Excy – Complete Exercise Bike in a Miniature Package
This foldable exercise bike can be operated with both hands and feet. It’s tough enough for serious workouts at a price that rivals full-size equipment. When you’re done, it almost won’t take up space. Excy is like a polite guest: he doesn’t bother you when you’re busy, but he always has fun.
We’ve already covered other unusual exercise bikes here, such as the DeskCycle and the full-size FitDesk . Both are designed to give you an easy workout while you’re doing something else. But Axi is only a distant relative to them. You can put Excy (and yes, they call it “Excy”, not “Excy”) in front of the couch while you watch the movie, but I tried to shove it under the table – no way. It is large enough for your knees to rest on the countertop. On the other hand, it’s easy to keep Excy close to your desk and do a short workout when you need a break.
The Excy’s asking price is also much higher than when they were not produced. DeskCycle is currently priced at $ 159, while other tiny bikes can be purchased for as little as $ 30 . For Excy, however, you’re looking for at least $ 700 . It’s competitive with some full-size exercise bikes! However, it tries to justify its price tag by being heavy-duty and versatile. It’s not just a situation where you relax with the pedal: Excy wants to be your companion for intense workouts.
Excy is great for intense interval training
While the Excy can be used for constant speed workouts, it works even better at intervals. If you’ve done group cycling, you know what exercise is: turn the handle on the bike to get more resistance, and turn it the other way when you need to relax. The Excy does not feel like a spin bike, however, because there is no flywheel here. This means that the pedal cycle will not be smooth until you learn to press evenly with each foot in turn.
This is how you use Excy for hard workouts. Place the Keeper Yoga Mat over the chair and hook it with your teeth on the Excy. Sit on the Keeper and you can push as much as you like without the little bike sliding forward. If the Keeper still slides – mine, although the Axie team says it’s unusual – you can secure it by wrapping the included zip ties around the back legs of the chair. It worked, and I was able to pedal from his best , without touching the bike.
You can use this with any chair or even sofa. But then the Excy gets really interesting when you realize you can customize it in more than one way – and even use it as a hand bike.
Axi can work with your hands and core
It is very difficult to get a good cardio workout if you have injured some part of your leg. I know this from experience. Excy founder Michelle Mehl does the same: She broke her leg while Excy was still in development, so she switched to using it with her hands.
An arm bike with Excy is no joke. I did the Arm Candy high resistance workout and in just seven minutes I got one of the best arm strength training I’ve had in a long time.
The built-in pedals only have tiny lugs for traction, so you can simply grab the pedals by the edges and train without chewing on your hands. (You can also pedal barefoot during leg workouts.) The cranks fit standard 9/16 ” pedals, so you can replace them with handles if you plan on cycling a lot, or your favorite bike pedals if you prefer. … style.
This little bike has many configurations between the legs and arms. I found the most useful ones:
- Attaches to chair with Keeper for recumbent-style workout.
- On a sturdy table or countertop and you stand on the Guardian to make sure the Axie doesn’t slip forward.
- On the floor, with the Guardian like a yoga mat; pedal and lift your glutes off the ground for a killer hamstring kick.
- On the floor, but this time you’re sitting at the base of the Excy and pedaling with your hands.
I also tried hand pedaling while doing the plank, but the safety warnings tell you not to do this , so unfortunately I recommend that you don’t. The Excy website has even more features and videos where you can follow great workouts for each position.
Where it fails
Excy doesn’t have such major flaws as quirks – things that might annoy some people, but the Excy team is hyping as unique design features. See what you think:
Pedaling is not smooth. At least until you get enough practice to learn how to pedal smoothly. Mehl described it to me as more like mountain biking than indoor flywheel cycling, but even mountain bikes have little momentum. With Excy, you just press, and when you stop, the pedal stops. It’s all.
The bike is not always stable from side to side . When you learn to pedal smoothly, the bike will not wobble, so this is a problem similar to the one described above. Excy also sells a stabilizer bar for $ 132, which prevents wobbling. Attaching and detaching the bar is not easy, even with video instructions. For a while it seemed to me that it was stuck forever, but then I realized that you need to press the buttons on both sides, and not just one at a time, to remove it.
There are no handy indicators to show your time or effort . Instead there is … a thermometer? Stay here with me. Because drag is due to friction, the bike physically heats up during use. The hotter it gets, the more energy you put into the machine. It actually makes a lot of sense because it reflects the volume of the workout: a long, light workout and a very short, very hard workout can reach the same temperature. Either way, you’ve done the same amount of work overall. The thermometer doesn’t lie.
The app is cumbersome and intended for iOS only . The Excy app comes with a customizable interval timer so you can design your own workout, and a series of pre-programmed interval workouts that play an audio track telling you what to do when a visual workout overview is displayed: yellow bars for easy, orange for medium, red for hard.
Both types will prompt for a start and end temperature, allowing the app to calculate the calories burned. But there is no way to add a workout manually or edit a workout that you have already completed. The app also doesn’t make the screen sleep, so if you really dive into your workout, you might find your phone is dark and you’re only signed in for a few minutes. It would be great to be able to watch a video of a workout while recording the corresponding workout at the same time, but this is not an in-app option.
Bottom line: like a real exercise bike, but smaller
Should you buy Excy? It depends what you are looking for. If you need a simple cycle while working, DeskCycle will make the job cheaper. If you want to work out in the living room because you can’t always get to the gym, Sworkit and YouTube are for you .
The sweet spot for Excy is probably someone who wants to cycle and has the budget to consider a full-size stationary bike, but not a place for one. (Cynical plus: It’s too small to be a bulky clothes hanger.) It’s also great if you want to keep up with your cardio workout but have an injury or disability affecting your legs.
I enjoyed spending time with Axi. I did some interval workouts on days when I couldn’t run and did some quick workouts as a break from work . The price is very high, but this gadget has many advantages in a small package.