This reminds me of my own wacky idea for a line of fitness products: ordinary everyday items that are normal in every way except that they are intentionally designed to be physically challenging to use.
For example, doors that require a lot of force to open, keyboards with 1lb resistance springs, remote controls that weigh several kilograms, etc. Since many people have trouble going to the gym, it would be a way to introduce weight training in a way that was both unobtrusive and unavoidable.
Just one of those things that has been bouncing around in my head for years now. I think riding this bike would definitely qualify as weight training :)
This is similar to my business plan where I start a combo moving company / personal training service and charge people to move other people's furniture. Double profit!
"and approach to moving as a sport, requiring dedication and teamwork. Many Gentle Giant employees are current or former athletes from a wide variety of sports and competitive backgrounds. Current and former employees include both Olympic, collegiate and club rowers."
Gentle Giant is really more of a rowing club that has a moving company. They moved our company a few years back and I've never seen anyone carry as much weight as quickly and effortlessly as those guys.
We think alike! I would have started that company years ago if not for the threat of the inevitable lawsuit when a client drops a grand piano on someone’s head.
In my experience, I have found that the u-pick places around me are significantly cheaper than in-store or farmers’ markets. Even to the point that I don’t see how they could be profitable.
Except that moving boxes and furniture doesnt promote fitness. Most of your time will be sitting in a truck. Then it will be repetitive motions with moderate weights. It would be more akin to life as a fedex driver than a modern workout.
I come from an ag background, and when crossfit started getting big we joked about charging people to work around the ranch. Not surprised to hear it's a real thing. No doubt, though, that ag work can be physically demanding.
You don't even need to be in space if you want to make things heavier. As always the great David Jones (Daedalus) had this idea first in his New Scientist column (16th Feb 1968), and it's included in the compendium "The inventions of Daedalus"
Various test chambers for astronauts where built to test how people respond to higher gravity / a rotating reference frame. Actually trying to do this runs into some unexpected issues in practice. Here is a Tom Scott video about a more recent example: https://youtu.be/bJ_seXo-Enc
I had a quick look last night on my phone and couldn't find a copy online (though I know I've had some success in the past). I'll try again later on the laptop and failing that drop you an email with the relevant page when I get a moment to scan it.
It's much easier to get married, so you'll have the weekly task of going to the store by foot and bring back bagfuls of groceries, and possibly two packs of bottled water... then return there because you forgot two bags of cat's litter:)
More seriously, ages ago I wondered about a way to generate power by making sort of a (very compact) exoskeleton-like contraption for each limb articulation, so walking or using arms would activate some generators. Mechanical construction would be quite a challenge, however if built in a very compact wearable way it could become a thing: sensors for body parameters could self power, the phone in a pocket equipped with a inductive charger would charge while running, etc.
> so you'll have the weekly task of going to the store by foot and bring back bagfuls of groceries, and possibly two packs of bottled water... then return there because you forgot two bags of cat's litter:)
it's the "by foot" part where this may not work as you intended.
I once met a guy on a bike ride who trained with a kids trailer loaded down with bricks. He claimed that it was more time-efficient way to train, and on race days, his bike felt like it was made of helium. My only concerns are wear&tear on knees, and the risk of a crash, getting smashed by a 200lb trailer doesn't sound fun.
The Airhub resistance trainer is a safer option. It can selectively apply magnetic resistance (drag) in order to make training rides harder. But when switched off the bike rides like normal, and there are no extra safety risks.
Wear on the knees is more an issue of proper bike fit and pedaling technique. If you want to get fit as a cyclist then you have to put in some high wattage training rides. Whether the resistance comes from a heavy trailer or a steep hill or whatever makes no difference to the knee injury risk.
I know a similar story retold by yellow-jacket wearing cofee drinkers of a man who trains on a heavy mountain bike weighed down with offroad equipment and spares. The humm of his fat mountain bike tyres on the road approaching inspires ire and jelousy.
It would be a cosmic irony, since humans have been trying to make things "easier" since at least 4000 years.
I have another idea, make a lot of crank generators so that biochemical energy gets converted into electricity. I know you won't power your kettle nor your telsa but considering people 1) pay for exercise [0] 2) pay to power the devices to exercise .. I think it's due time.
[0] gym club managed to market gravity (and social context, but mostly gravity).
Everything here sounds like a recipe for injury. When you're lifting heavy things you should be focused on (correctly) lifting the heavy thing. If you turn the oven door into a deadlift you're going to forget one day and throw out your back.
For some reason the feeling of getting exhausted on an ultralight racing bike feels much easier on the mind than getting exhausted on a regular bike with a flat tire. Similar with swimming with slick gear versus swimming with long shorts and a shirt.
There's something to be said about overloading the effort required though. We used to train endurance by dragging a tire behind us in the water. When it came to race day, everything would feel 10x easier.
> This reminds me of my own wacky idea for a line of fitness products: ordinary everyday items that are normal in every way except that they are intentionally designed to be physically challenging to use.
Not exactly an everyday item, but people who want to train for "tactical" things with ballistic armored vests, either because they work for a PMC or are actually in the military, can buy steel plates to put in a plate carrier which exactly match the dimensions of an expensive ($2000+) ceramic plate set, for weight and balance purposes and train with those.
Famous Russian wrestler a century ago walked with a cane 16 kg weight.
For simple mortals like me - while hiking I've been using the Nordic poles with 8 inches springed amortization which naturally works up your upper body.
1kg of lead is like 90mL. I just measured my quite svelte TV remote at 22cm x 2cm x 5cm = 220mL. I'm sure you could easily fit 1.5 kilos of lead in there, and with a slightly thicker "A/V receiver" style remote we could easily make that 3-4kg
Unfortunately the venn diagram between "people who want a heavy remote for physical fitness reasons" and "people who will absolutely lose their minds when they find out it has lead in it no matter how safely you have encapsulated it" is pretty close to a circle.
Along the same lines, I’ve wondered why gyms don’t hook up all their weight machines up to a big generator. Gym members would be paying the gym to reduce the gym’s electric bill.
Another interesting idea I've had many many years ago: Skies that have enough buoyancy to be able to float on the sea while a person is standing on them. Do that you ski across the sea. Although the movement would be closer to rollerblades, due to lack of hills.
What you're describing would be called "skate skiing" on snow, and it's absolutely a thing. Not pooh poohing the idea, but imagine the fun of a loss of balance on the open sea. It'd make a waterski crash look downright convenient.
The door idea is a safety issue, but there's a market for a gag-gift remote control holder that's a barbell, for sure. Whether it helps anyone is an open question, but it hits the sweet spot for twee Americana gas station stuff.
I am picking up a 16kg and a 12kg masses several times a day, and I am sure that this keeps me in shape. Basically, because I didn't have time to go to the gym in the last five years.
It seems like anyone who’s a lazy TV watching bum would get RSIs from their remote control. I know my Apple TV remote does this to me when I use the integrated touchpad.
My favorite part of this project has got to be the helmet. For one, because it's pure concrete, with no metal frame inside it like the other parts. And second, because it best illustrates the utility of the project in that a concrete helmet is literally worse than useless.
> a concrete helmet is literally worse than useless.
Is it? It would still absorb energy upon impact. Which, in contrast to popular belief about bike helmets, is its main function. Yes, ordinary bike helmets will also just break. But in doing so, they absorb energy which then won't be absorbed by your skull.
There is no point in a perfectly stiff helmet. It would just transfer the energy right through and you'd crash your skull into the helmet, which doesn't help.
It may not be as much of a factor at bicycle speeds, but I've read that heavy helmets can dramatically increase whiplash in things like motorsport. The increased mass on your head means higher forces trying to rip it off. Obviously the other benefits of real helmets outweigh that issue, but I'd imagine a concrete helmet with very poor shock absorption and very high mass would not fair so well.
Concrete is pretty stiff.
But mostly, wearing such a helmet will make it much harder to move your head around to scan your surroundings, increasing the chance of accidents.
Concrete canoes are a thing civil engineers make for fun [1]. Weight can come in at under 10kg [2]. That's about half the weight of a typical canoe [3].
On that basis, one might be able to build a concrete bike that is lighter than a typical bike?
In the late 70's ferro-cement sailboats were a thing. I watched one get built at the marina where we kept our boat at the time. It's mentioned here [0], the Sandpiper.
My friends live in a 80s cement boat, and have done since they built it. Was brilliant but now uninsurable, and they are stuck unable to move it and worrying about every stormy day. That said, for over 20 years it was great, but once water gets in the cracks...
when I lived in JP (a part of Boston) I made my commuter bike "unstealable" by taping it and putting joint compound all over the frame. The thing was ugly as sin and looked at lot like this bike.
I could leave it locked with one of those cheap combination cable locks, and no one ever took it.
It sort of does. You can see the fork got damaged mid-span in some of the riding shots. Still there isn't enough strength in places like the fork ends or crown without the concrete.
Oh there’s a lot of fun concepts to muse about. But one is brakes.
That aside, at least it wouldn’t get stolen in Amsterdam.
Which reminds me of something a friend did. He lived in a neighborhood where anything visible would be stolen. So he took an old computer tower case and filled it with concrete. Then he left it on his front porch.
Predictably some guy tried to steal it. The poor fool managed to move it one house over before giving up and dropping it in the street.
The same thought went through my mind watching it, but you could say the same about most (many?) concrete structures. Someone with a structural background could explain better, but I believe the rebar and concrete provide different kinds of strength, like concrete is compressive strong (and keeps the minimal amount of rebar from moving around and bending, while the rebar keeps the concrete from cracking. Even for the bike, it wouldn't be the same structurally if they just wired up a rebar frame
I took civil engineering a long ago in college but diverged on my career. This is what I recall.
In reinforce concrete beams the bending causes compression on the top and tension on the bottom. Since concrete is weak in tension (maybe 1/10 of compression strength), the rebar at the bottom will carry the tension. When you do the design calculations, some approximations are made like concrete carries no tension on bottom half of beam and how the stress is distributed on the top portion. Then with iterative analysis you can converge on an solution. Then once you got the basic design, there will other rules like displacement, buckling conditions.
The front left fork failed. You can see the crack in the video as he is riding. The front fork has a bending moment as well as compressive force. When the bending force was applied the concrete failed and the rebar did not.
Overall, I really liked this as an art project. I'm not sure what the artist wants to communicate with the bike, but I found it very satisfying.
How much of this can you just chalk up to using concrete and just copying the design of a normal bike? This is a fun art project but doesn't seem like much more.
Sorry for being negative about an art project. I think I was projecting my own biases, but it sounded like an engineering project and then I didn't learn anything.
Yes, and the entire thing is either reinforced with rebar or structurally dependent on actual bicycle parts. You could argue that the rebar reinforcements, if welded together, would make a sufficient frame and the concrete is primarily acting as a bonding agent.
The combination with steel is what gives concrete its power. It's a composite material created by the two things together. Concrete surrounds the steel frame and penetrates it. It binds the steel together.
Ah my Civil Engineering student years.. Except my year, because the year before the canoe wasn't right, and the sponsoring professor swamped the thing and took a year off (or so was the rumor), so our class never got to build one.
I remember in the 1980s Bicycling or some such magazine wrapped a road bike in concrete, called it a composite bicycle and did a full review. Needless to say, it scored poorly.
True, I suppose it's the types of injuries that will differ most between bicycling and motorcycling. You won't see many flesh burns from touching hot bicycle parts either.
Nonetheless, severity can get a lot closer. Shiny side up!
I thought so too, but at 20:55 you can see the rider stop pedalling while still rolling. It seems to contain a freewheel mechanism: https://youtu.be/Yqgn-qlg1X0?t=1255
It's a "coaster" hub, very common on cheap single-speed bikes. It allows you to coast without pedalling, and by applying backwards pedal pressure it activates a drum brake.
Definitely not enough braking force for this bike weight though.
Reminds me of a story that happened in Russia. A store offered a discount on buying new bikes if you turn in your old bike. The discount percentage was equal to the bike's weight in kg. One clever guy built a bike weighing 113 kg. It actually worked and he got a very expensive bike for free
Waste of resources to do a YT hype. It's not a concrete bike, its a reinfoced concrete bike (a steel + concrete bike). Withe the amount of steel used a just-steel bike could have been built.
There's just a bit of concrete on the outside of the otherwise quite regular bike. Well done /s
I have always wanted to make a mountain bike out of scaffolding poles in order to review it positively.
Notionally such a bike should score highly in many key metrics. In the review the obvious failings are overlooked yet the reader can work it out for themselves.
No they are not. Most people can't explain off the top of their head how the derailleur works to move the chain from one cog to another, or how freewheeling allows the wheel to move without the pedals to move, or even how the cable allows brakes to be remotely activated from the handlebar. Most people can't even explain why it is possible for a bike to be stable while moving but can't stand on its own. It's counter-intuitive.
There's plenty of ingenuity in the design of a modern bike.
Most of what you're describing isn't necessary for a bike. A fixie bike doesn't have a derailleur or freewheeling. And you can slow down without breaks.
You can even remove the chain. A penny-farthing bike is a surprisingly simple device. It is surprising it wasn't invented earlier.
My guess would be that they weren't invented earlier because they are not that useful without good roads.
the steering geometry of a modern bike is not entirely obvious, most configurations are either unstable or unsteerable. Plus a bike is unusable if you don't know how to ride it, so even if you stumbled on a stable steering configuration you might give up on it before you learned to ride it.
When I was a kid I taught my neighbor kid to ride a bike by rolling him down a hill. He crashed eventually into a wall (tangentially, so no great damage to him or to a bike), but he did ride bicycle after that crash course, no problem.
For example, doors that require a lot of force to open, keyboards with 1lb resistance springs, remote controls that weigh several kilograms, etc. Since many people have trouble going to the gym, it would be a way to introduce weight training in a way that was both unobtrusive and unavoidable.
Just one of those things that has been bouncing around in my head for years now. I think riding this bike would definitely qualify as weight training :)