Elite 3008 Cycle product reviews

Years ago I used to be a regular cyclist, until a knee injury put paid to that pleasure of life. There's nothing like the wind in your hair, the burn in the muscles and the sweat on your back being cooled by your sheer speed... After years of gentle physiotherapy, I bought another bike and started getting back into it... and blew out my knee again when I got shot during a game of Splatterzone and fell badly. Typical!

After another year of taking it easy, I hopped on a mate's bike and realised I was so far out of shape, it just wasn't funny... and then Elite Fitness came to my rescue with this wonderful exercycle, which has, in just 1 month, enabled me to go from 'panting and sweating and knackered after 2 blocks in 3rd gear' to 'being able to cycle across town at a good speed, and reach a destination 3km away in under 15 minutes (accounting for traffic) without being puffed at all' and 'clicking up the gears and putting on a burn without collapsing'...

The Elite 3008 Cycle has 8 tension settings, allowing you to 'tune' your workout to your tone at the time. If you have been out working your legs in some way, such as out biking or walking, you can turn the tension down to avoid pulling anything, and when you feel like an extra burn, you can wind it up a notch.

This cycle comes with a multifunction digital display board, which will show you the time, the room's temperature (essential for calibrating extra water intake), your speed in km/hr or miles/hr, rotations per minute (how fast you are pedaling), cummulative workout time, distance travelled (if you were on the road, that is), calories burned, and while you have your hands on the sensor pads on the adjustable handlebars, your heartrate.

The control panel is a little annoying to deal with if you leave it on 'cycle' mode, which displays all of the various numbers in rotation. Since all the data is available at a glance along the bottom of the display screen anyway, I chose to set it to heartrate (since I was primarily concerned with burning excess fat, and the best way is to get the heart rate up, but not overdo it), and was still able to see any info I needed with just a flick of the eyes.

The seat is fully adjustable in terms of height, and surprisingly comfortable to use, however if it does happen to be a bit firm for you, and you start to get numb-bum, you can usually find a great slip-on gel-pad cover at your nearest quality cycle shop.

Overall, with it's durable and sturdy construction and very functional display console, this machine is a great addition to any home gym. Sure, it does only one thing... but it does it so well. Some multifunction machine sacrifice effectiveness for functionality... and as we are finding more and more these days... the more features they have, the more way there are for it to break down. It may be simple, but that's it greatest asset.