Bike Forums - e-Motion rollers anyone?

Wow! I can ride rollers! Kewl!

I can't say I'm great at it yet (or even good), but let's put it this way: after only a couple of hours on them my legs and wind give out before my balance does.

So how long did it take me to learn? A surprisingly short period of time, if other accounts I've read about learning to ride rollers are accurate. About 45 minutes to be exact.

Here's the thing: I really love these rollers but…since I've never ridden ANY rollers before, my review of them will have to be tempered by the fact that I have no comparison base, which means that I can't say if they are any easier to learn on or more comfortable to ride than conventional "fixed" rollers, although for reasons that will become apparent (not the least of which is that *I* learned to ride them) I think they ARE easier and more comfortable.

First of all the rollers themselves: They are a really slick piece of engineering. The "rollers" part is fairly conventional, with a slightly narrower drum (about 3.5") than the top-of-the-line Kreitlers, which max out at 4.5" (The Elite Poly Pro's go up to 6"!)

From what I understand, the thinner the drum, the greater the resistance, and riding these rollers at cruising speed feels to me like climbing a mild incline…on ice. This makes me curious what the Kreitlers and Elites feel like…does anyone ride either of them?

I was a little disappointed by the resistance of these rollers, since I was hoping for rollers that, at their lowest resistance setting (you can add more resistance to them via a built-in magnetic lever) would feel like pedaling on level pavement, but the amount of resistance these rollers give is not unreasonable for their design. I would have liked to see larger drums though.

The roller assembly itself is quite different from any other rollers you've seen. For one thing, the "roller body" (the frame that includes the rails and drums) "floats" on bearings that track inside of a slightly larger, sturdier frame that sits on the ground. This roller body frame is tethered to the external frame at both ends by a thick rubber band such that you can slide the body back and forth under tension, but the bands always pull it back to center. On either end of the body a set of "bumper rollers" rises about 6" from the frame to keep you from riding forwards or backwards off the rollers (I never contacted either of these while learning.)

There is a combination flywheel/resistance unit attached by a separate belt with a tensioner on the rear of the unit, and there are two little hockey-puck style idlers on the ends of the front rollers to nudge you back onto the drums if you drift off (I hit these quite a few times while learning.)

The whole thing comes completely assembled and ready to ride after adjusting the position of the front drum to sit directly below (plumb) or slight ahead of the axle of your front wheel. This is accomplished with a set of turnscrews that make very small adjustments fore and aft on either side, and then the drums are socked down with two 5/8" nuts. It's an easy setup, but surprisingly the rollers came adjusted precisely right for my bike, so I didn't have to fool around with them.

The only glitch came when I started to ride for the first time. The idler belt which goes to the flywheel would not stay on, and would pop off within a few revolutions. I called InsideRide and actually got to speak with the owner, who told me that the small bearings on the tensioner sometimes come out of alignment during shipping, and he gave me instructions how to re-align them. As soon as I did this the problem went away, and they've been fine ever since. A change in the type of bearing would fix the problem I think, so perhaps InsideRide will change it and/or offer an upgrade sometime in the near future. It's about a $5 part.

Anyway…the ride.

From what I understand (again, never having ridden rollers until now) balance and steering are the big issues in learning to ride rollers, and they certainly were for me. The smoothness of your stroke has a lot to do with it, since the more "uneven" your pedaling the more squirrely your steering is going to be, and rollers greatly amplify every little wobble in your front wheel.

Here's where the unique design of these rollers really seem to make a difference.

Since the roller frame sits on a set of tensioned bearings inside of a larger frame, your bike and the rollers together seem to be "floating" inside the larger frame.

This is way cool, especially when you're starting out.

I could see within moments that my stroke was FAR from perfectly even, but since my bike and I were "floating," the eccentricities in my stroke were NOT instantly transmitted to rigidly fixed, unforgiving rollers, but were instead "absorbed" by the tensioned bearings that the roller body sits in. The result was that whole assembly rocked back and forth gently with each stroke while I was gaining my balance.

Let me tell you: even without having ridden fixed rollers before I could see this was a big improvement. After I could ride for more than 30 seconds at a time (more on this in a bit) I was able to practice "perfect stroke" which, on these rollers, is greatly aided by the rocking motion, because it gives you instant feedback on how smoothly you are pedaling. In other words: the less rocking you do, the smoother and more even your stroke must be.

With intense concentration I was able to reduce the rocking to a minimum, which is what I imagine must be necessary to ride traditional fixed rollers. I look forward to the day when I can just pedal without having to be hyper-aware of my stroke but today (after only a couple of hours on the rollers) I still suck at it. Of course, that is probably the whole point: the rocking motion (or lack thereof) gives me a goal to work towards and more importantly, immediate feedback and a yardstick by which to measure my progress. Come to think of it, I can't see how you would achieve this understanding with traditional rollers without a lot more trial and error.

About learning how to ride rollers:

I've read a lot of descriptions about how people learned to ride rollers, and even though I'm riding the equivalent of "E-Z" rollers, by the way I taught myself (purely by luck! I didn’t really understand what I was doing until afterwards!) I think my experience would help ANYONE learn to ride them.

I'm lucky in that I have an absolutely ideal setup in which to learn to ride rollers. I have some cardio equipment (a lifecycle and an elliptical) that I set up alongside my rollers, which gave me the equivalent of waist-height grab bars on both sides. For the first half hour on the rollers these were like having training wheels, and like real training wheels they both hindered my progress but also led me to "the way" to ride.

At first, once I was able to balance reasonably well on my bike on the rollers, I would hold on to the grab bars for dear life as I started to pedal. This gave me a little feel for what the bike felt like while spinning on drums, but of course it did nothing for my balance or steering. As I got more confident that I wasn't going to launch the bike off the rollers at any second, I was able to gradually "let go" of the grab bars and ride the rollers for a few seconds at a time.

Here's why this did NOT work.

As anyone who rides rollers will tell you (and I feel that now includes me) the trick to staying on them is to have a very calm center of gravity and to maintain fairly precise balance and steering while pedaling smoothly (not easy!) Although the bike DOES track on the rollers, I was surprised (and relieved) to find that it doesn't "turn" as quickly as I had feared. In other words, when the bike starts drifting to either side, as long as you are paying attention you DO have some reaction time to counter-steer and bring yourself back to center.

What caused me to tip violently was not so much that I lost steering but that I simply lost my balance and basically "fell" off my bike--not that hard to do if you're struggling to stay upright in the first place.

Here's where serendipity played a part. As I mentioned, I began riding the rollers by hanging on to my improvised grab bars on either side.

What I soon discovered was that I had created an inherently unbalanced position: a triangle between the hand holding the handlebars, the wheelbase, and the hand on the grab bar.

No matter what I did, as soon as I began to pedal I had to exert so much pressure on the hand holding the grab bar that I could not steer the bike. Only by precisely balancing myself between the three elements could I stay upright at all, and only by essentially "suspending" myself between my hands.

This is where the "aha" moment kicked in.

I reasoned that it was the unweighting of one side of my body (by pressing down on the grab bar) that was destabilizing my balance. Yet, I still needed some external force to help me keep my center.

The solution was to change the position of the grab bars such that they were now shoulder height, so that I could use them to balance myself on the bike by placing BOTH hands on the handlebars and then extending my elbows to balance myself as I started to pedal.

Voila! Almost instant success.

By placing both hands on the handlebars I was now in a position to steer and correctly balance myself over the bike's center of gravity in the proper position to track "forwards" and yet whenever I began to lose balance and tip to either side my shoulders would bump up against grab bars and nudge me back to center. After about 15 minutes of this I was able to keep myself from drifting sufficiently that I no longer needed the grab bars to stay within a reasonable range of the center of the drums.

And once you get the hang of it, well, as they say…it's like riding a bike...except you're now riding a bike on rollers.

Hal