Riding an e-bike is an excellent form of exercise for adults, regardless of gender, especially for seniors. This low-impact exercise has huge medical and curative health benefits. If you can ensure regular riding, you can protect yourself from many health risks associated with your sedentary lifestyle.
However, if you have any knee-related issues, you should know whether are electric bikes better for knees or good for them.
Without any doubt, cycling with an e-bike is a superb exercise for your knees. This low-impact exercise produces synovial fluid in your knee area and helps them in easy movement. It strengthens your leg and core muscles. Additionally, there are several medical health benefits of riding an e-bike.
Read the article thoroughly to know how an electric bike helps in the betterment of your knees.
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Are Electric Bikes Better For Knees?
Cycling is a first-rate form of exercise for the knees. If you have arthritis or bad knees, riding a regular bike is next to impossible. In such situations, you can rely on an electric bike to do low-impact workouts. E-bike offers almost all the benefits that you get from a non-electric one.
However, a question might arise in your mind: How are electric bikes better for knees when they both are the same? Well, it depends on what types of e-bike you’re using. For knee-related problems like arthritis, you should go for a specialized ebike designed for arthritis patients. These bikes have pedal-assist mode and an easy step-in design.
Just like a regular bike, a specialized electric bike for arthritis helps you to do cardio exercises. It produces synovial fluid on your knee to lubricate the knee joint area. And, the continuous movement of the knee increases the strength of your leg and core muscles.
Tips to Protect Your Knees When Riding Electric Bikes
Most electric bike riders don’t have adequate knowledge about how to protect their knees while riding an e-bike. Consequently, they hurt their knees due to their lack of knowledge and put the blame on the e-bike.
If you’re also living with the same misconception that an e-bike isn’t good for bad knees then the following discussion is for you. Here, let’s show you some tips and tricks that’ll help you to protect your knees even though you have bad knees.
Proper Warm-Up
Before doing any exercise, it’s always better to have a proper warm-up session for stretching the vein of your body. The rule is the same for the biking exercise as well. To avoid any knee-related issue with your e-bike, you need to do at least five minutes of freehand stretching.
By following this simple step you can protect your knee from incurring any damage while cycling. For example, you can stretch your legs and arms, and make sure your hips and limber are loose during the stretching.
You can also warm up your body by riding your e-bike at a slow pace and increasing the speed gradually. Don’t skip the warm-up session, as it increases oxygen, metabolism and makes the joints efficient.
Set The Saddle In The Right Height
It’s true that an e-bike makes pedaling completely effortless and that’s what makes it great for bad knees. However, all these trouble-free fun and low-impact exercises become terrible and potentially risky if you’re unable to sit on your e-bike saddle correctly.
To ensure the right sitting position, you need to sit on the back of your seat as far as possible using your body’s sit bones. It’s crucial to secure your sitting proportions in the exact manner that fits with your height to avoid any knee-related problems.
Depending on your e-bike saddle height, too low or too high, puts a huge impact on the degree of your knee bending. The right way to set your saddle is to set it in a position that keeps your knee at a 45° angle. (At the top of the stroke.) And, your knee remains slightly bent when you hit the bottom of the stroke.
Suitable Ride Position
“Make the right posture a habit”- a very familiar tune that we all hear from our childhood. Well, the importance of developing this habit of sitting with the right posture is huge if you want to avoid lower back and knee-related pain.
When you sit on your e-bike, keep your shoulders down and elbows in and make sure you’re not leaning forward or slouching. Recommending the right sitting position is a difficult task because every cyclist has their own preferences.
However, below I’m going to show you some general guidelines that you can follow if you don’t want to compromise with your knees.
- Keep your shoulder down while riding your e-bike. Otherwise, if you keep your shoulder to an upward position, you’ll experience pain in your shoulder, back, and neck.
- Bent your elbows slightly instead of keeping them too straight or too bent. And, keep them tucked along your sides.
- Keep your back straight but not locked otherwise you’ll encounter several problems.
- Try to avoid your knees collapsing downwards. Knee collapse will result in poor force distribution in the knee and ultimately end up in knee pain.
Hold The Appropriate Core Strength
Maintaining excellent strength is a little bit critical. But without having it, if you ride your e-bike, the continuous peddling will result in knee pain and other injuries. That’s why you must work out your total body muscles before riding your e-bike, especially your leg muscles.
Prepare a fitness routine that will strengthen your leg muscles to provide adequate support and keep your knees stable. There are some freehand workouts, such as crunches, to improve your core muscle and avoid injury.
To perform these freehand workouts, you won’t require weights or a gym. You can easily do them from the comfort of your home as your warm-up routine. Besides, a proper core strength exercise isn’t only good for your pain & aches, but it also helps you stay healthy.
Ride With Decent Speed
Riding with decent speed means finding the comfort zone where your body feels comfortable, and you won’t feel any pain or tension on your knees. The speed of your e-bike and your knee are interrelated. For higher speed, when you paddle quickly, your knees bend faster and get swiftly stressed.
Ride your e-bike at a moderate pace to maintain proper fluid motion on your legs and knees while pedaling. Don’t ride under sixty revolutions per minute as it’s harmful to your knees.
Experts recommend keeping the speed at least 80 revolutions per minute. You need to ride with the proper gear to maintain this speed. If it becomes difficult for you, then you can use the accelerator of your e-bike directly.
Use Elastic Therapeutic Knee Tape
If you have terrible knees, then the elastic therapeutic tape is a great tool. It’s capable of mimicking your skin’s elasticity that helps to increase your range of motion. And, the good thing is elastic therapeutic tape is medical-grade and water-resistant. It lasts for three to five days with its pain relief properties.
By using this tape, bikers can protect their knees from pain and soreness while riding an e-bike. Moreover, this elastic therapeutic tape has more medical benefits such as relief from injuries, assisting weak zones, managing scars, and enhancing your performance.
Final Words
You can’t do any exercise you want if you’ve got bad knees. Bad knees often restrict you to do a certain amount of low-impact exercise, cycling an e-bike is not one of them. And we hope now you know how are electric bikes better for knees which for you should be going out with Ebikes instead of sitting inside.
Experts say riding an e-bike for 150 minutes a week helps relieve knee pain and injury. Plus, this low-impact exercise puts less stress on your knees and other weight-bearing joints. Especially, people who have arthritic knees, riding an e-bike is a very effective exercise for them. Good luck recovering from your bad knees. Stay well and exercise safely.
