This is sort of a collection of photos but…

My mental health very much suffers if I’m not exercising every day. It’s a particularly bad sign if I get out of the habit.

At Christmas I upgraded my smartwatch - that let me use a new app.

The new app (Pulsalarm) sets off an alarm if my heart rate drops out of the zone I’m looking for. This in turn means that I can start listening/doing much more distracting things while working out on my exercise bike.

The rest of this post is the evolution of my setup over the 60 days or so since I’ve been using this.

The first version was borrowing Leo’s iPad to watch TV while cycling. iPad hanging over a bike with string

Then I tried balancing my old ps3 on a shelf and buying a audio splitter for about £10 to pipe the audio direct to my headphones.

exercise bike in front of computer screen

Then I put together something slightly more study. exercise bike in front of ps3 setup that is balanced on two chairs

When it became apparent that this was a habit that was sticking (after I’d played through the whole of Uncharted 3, and started Uncharted 2). I built a more permanent and compact version out of scrap wood in the garage. If you look closely you can see these photos accidentally also document our winter ‘tidy the garage’ project.

Exercise bike in front of some permanent shelves with a ps3 on them

Update May 2023

I replaced the bike with a proper spin bike and picked up a cheap (and slow) running machine from eBay. The idea of the running machine is that is keeps my heart rate up a bit with films and the like: trying to play a complex game would be very dangerous.

I suspect I’ll get a lot less use out of the setup during the warmer months. I now run next to Nova on the school run and back, and that’s quite enough exercise for a normal day. It’s also simply nicer to run outside. But it will get a lot of use in the rain as well.

Future plans

Future plans include:

  • saving up for a PS4 (I’m aware that I’m a good 15 years behind in console gaming terms and it would be nice to reduce that to only 10),
  • getting a proper ‘exercise bike’ rather than a turbo trainer
    • Or even upgrading the actual bike - it was £200 about seven years ago and has been much abused since.
    • This also opens up the possibility of a ‘walking desk’ for working, but I don’t know how much use that would be for anything other than zoom calls which I rarely have.