Social Workout

The Future

Expresso

The Expresso Bike (Via Exspress.com.)

Here's the big picture: Fitness gear is going high tech. Chips in sneakers, body monitors, Wii Fits, etc.  In the future, your local health club will have quite alot more in common with Facebook and/or a video game arcade than, say, a gymnasium. Hopefully we'll be spared the bizarre vibraphone sounds. In any event, it's inevitable. Should you want to visit this future, go take a spin on an Expresso Bike.

"People are addicted," Keith Worts, Crunch C.O.O. told us. "I get calls. 'I want one for my home,'" he said. "The company was started by six guys who left Playstation...."

Forget about dialing up your resistance on a dopey knob or button. That's SO early 2000s. With this bike, you're moving over terrain displayed on heads-up video screen. When the video shows you going up a lushly landscaped hill, the resistance on your peddles increases. Get it? Should you be feeling a little sluggish, simply turn on the "power assist" mode so you can spin through the virtual forest like Lance. Naturally, it's all networked, so you can upload your rides to Expresso.net, and vie for poll position on the "Leaderboard." There you'll find a few thousand other Expresso fans challenging each other to races of all sorts.

Yes, it makes us nostalgic for the old leather medicine ball, but don't be a hater. Who really loves the current state of the treadmill or elliptical or stationary bike anyway? Adding virtual reality and social networking could actually be the best thing for indoor workouts since Jane Fonda.

So next time you're at the gym, go find the high tech gizmo in the corner and give it a try. Crunch is not the only gym to have the bike. In New York, Equinox on Amsterdam and 76th has one, and so does the New York Sports Club on Wall Street, The Sports Club/LA (61st St.) , and, naturally, the J.C.C., also at Amsterdam and 76th (which, Jill S. tells us, is to fitness trends what Columbus, OH is to fast food.)