedalling. Whereas on a road bike, you can choose how much energy you’re putting in at any time.

It’s worse on a muni, you can’t consistently exercise at all, there’s so much difference between bits you spin out on, and bits you have to hop over, and between uphills and downhills.

So in terms of aerobic exercise, if you train well on a road bike, you’ll get fitter faster than training well on a unicycle, particularly doing anything other than riding a high geared road unicycle on the flat.

Joe

26

Haha, I remember a thread a year or two ago about what’s gone down over the last few posts. Kind of turned into a unicycling is the best and nothing can touch it! vs. use your head argument. I also remember Joe getting in there… but, anyway, I second Joe. He knows what he’s talking about.

On a road bike, the conditions are so controlled and the choices of gearing are so many and so close that you can dial in exactly the power (literal power, force*distance/time) you need to put out to maintain a constant speed. If you’re diligent enough, you can get a much more intense workout on a road bike than anything else. If you have a higher gear, and you’re complaining that it’s too easy, take the higher gear. You have no excuse not to :).

My argument last time was that, even with a coker, the equivalent gear ratio (or Total Gear Ratio, as someone put it here a while ago) just isn’t high enough to necessitate sufficient FORCE from your legs to give you a workout at sane cadences.

With the geared 36er, that may or may not be true. Just riding on flat ground in high gear, there still isn’t enough gain to give your legs the same workout they’d get on a bike, but the slightest of grades or headwinds will make up the difference. (Sometimes, maybe more than the difference, which lowers your performance in the other direction… too high a gear is just as bad as too low a gear). If I go out riding on my geared 36 into the wind or up SHALLOW grades (steeper grades mean low gear, which is way too easy), I get a pretty darned thorough workout, and I get all the opportunity I need to actually feel like I’m cranking something… but if I’m going with the wind, I decisively still need a bigger gear (maybe 1.8 or 2). Now, because I’m lazy on my bike, I usually end up taking gear choices that give me a workout comparable to or slightly less intense than what I do on my the uni, so the net effect is that I get nearly all my training on my uni now, and hardly ride my bike anymore. If I seriously want to ride hard, I’ll take the bike, but the uni is so much more fun, and is so “close enough” to my bike (in terms of how hard I work) that it’s worth it to take the uni. Also, it makes me ride more because of how much fun it is. So if I ride 90% as hard on average, but twice as much because it’s fun, I end up in better shape! Win/win! That still doesn’t mean a geared 36 is as good a fitness tool as a bike, though. Just means I should be riding harder than I actually am. :-/

27

All I ride are hills when I guni on the 29. I agree riding the flats doesn’t do it for me. But bikes are harder on my back.
I don’t get sore backs on a uni. In fact my back has never been better since I was 20 years old. I have degenerative back disease. But riding uni for the last 4 years has made me younger.

28

And yeah, about stuff like muni - it’s punishing, and your heart rate is up, but it’s not consistent and consistently difficult. You feel thrashed afterwards, but not because you, say, dumped exactly 250 watts into the road for the last hour at 100 RPM. So, doing MUni or ungeared-coker riding on hard terrain, you’ll definitely get a level of fitness others don’t have, but it won’t necessarily be the ability to push the pedals hard at a constant RPM and cadence for a long time without ever taking a break. On pretty much anything less than a geared coker (except, for some, maybe a geared 29), if you’re just pedaling it on anything but the steepest climbs, you’re not really getting training that will make you powerful (i.e. able to really stomp up hills in high gear and keep up high cadences in heavy gears for long periods of time). But don’t get me wrong, you’ll be REALLY fit, and you’ll be able to punish yourself like that longer and harder than someone who doesn’t do it… maybe even someone who spends all his time on a road bike. I’m a total roadie, and muni sucks the wind out of me quite reliably: while some of the people I can usually out-coker on the road are WAY stronger than me on rocky trails, and can keep trucking along through drop after drop, rock after rock. But it’s rare that those hard spots last longer than a minute or two before there’s 20 or 30 feet of just spinning on relatively smooth trail; on a road bike, you’ll work 80% as hard for 50 times the contiguous time span, and that’s where the coolness of the measurability and gear choice lies.

So I’m not saying Muni’s not hard; it’s clearly really hard, and though I’m not really great at it, it ALWAYS can take energy faster than I can recoup it. It’s really hard… but it’s not consistently aerobic like what you can do on a road bike unless you’re going up a perfectly smooth fire road with something like a 10% grade (assuming you’re on a 24ish inch wheel).

29

I can compare mile-to-mile and hour-to-hour to running and biking.

My comparison is based on distance or commuting riding. I don’t do trials or muni or anything like that. In those cases, I don’t think mile per mile is the appropriate measure.

Mile per mile, running burns more than unicycling burns more than bicycling.

Somebody above said that biking is better exercise mile per mile but that’s demonstrably false. Mile per mile you are working harder on a unicycle. No coasting means that you are working as hard or harder to move forward on a unicycle, and then you sink a positive amount of energy into balance that you do not on a bicycle.

On the road, I typically burn about 130 calories per mile running, 75-100 calories per mile unicycling, and 50-70 calories per mile bicycling.

Hour per hour, bicycling and running can be equal and unicycling cannot keep up at the high end. Whatever your physical capacity is for running or bicycling, you can sink that energy into either and be limited by your V02 max or other physical factors rather than your choice of exercise. Unicycling’s upper limit, in distance or commuting, is not physical but one of mental energy and balance.

For example, I can go out and run a marathon averaging a heart rate around 170 beats per minute. I should be able to maintain something similar on a bicycle, but I just can’t get up to that high a heart rate on a unicycle except when I’m climbing a big hill. Even if I had a big hill that I could theoretically climb for three hours, it takes an amount of mental energy, balance, and fast-twitch as opposed to slow-twitch muscle action to climb hills on a unicycle that I just couldn’t do it. Hour for hour I can get a better workout on a bike or a unicycle.

For cross training, the unicycle’s unique qualities and limitations make it a better way to train for running than does a bicycle. It keeps me at my long-run heart rate and emphasizes balance and core.

Hope that helps.

Z

30

That’s not right. I think, if you go a mile at 26 mph on a bike, you use way more energy per mile than doing a mile at 15 mph on a unicycle. So, if you go out and do a 10 mile ride on a bike, you can potentially tire yourself out more than a 10 mile ride on a unicycle. It’s because energy used vs speed is not a linear relationship, thanks to air & rolling resistance.

You’re only right if you ride at the same speed on the bike and the unicycle. I think as you get to high speeds on the bike, the inefficiency due to air resistance and rolling resistance become high enough that you’re less efficient per mile than the unicycle.

On my commute, I find I can make myself way more tired by hammering it on the bike than hammering it on the unicycle, because I can ride so much harder on the bike. And that’s a fixed distance.

Joe

31

Once you get into a measure based on how you “tire yourself out” rather than energy used we’re into more mushy territory. I base my conclusions above on measured energy expenditure as a function of heart rate that does not address how “tired” one feels. Without getting into extreme speeds where factors such as air resistance become increasingly important factors, the energy expenditure per mile stays pretty constant regardless of the energy expenditure per unit time.

What you describe, outside of the extremes where air resistance becomes increasingly important, is more a function of what metabolism we are emphasizing at different rates of energy expenditure. It is very difficult to maintain a speed on a unicycle that emphasizes an anaerobic metabolism. Instead distance unicycling emphasizes aerobic metabolism almost exclusively, with a higher heart rate only achieved on hills and unsustainable bursts. Aerobic activity can be maintained for as long as you can keep a stream of carbohydrates coming into the system to keep burning fat stores for energy. I’ve maintained aerobic activity for over 30 hours without being too tired to stop. Anaerobic activity is physically bounded in how long it can be sustained. You burn almost exclusively carbohydrates in your muscle and liver in the form of glycogen, cannot replenish those carbohydrate sources during the exertion, and build up lactic acid faster than it can be processed resulting in more rapid muscle fatigue. All this without notably different rates of energy expenditure mile per mile.

When you “hammer it” on a bike you tire out faster than the equivalent distance on a unicycle because you are exhausting a bounded anaerobic source of energy more quickly than the unbounded source of aerobic energy used on a unicycle.

All without violating my previous observations, until you reach a speed where air resistance significantly alters the physics involved.

32

But those resistance effects start to make a difference at something like 15mph. Which isn’t very fast on a bike - all fast riders can average over that for long distances (like 100 miles or so). That’s in still air. If there’s any head wind, which there usually is, it obviously can make a difference at slower speeds as the relative windspeed will be higher.

For a good road unicyclist, the extra energy used to balance is minimal, so the bike only needs to be going a little bit faster to lose efficiency due to drag.

Personally I think on anything other than a geared 36, for a relatively fit rider, who runs out of spinning ability before they go anaerobic, they could probably work hard enough extra on a bike to be less efficient and use more calories per mile. On a geared 36 it’s closer - as the speeds are getting so close to bike speeds (and the high up / poor aerodynamics at those speeds probably make them inefficient at those speeds).

Joe

33

OK, without spinning off into a lot of different points (at least not without resolving the initial set) I will say I overstated the degree to which calorie burn per distance remains constant with respect to speed, but note that I also allowed a relatively wide range of burn rates in the numbers I stated.

That said, it still seems difficult to have the calories per mile on a bicycle exceed that on a unicycle. The following link does a nice job I think of demonstrating the bicycle numbers:

Note that the numbers it gives at its highest velocity of 30mph only just reaches beyond the high end of 70 cal/mile I stated, reaching approximately 77cal/mile and just reaching the bottom end of the range that I’ve observed in unicycling.

The increase in energy requirements as speed increases beyond 15mph on a bicycle cannot be ignored, but don’t seem to result in burning more per mile than a unicycle. Exhausting to ride with an intensity to achieve 30mph? Definitely. But you’re still on a much more efficient ride than a unicycle.

I look forward to getting my taint onto a geared 36r to see how that changes the numbers!

Cheers,
Z

34

Builds good balance, strong abdominal muscles, its a good leg work out, and its super fun.

35

You’re taking numbers that you worked out from some magic number device (probably a heart rate monitor/gps or something), which, whilst they may be good relative to each other, probably won’t relate in any way to real numbers, and comparing them to a set of calculated numbers on the internet. That doesn’t say much, as those HRM calculated things are only good relative to other things calculated for the same person with the same device.

What the web site you posted does show, is that by going at 20mph, you burn 37.1 calories / mile, whereas at 10 mph, you burn 13.3 calories per mile. That’s a massive difference, almost 3 times as much energy per mile at the higher speed.

If both a unicycle and a bike are going at 10mph, there is no way that a unicycle is 2.8 times harder to ride than the bike, as long as the unicyclist is a smooth rider. So, if we up the bike speed to 20mph, the bike is going to be way less efficient than the unicycle, mile for mile.

Joe

36

It seems we’ll have to agree to disagree. I’ve been observing these things in myself for a good while and have never seen a bicycle approach the number of calories per mile required on a unicycle in anything resembling common circumstances. If you’ve measured such an occurrence I’d be thrilled to hear more about it.

My attempt to use multiple lines of evidence was not to make them perfectly agree with each other but to try and use the evidence available to demonstrate to you, across the pond, what I have observed myself here.

Cheers,
Z

37

Unicycling is definitely the most fun way for me to keep in shape.

Due to back surgery several years ago I was no longer able to cycle, which had been a passion all my life. It’s funny how the wheel turns as I’d always wanted to learn to unicycle.

Unicycling has been insanely beneficial to my lower back, and I can’t recall ever being as fit overall from cycling. Uni is also surprisingly low impact compared to a lot of other sports.

Plus there’s obviously more to health than just aerobic fitness. The ‘zen zone’ is so much more intense/pure when unicycling vs cycling, imo anyway.

Can’t comment too much on road unicycling as I don’t do much of it, apart from that it seems to take significantly less effort than off road, which is what I enjoy most.

I’m off for a uni ride! :stuck_out_tongue:

38

I agree that unicycling is very good for core muscles–much better than biking–which basically mess up my back.

I find that unicycling is also a low impact sport, except for the UPDs. :wink:

39

This has been beat to death both in this thread and others, but I just found it funny that we’re not talking about “extreme speeds where air resistance becomes significant.” On any good road bike, air resistance is pretty much all there IS! (I’m assuming you’re on a smooth road with tires up in the 120 PSI range.) And on a geared 36, just bending down over the handlebar will easily turn your 17mph into 19.5mph with the same effort.

and @Joe, regarding your 2.8-times-the-power-for-double-the-speed point: it’s also possible that it’s more than 2.8 times as hard to ride the unicycle at 20mph than 10mph, which would keep the unicycle less efficient than the bicycle, even with the bike’s loss.

But Joe is definitely right; if you go out and crank a mile at 32mph on your bike, you WILL burn more energy than spinning out that mile at 15mph on a uni. 26mph… maybe, maybe not, but there IS definitely a line that the bike can cross where, beyond it, you’re burning more mile per mile. In most cases, though, you’re not riding at that level; you’d be doing 17-19mph on the uni and 22-24mph on the bike, or something, burning less energy per mile on the bike than on the uni, as boisei says.

I think this all boils down to “it depends on how you ride.” :slight_smile:

40

Isn’t energy burning a very narrow definition of “health benefits” which was the original topic of this thread?

41

Yes it is, although it was relevant to the question particularly as it was revived by Ducttape. That it spun off into such a lengthy discussion shouldn’t be taken as a disproportionate level of importance attributed to it though.

Yes, that was probably a poor choice of words and one that I backpedaled on since. To be clear, I spend most of my time on a bicycle at a recreational and commuting speeds, focusing on it much less than running or unicycling.

I think the point I was groping for was more to do with where that increase in resistance becomes very steep with respect to increase in speed. I also think that the speeds that we’re talking about have more to do with performance than exercise. I don’t train for any kind of bicycle racing, but if training is at all like running then the “exercise” of training is mostly at a slower pace than the “performance” of racing. Finally, I think that the energy sinks involved in unicycling increase quickly with speed too - we’re nowhere near as aerodynamic as a bicyclist, and it seems to me that the variances in balance that suck up energy on a unicycle grow at higher velocities as well. At this point I’m outside of the range of my systematic empirical observations though. It would be fun to explore these further with my fairly well calibrated magic number device.

Thanks for your insights chuckaeronut.

Cheers,
Z

42

Hour per hour is a better measurement. I can keep a target heart rate for as long as I can push myself. I ride a series of small hills for almost an hour.

Running is high impact. More things in the body are shaken up. Like banging on your razor to clean out the whiskers. It’s hard on it and shortens the life. It’s better to brush it.

Weight lifting can be aerobic if you do a speedy circuit. Quick reps with little rest.

Also, rollerblade/ice skating is a great workout using a lot of muscles. But it’s hard for me to find a good place to get the full stokes and good speed.
Swimming is great; sometimes perfect. But I think sometimes it’s almost too low impact.
Stand up paddle surfing uses every muscle without trying. Paddle hard if you want aerobic.

You don’t need a perfect cadence for perfect aerobic workout. Muni can go as hard as you want. Just don’t stop. Usually we muni not for the workout but for the fun. It nice to rest on the ride and play on some fun lines.

Lastly, I pretty sure a unicycle uses a lot of muscles(much more than a bike). Lots of upper body muscles are involved without putting pressure on your hands, neck, and lower back.

I heart unicycles!!:slight_smile: