New Electric Bicycle

Electric Bicycles / May 2, 2023

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Gretchen Reynolds on the science of fitness.

In the Tour de France, equipping your bike with a small electric motor is called mechanical doping, and is considered cheating. But for the rest of us, an electrified bicycle might be a way to make exercise both tolerable and practical, according to an encouraging new study of bicycle commuting.

Exercise is necessary in our lives, as we all know by now. People who are physically active are much less likely than sedentary people to develop heart disease, diabetes, cancer, stroke, depression, disabilities in old age, or to die prematurely.

But statistics show that, despite its benefits, a majority of us never exercise. When researchers ask why, most people offer the same two excuses — they don’t have time to fit exercise into their lives or they aren’t fit enough to undertake exercise.

Potentially, electric bicycles could address those concerns. Their motors shore up your pedaling as needed — or, with some electric bikes, do the pedaling for you — making climbing hills or riding for long distances less taxing and daunting than the same ride on a standard bicycle.

In the process, they could make cycling a palatable alternative to commuting by car, allowing people with jammed daily schedules to work out while getting to work.

But the value of electric bicycles has so far been mostly notional. Few of us have seen, let alone ridden, an electric bike and there is scant scientific evidence supporting — or refuting — the potential health benefits of using the machines.

So for the new experiment, which was, researchers at the University of Colorado, Boulder, decided to see what would happen if they gave a group of out-of-shape men and women zippy electric bikes and suggested that they begin riding to work.

Notably, the researchers only studied motorized bikes that assist the rider rather than doing all the work for them, like a moped. They used electric bikes that require the rider to pedal in order to receive assistance from the motor.

The researchers wanted to determine whether these bikes — even with the added assistance of a motor — would provide a meaningful workout for people who previously had not been exercising much. They also wanted to see whether such bikes were fundamentally safe, given that they enable even novice riders to achieve speeds of 20 miles per hour or higher. (The Boulder city government partially funded the study as part of an assessment of whether to allow electric bikes on municipal bike paths. Additional funding came from local bike shops and Skratch Labs, a sports nutrition company in Boulder.)

The researchers first brought their 20 sedentary volunteers into the lab to check their body composition, aerobic fitness, blood sugar control, blood pressure and cholesterol profiles. Then they provided each with an electric bicycle, heart rate monitor, GPS device, instructions on the use of all of this equipment, and asked each volunteer to don the monitors and ride his or her new bike to and from work at least three times a week for the next month, spending at least 40 minutes in the saddle on those days.