This illustrated serie of articles is about the know-how of riding a recumbent, undestanding your body and the basic principals of  mechanics in cycling.  You do not have to be a scientist to undestand the text though so give it a go! Knowing some basics will expand your cycling experience and save you from a lot of wondering. Let´s begin our lesson..

Part 1: Understanding the benefits of a recumbent position…

uman is a muscle kinetic “machine”. To get full benefit of your bodys features you have to make a good use of it´s abilities and compensate it´s flaws at the same time. Our engine is a mix of different machinery: there´s muscle-, nervous-, energy storage and intake systems. Let´s start with the basics and think about the position of your body while on a bike:

To understand better what are the benefits of the recumbent position compared to the upright one, take a look at these silhouettes:

And if you think about how your bodys weight is supported:

People often think recumbent position is unnatural but the silhouettes don´t lie. It´s easy to see how natural and comfortable the ´bent position actually is. It prevents a lot of neck, back and pelvis injuries and furthermore wrist, shoulder and even genital problems a cyclists can suffer from. It´s very obvious a recumbent position has benefits in how comfortable the ride is. Note that the comparison above is extreme as the upright bike is a racing model…

…which leads us to the next benefit: smaller air resistance:

Air resistance is the biggest difficulty to overcome in cycling. Rolling resistance and mechanical friction are the other ones but they play a much smaller role. People often speak about the wind that makes the cycling so difficult but most of the time we should blame the air resistance for that. And the faster you go the more the air resistance you have to overcome. As the speed doubles air resistance quadruples. Even a touring recumbent has much smaller frontal area than an upright racing bike.

And if we swap the silhouettes to time trial configuration the difference is even bigger:

Smaller frontal area means the cyclist has less drag/turbulence than the one with bigger area. This means the same speed is achieved with less power/watts. In the end the recumbent position is more comfortable and usually faster than the upright one.

The biggest downside in a recumbent position is the gravity. The mass of our leg muscles is horizontally downwards. In an upright position the gravity helps pulling the mass down, in recumbent position it doesn´t. This is the reason why a recumbent position needs, some times quite a long, time to adapt and still one will rarely see the same power outputs on the both bikes:

However air resistance is much greater deal to overcome so in the end a recumbent is usually faster than it´s upright brother and as said leg muscles will get better used to the horizontal position with exercise. However the first rides with a recumbent can be disappointing and leave your legs feeling very empty. This wouldn´t be such a problem if we could have trained and the youth of today could train with ´bents from a young age. But to achieve this level of evolution recumbents would need to be more popular and accepted and that´s another story to tell.

The next part of the series will explain you how to fit yourself on a recumbent bike.

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