This is the prelude to my review of the Schwinn 270 Recumbent Bike, an indoor exercise bike.
Motivation
My wife Becky and I have been reinventing our lives recently. Halfway through 2020, we decided to turn our lives around and make a big life change, relocating from California to Texas. By November, we had executed on our plan, sold our home, and moved to Frisco, Texas.
In the two months we've been here, we've been spending some of our home sale proceeds on furnishings for our new home and Christmas gifts. There was a little bit of spending money left, and two weeks before the end of 2020, my thoughts turned to the upcoming new year and the usual routine of making resolutions. We're pretty happy with our new life in Texas, but there is one thing Becky and I would like to address: our weight. Losing weight is hardly a new idea, and we've had a mixed record of weight loss over the years. However, there's some extra motivation this time: we have an upcoming wedding in the family next June. We've been taking walks every evening, but it's now too cold to do so, and the Texan summer will be insufferably hot. It was clear that if we were going to exercise year round, we'd need some indoor equipment.
Why a Bike?
I rejected a treadmill right off the bat: we'd purchased one in the 90s, and it ended up as a clothes hanger. It was also noisy. We'd had it in our family room, and it disturbed TV viewing when used.
What would be more successful this time around? I wanted to be able to sit: I'm an overweight man in my 50s, with a sedentary lifestyle and scoliosis; being on my feet for a long time is tiring. This led to the idea of an indoor exercise bike.
I also wanted something quiet, that wouldn't disturb others. We'd probably put this equipment in our bedroom, and I tend to rise early. I'd like to exercise without disturbing Becky. Fortunately, many indoor exercise bikes are described as whisper quiet. I eagerly turned to researching bikes.
Equipment Selection
Some research revealed just how many different exercise bikes there are. I started focusing on top recommendations and experienced sticker shock. I quickly discounted elite bike brands like Peloton and Keiser because I didn't want to spend 4 figures; my target was more like $500. Fortunately, reviews indicated there were plenty of good bikes in the vicinity of my budget. Still, there were so many to choose from. I needed criteria to reduce the choices.
I started reading reviews and watching videos of top-recommended bikes in my budget to get some ideas of pros and cons. Somewhere in the midst of this research I started to second-guess the choice of an indoor bike. Bikes have small saddles that I might find uncomfortable and not want to spend much time on. Bikers are often hunched forward, which might bother my back. It was then that I discovered an entire category of indoor bikes called recumbent bikes and my worries subsided. A recumbent bike has a generous, comfortable chair that you recline in. It's the La-Z-Boy of exercise bikes, and clearly the bike for me. Do you get sufficient exercise in a recumbent bike for weight loss? Yes, I read, if you use it enough.
I started looking again at top bike recommendations, zooming in on the ones that were recumbent and fit my budget. I looked seriously at bikes from Sunny Health, HCI, Marcy, Nautilus, and ProForm. The Schwinn 270 was mentioned a lot, but I discounted that as I associated Schwinn with bikes from my childhood, not exercise equipment.
As I took a hard look at available models, I realized many of the models capped out at 200lbs and wouldn't support my weight. I refined my list to only those models that would support 200-300lbs weight.
There were also some nice-to-haves I was looking for. I knew a bike in my budget wouldn't give me the full graphics screen of a Peloton, but at the other extreme some bikes had really minimal displays (just some LCD digits), and some had none at all. I wanted to be able to select different exercise routines and goals and monitor my progress. Since my wife (and perhaps my son) would also be using this equipment, multi-user support would keep our statistics tracking separate. Lastly, I knew some bikes had support for phones and tablets. That varied from a device holder, to speakers, to Bluetooth device integration. Device integration would open up a range of interesting apps, whether for entertainment or fitness tracking. We'd used the My Fitness Pal app a lot, and I knew Becky was considering a Fit Bit.
At this point I'd arrived at the following criteria and nice-to-haves:
Recumbent bike
Highly-recommended brand
Supports 200-300lbs weight
Price under $800
Quiet
Decent display
Tracks progress
Multi-user
Integrates with phones/tablets
I let Becky know I'd been thinking about an exercise bike and shared my research. She was on-board and we reviewed the short list of bikes together and watched videos about them. Most of them, frustratingly, were out of stock and would not be available for weeks or months.
What I did find available was the Schwinn 270, so we decided to take a look at it after all. It scored really well in reviews, and I learned that Schwinn is now owned by Nautilus.This gave me some reassurance because I'd once worked at Nautilus for a couple years as a consultant, and I knew they had fitness expertise and built quality products. It was a good looking bike, and it satisfied all of our criteria, even the nice-to-haves.
Purchase and Setup
Becky and I headed over to a nearby Dick's Sporting Goods where we could try out the Schwinn 270 before making a buying decision. It was comfortable and quiet in our in-store trial, and was on sale for $649 instead of the usual $799. We bought it plus a mat to put underneath, and took a very large box home in our minivan.
The next day, my 17-year old son Jonathan and I set out to assemble the bike. I had the instructions, and I'd watched an assembly video. I'm not great at assembling things, but my son is a little more adept at it and did most of the work. There were a lot of screws and washers in quite a few different sizes. An hour and a half later, we had the bike assembled and on its mat next to the master bedroom window. There was one step where the curved washers we needed were the wrong size, which meant we must have used the wrong size washers in an earlier step. Taking everything apart and starting over was unthinkable. We decided to just let that go.
As you can see in the photo, the Schwinn 270 has a large, adjustable seat, a decent-size front panel, side and front hand grips, a heart rate monitor (in the side grips), and a water bottle holder.
What's the bike like? Did we make the right choice? Are we using it regularly? Are we losing weight? All good questions, and I will cover them in my upcoming official review of the Schwinn 270 Recumbent Exercise Bike. Stay tuned!
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