I found the health rider easy to use. After following the instruction video tht came with mine I found it easy to get into the habit of doing a number of different exercises to develop different muscle groups. The routine lasts about 25-30 minutes.
The advantage with the healthrider is that your using your own weight to help exercise, in effect your lifting yourself up and the way the machine is designed impact on your joints is low.
It is important to make sure that the seat is adjusted correctly and that you warmup first otherwise there is some scope for back injury. But if you follow the video I can't see a problem occuring.
The only disadvantage I can really see comparing the health rider to something like an exercise bike is its "footprint" the handle bars a quite wide and if space is limited it can get in the way. However comparing the healthrider to an exercise bike is not really fair as the range of exrcise on the healthrider is much more extensive.
I'm glad I bought it.
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