Excerpt from A Bicycle Ergometer With an Electric Brake Certain muscular exercises, such as swimming or rowing with sliding seats, unquestionably bring into play more muscles than does the exercise of bicycle riding; on the other hand, the stationary position of the body, particularly of the head, makes the exercise of riding on a stationary bi cycle distinctly advantageous for a study of the respiratory exchange, especially when the subject has to breathe through a mouthpiece or nose piece, or through some other form of breathing appliance. Furthermore, as has been frequently demonstrated, most intense muscular exercise can be produced by means of the powerful leg muscles; hence, in any study of metabolism during muscular work, all of these advantages seem to point toward the desirability of utilizing some form of bicycle motion for the muscular work. The great difficulty with the earlier types of bicycle ergometers, how ever, has been the uncertainty of the amount of work performed, for even with the apparatus of Atwater and Benedict there was considerable slip of the contact, and the determination of the work done was by no means satisfactory. With other forms of ergometers, in which there is the fric tion of a band, or belt, or weight, the uncertainty and variations in the resistance must always be reckoned with. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.