Abandoned Ideas Volume 4
Whenever the weather is bad I wind up having to spend some time at the gym. I like to see people there and look at their faces while they are pounding out miles on treadmills and elliptical machines, sweating it out on stationary bikes. As I look at them, I many times see the same faces and wonder “what keeps” them (me) at this?” What motivates us to spend our valuable time in this manner? Is it health? Mutual well-being? Stress-relief? Escaping feelings of guilt? Running away from bad habits? Pure enjoyment? A desire to improve at something? To look more conventionally attractive? Anyway, I look around at these familiar, yet anonymous faces and feel a strange camaraderie. We’re all WORKING for something.And I got to thinking about that “work” part. Work is merely the expense of energy- burning calories. “What if,” I thought to myself, “we could find a way to harvest all of this energy we’re expelling in the name of fitness?”
What if the sum total of the mechanical energy I’m producing could be captured and stored by that stationary bike? And then sent on to a master collection point at the gym? And then multiply that by how many people use that one bike in one day. Multiply that by however many other bikes, treadmills, and weight machines are used in a day, week, month…Now multiply that by however many fitness centers there are in the country, the world! Whoah! There is your alternative energy source!
posted by Mike @ 10:26 AM
2 Comments:
Believe it or not, I have had the same idea before. We could at least power up the gym!
It is funny how humans "create work" in order to stay in shape.
My dad used to always tell me when I would hook my bike up to a stationary trainer on snowy days, that if my wheel was turning some sort of generator instead of a ball bearing I could just power the house for an hour.
I think you should re-file this idea. Maybe file under still in persuit or something, makes me wonder if any gyms out there have thought about this. Even if there was an apparatus to store the energy, at least costs could be greatly reduced, if not eliminated with user-powered facilities.
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