I suppose the title kinda gives away my question. So could you? All the physics (I think) point to yes, but something seems inherently wrong. I suppose it’s becuase we associate balance with foward motion and not rotating wheels. Has anyone actually tried it? What happens if you turn the handlebars? Do you just go back and forth or would you fall over??
Yes, you could, with no ill effects provided you retain enough control over the bike to remain entirely on the moving tread.
This does beg the question, though - what do you have against the outdoors?
-FK
Many bike riders use rollers for indoor training. I’ve never used them and I hear they take some practice, but it shows that it’s possible to balance a stationary bicycle. A treadmill will be even more difficult because you’ll need to match the speed, but I think it’s possible with practice.
Nothing, just one of those questions that pops into my head from time to time.
What scr4 said. Rollers!
I can’t speak for bicycles and treadmills, but I can vouch for the fact that roller skates and trampolines are a poor mix indeed.
From your frame of reference, there is no difference between a treadmill and a road.
I’m not sure if that is correct. Shalmanese; in practical terms it may be, but I think there may be a difference (I just can’t quite work out what it is…)
There is air resistance of course, but if we ignore that I think there’s still the question of inertia. Stop pedalling on the road and friction (and air restistance) has to overcome the inertia of the spinning wheels, and the moving bike and body. Stop pedalling on the treadmill and only the spinning wheels matter.
Or maybe I’m completely wrong, since the treadmill has to overcome the inertia of bike and rider to accellerate it backwards.
I can’t be bothered to do the numbers, anyone want to check if the effect is equal?
I use rollers, as mentioned above, and the spinning of the wheels is what creates the balance effect, not forward motion.
Riding a bike on a treadmill would be equivalent, except that most treadmills are powered and rollers are not.
There’s a great scene in Breaking Away where the lead character is training for a bike race indoors on rollers because it’s raining.
This is what I was thinking of, but I’m not sure either; Specifically, I was thinking of the way that (on a road) a bike tends to ‘pull’ away from you and you have to exert a pulling force on the handlebars (I suppose what is actually happening is that you are pulling your body up to the same speed as the bike) - would this effect still be felt on a treadmill?
First, you would have to find a treadmill that’s long enough for the bike & then also consider most treadmills don’t run very fast, so you’d be going pretty slow.
Your body and the bike are going exactly the same speed w.r.t. earth so ther is no effect of the bike pulling the rider up to speed. However, riders often pull on the handlebars to pull back against the force of pedaling, giving more power than would be available from just allowing gravity to pull your body weight down onto the pedals. That wouldn’t change.
I have been thinking about the question in the OP about turning the handlebars. Steering a bike is more complicated than intuition allows us to think because of the gyroscopic effects. But if you turn the handlebars and lean just as you do on the road, you ride off the treadmill to one side. (While learning to use rollers I rode off my rollers a couple of times. Definitely avoid this.)
The point is that forward motion doesn’t have as much to do with keeping a bicycle upright as does the rotation of the wheels (which keeps the wheels’, and effectively your, axis stable).
IN a system where the treadmill is infinitely long and is already in motion before the rider starts pedalling (so WRT a bystander the rider is going from travelling backwards>staying still), then I’d agree that it is the same as the rider on the road; just a matter of switching reference frames.
As regards the rider accelerating up to speed as the treadmill does the same in the opposite direction, I’m not going to say that I disagree it is the same, I just can’t get my head around the idea, that’s all.
Incidentally, I thought that the gyroscopic effect from the wheels was only part of the picture; isn’t there also something to the effect that the center of mass of the bike/rider system tends to result in the whole thing being stable (leaning to the right causes the bike to swerve to the right, bringing it back to a balanced state, or something along those lines)
Well, the forward motion of the wheels with respect to the surface they’re riding on is what makes the difference, not the rotation per se. If you’re talking gyroscopic effects, those play a very minor role in bicycle stability.
Riding on a treadmill would be just as difficult as riding a same-width path on a road, plus the extra difficulty of maintaining the same speed as the treadmill so you don’t go off the front or the back.
Riding on rollers is easy enough, but stopping suddenly by applying the brakes results in a reaction between the wheels and the rotating mass of the rollers, the rollers will skip backwards whilst the bike stays still, and you get a sudden drop, but you not not shoot forward.
One problem not considered is that rollers are usually plastic, and when you addd in your synthetic rubber tyres you can build up a goodly amount of static electricity, which bites you whenever you reach out to something fixed to steady yourself, it makes things interesting, I use an earth bonding strap which I connect to a central heating pipe or somesuch.
Rollers are usually stainless steel or another alloy that doesn’t corrode. I’ve seen a set that’s over 25 years old that have not rust or corrosion on them.
The gyroscopic effect of the wheels has everything to do with keeping the bike stable on a set of rollers or on the ground. The faster the wheels spin, the more stable the bike.
Well maybe rollers are metal in your neck of the woods, but you would be very hard pressed to find anything other than plastic in the UK, except for anyone having a set of competition rollers, complete with the gear drive for the 4-roller clock.
I concede one or two of the old boys might have some metal ones, I think I have seen wood ones too, but these are extremely rare over here.