Evolution on a ladies bike

Recently there has been a great deal of talk about caveman health, or how evolution has designed us to be healthy with certain kinds of food and exercise. The basic premise is that we are substantially the same physically as our ancestors ten thousand years ago. This was before humanity took up agriculture, crop rearing and a settled way of life. Our ancestors basically scavenged on the carcases of already dead meat, gathered nuts, fruit and wild plants. Or hunted amongst the prehistoric herbivores.

So our ancestors would wonder around looking for food, on the coast maybe fishing or collecting shell fish. So an active life, low energy activities interspersed with occasional bursts of high energy activities. These activates would be things such as chasing after animals in a hunt, fighting between males or rival tribes or even running away from the many predators such as lions, tigers and bears

From an exercise and diet point of view this means we are best suited to low energy activities interspersed with short bursts of high energy actions. We should eat only the carbohydrates found in nuts, berries fruit and other basic food stuffs. We should avoid foods based on cultivated cereal crops such as wheat.

How can we use this exercise method on our bikes? Let me say right away that we are talking about “cycling bikes” here not the sort you sit on and the engine does all of the work for you! We all know that cycling can be fun, good for our health and good for the environment; you can even use it for getting from A to B. To improve your fitness, lose weight and tone up those flagging muscles, you should firstly cycle as much and as regularly as possible. To implement the Evolution on a ladies bike method you should cruise along but then burst as fast as you can for one or two min. Slow to an easier pace for at least 3mins and do the same thing over and over. Make sure you are in a safe area to do the ,fast as you can, burn part, maybe a local park or a traffic free cycle way is perfect. Recent research has shown that only 3 repetitions of the burn phase a day can improve the health of your heart and lungs. And lead to improved fitness and weight loss.

Stretched out on a ladies bike

There are quite a few challenges associated with selecting a bike for women, since women are generally smaller than men. They boil down to the fact the bike needs to have a top tube that is low enough  to allowing you to stand over the bike easily and has the bars within easy reach.

Females seem to have a worse time than men with getting the bars in easy reach. Many people explain this desire for a shorter reach to the handlebars than is offered by standard bikes by saying that women usually have longer legs and shorter torsos than men of the same height. However, this isn't true: statistical studies of dimensions of men and women show that proportionally, men and women have the same length of legs. However, women do have proportionally shorter arms than men, as well as smaller hands.

Even if we assume that women are proportionally exactly the same as men are, we would find that women would still feel more stretched out than men on a bike that is appropriate for their leg length. The reason for this is simply their size, combined with the way that bikes are designed. The average man is about 5'10", while the average woman is about 5'4". Bike sizes are generally arranged so that the size of bike that fits the medium sized man falls in the middle of the sizes of bikes. Most manufactures expect that medium sized men will ride the 18" or 19.5" MTBs, while they will ride the 56cm or 58cm road bikes and the 20" hybrid. In the world of road bikes, medium-sized women can (maybe) fit the smallest bike size, while in the world of MTBs, a medium sized woman fits perhaps the next-to-smallest size of bike, and for hybrids, a medium-sized woman would go for a 15" or 17.5" hybrid. A small woman can't fit a standard road bike at all, while a small woman might be able to fit the smallest size MTB or hybrid.

For all types of bikes with frame sizes larger than those "medium" sizes have proportionally shorter top tubes, while the smaller frames have proportionally longer top tubes. Thus the smaller frames, the ones that the women will be riding, if they can ride the bikes at all, have proportionally longer top tubes than medium and large frames.

This is the major cause of problems when women go to find bikes that fit them. Add in the fact that women in general have shorter arms than men, and it's no surprise that women often find themselves too stretched out on bikes.