Video: Water biking – a fitness craze that rather passed us by

Here at road.cc we’ll merrily confess to being behind the times when it comes to fitness classes, so water biking was a new one on us. It’s fairly straightforward. It’s riding an exercise bike in water.

As with so many of these things, the activity’s fundamental ridiculousness is explained away in this video with a host of pseudo-scientific sounding benefits that may or may not stand up to scrutiny. We wouldn’t profess to be experts in lymphatic drainage, for example.

We would however support WaterBiking Studio’s claim that this is a low impact activity. Common-or-garden cycling is low impact anyway, isn’t it? (Provided you don’t fall off.) We see no reason why doing it part-submerged would change that.

As was intimated above, we had a strong suspicion that water biking might have been around for a while without our picking up on it – and so it proved.

The video’s assertion that it is the latest fitness trend “from Europe” led us to discover that it came to prominence in 2011 after being popularised by a Frenchman called Alain Lellouche.

It seems to be known as ‘hydrospinning’ in the UK and Pippa Middleton wrote an article about it for The Telegraph.

In that piece – entitled “the l'eaudown on hydro-spinning” – Pippa describes “cycling in a Jacuzzi,” which seems rather different to the group class seen in the video. The place she went to also had duo cubicles where couples could hydro-spin together. Ahh, how romantic.

As for what Pippa was hoping to get out of the experience, she wrote: “Spinning fast in water while being blasted by hydro-massage jets helps reshape the fat tissue on calves, thighs and buttocks, replacing it with (I hope) lean and shapely leather-trouser appropriate muscles.”

Pippa did 15km in 45 minutes. We’ve no real clue whether this is any good or not. All we know is that Homar Leuci managed to do 855m with his head under.