The assault bike is a fan bike with moving handles, so your arms and legs both drive it. The fan is the trick: resistance rises with how hard you push, which means there is no setting to hide behind and a hard interval is genuinely as hard as you are willing to make it.
How to do it
- Arms and legs both drive — the resistance rises with your own effort.
- Because it is wind resistance, intervals suit it better than a steady grind.
Common mistakes
- Opening at a sprint and having nothing left after forty seconds.
What it trains
- Quads
- drive each pedal stroke down — the largest share of the work at any pace
- Hamstrings and glutes
- pull the pedal back round and extend the hip
- Front delts and arms
- push and pull the handles, which is what makes this so much harder than a normal bike
- Heart and lungs
- the actual training target — the fan is just a way to ask for everything at once
Variations and alternatives
Common questions
Why is the assault bike so much harder than a normal bike?
Because the fan resistance scales with your effort and your arms are working too. On a normal bike you can freewheel and the resistance stays put; here it fights back harder the harder you go, and there is no coasting built into the machine at all.
What is a good assault bike interval?
Ten to twenty seconds flat out with sixty to ninety seconds easy, repeated six to ten times, is the standard hard session. For steady work, pick a calorie or RPM number you can hold for the whole duration and hold it — the value is in the consistency, not the first minute.
Should I track calories or distance on the assault bike?
Calories, because that is what these machines are built around and what every workout on them is written in. The number is not an accurate measure of what you burned, but it is a consistent measure of work done on that machine — compare it only with your own previous sessions.
In StackUp. Logged with a stopwatch that keeps running if you leave the app, plus distance. Get the app.
Cardio
