Pro Fitness EB1000 Exercise Bike Review

There are many factors to take into account when choosing an exercise bike that’s going to meet your needs. How much action is it likely to see? Is it suitable for the type of training you want to do? Can you get what you need within your budget? These are all but a few of the considerations. So what can the Pro Fitness EB1000 upright exercise bike do for you and will it live up to expectations? We took a closer look at one to see what you get for your money and how it stacks up against the competition. Here’s what we found….

Assembly of the EB1000 is simple enough and the only slightly fiddly bit we found was getting the tension knob connected properly. Other than that, our test model went together without too much fuss and it took us around 45 minutes to complete the build.

This is, in your reviewer’s opinion, a nice looking bike. Pro Fitness has opted for an all-black look with a few white trimmings and the result is a nice looking bit of kit. Everything here is very simple and makes the bike look unassuming and quite capable of fitting into most surroundings without standing out like a sore thumb.

In terms of riding position, the EB1000 features many of the things that you’re likely to find on most bikes in and around this price range, though not all of them. The seat is adjustable horizontally and vertically, though, unlike most similar offerings, the seat cannot be adjusted for tilt. This is due to the fixing mechanism for the seat which is not a standard bike fitting of the sort that can usually be found on most upright exercise bikes. This is a pity for two reasons. The first is purely a positional one. If the fixed tilt angle setting happens to work for you, great, but if it doesn’t, there’s nothing that can be done about it, so this definitely is not a one-size-fits-all model. The second reason is that due to the way the saddle is attached to the bike, it’s not possible to change it for a different one that suits you better, as you can with a model that uses a standard bicycle saddle fixing. Other than this drawback, getting into a sensible riding position isn’t hard here and the majority of users should find it comfortable enough to get a good workout on.

After the basic riding position, the action is the next thing that usually makes or breaks a bike. The action, ergonomics aside, is greatly affected by the flywheel and how well-balanced and heavy it is, as these factors play a central role in how a bike will feel. Here, it has to be said that the 4kg flywheel isn’t really up to scratch. It does deliver a smooth ride for the most part, but this is as much to do with the bearings in the crank and pedals themselves as anything else. The issue of it being so light is that as you pass the point of no return in the cycle, the momentum isn’t maintained as well as it would be with a heavier flywheel of the kind that is common in exercise bikes these days. In practice what this means is that as you go over the top of the cycle, it’s possible to feel a slight increase in the speed of the rotation. The pedals ‘want’ to move faster. Then as you come back up, you can feel they “want” to slow down. Overall, the action here is relatively smooth, but it’s not uniform on many of the 8 available levels of resistance, and this makes this model feel less enjoyable to ride on compared with most other models we’ve tested in this price bracket. The key thing here is that if a bike doesn’t feel good to ride on, it’s probable that as time goes by it will be used less. With many manufacturers currently introducing ever-more-complex ways of keeping riders motivated, introducing a component that may well reduce that motivation seems like a step in the wrong direction.

The EB1000 is a manually controlled magnetic resistance bike. The upside is that resistance changes are fast and there are few electronic components, making it, at least in theory, more reliable than a computer-controlled model. Another plus is that as the console is battery powered there’s no need to position the bike near an electrical outlet. The downside is that there are no computer-controlled workouts. There are no weight loss programs, nor any cardio conditioning programmes here. No heart rate controlled or workouts either. Everything is manually controlled so the functions of the console are limited to providing real-time information on speed, distance, theoretical calorie burn, time, pulse and interestingly (though we struggled to see why) ambient temperature. The LCD display characters are large enough to be easy to read and there’s a scan function that allows various data to be displayed in running order, or you can choose to display a particular data set and keep it there. All in all the console allows you to monitor your workout and progress but other than a recovery fitness test, that’s really all it does. Hand pulse sensors are featured in the handles for tracking your heart rate and are used in the recovery test. But, hand pulse sensors are not very accurate (being kind) and it’s telling that the user manual contains instructions for measuring your heart rate – by placing 2 fingers on your wrist for 6 seconds, counting the beats, and then multiplying the answer by a factor of 10 to get your beats per minute! Enough said, and for this reason, it’s disappointing not to see a wireless heart rate receiver on this model.

Other features include self-levelling pedals and transport wheels to make it easy to move the bike around if you need to. The Pro Fitness EMB1000 is covered by a 12-month warranty against manufacturing defects in the event of something going wrong, though this is around half the length most manufacturers are offering on comparable models.