Here's what it's REALLY like owning an E-Bike

What am I talking about?? I've been riding ebikes for nearly 3 years now and it is time to share what life is actually like riding and owning these fancy electric chariots both on the trail and having them in your garage and to be 100% honest with you before having one of these I never would have guessed what the best part would be and especially what the worst part would be about owning an ebike so let's get into it and we are Brain explosions (the best part) going to start off with the very best part which was not only a shocking realization for me but little trigger alert for the r ebike haters out there you might want to cover up any sensitive Electronics you have because what I'm about to say just might blow up your brain mind the ebike is hands down the best fitness tool for mountain bikers not joking here's why see a couple of years ago I only had a few short weeks to physically prepare myself for a really cool riding opportunity in the high Andes mountains of Peru where we were going to be pedaling at altitudes between 12,000 and 15,000 ft of elevation daily yeah I needed a lot of help and quick so I went to a professional trainer to get their advice on what I can do in such a short amount of time and what he said surprised me he told me to go and get on a bike put my heart rate into a relatively low zone two which for me I think it was about 135 BPM and keep it in that zone 2 for 1 to 2 hours every day as he said that will be the most effective way to build up most amount of endurance possible in the shortest amount of time this is what professional athletes of pretty much any sort do on the regular you see it from downhill mountain bikers and duro mountain bikers obviously Road bikers they all hop on those spin bikes or those road bikes and turn away at a relatively low heart rate for long periods of time but for me at that time my only option was to get on an exercise bike in a gym and it was so incredibly boring I just couldn't stick with it and with how Punchy and spiky the pedaling efforts are on a regular mountain bike I knew that that wasn't going to work either but fast forward with this modern How I use power modes ebike I'm sitting on right now the coolest part about the whole thing is how I get to decide how much effort I put in on any given ride I get to decide exactly what I want my heart rate to be through a full ride so now I can go out there and ride Punchy mountain bike trails and if I have it in the right mode I can keep my heart rate exactly where I want it to be nice and steady allowing me to get those like core I'll call them like deep cycle workouts while not being bored to tears and you really start to get to know what modes on your bike are best for What on this particular one it's an Ibis Oso and has like the Bosch system but I'm assuming this applies to other ebikes as well I don't actually know but so like the green Eco power power mode if I keep it in that mode and I keep it in a couple harder gears I can keep my heart rate between 150 and 160 riding with anybody on regular bikes or you can choose you know one of the top two Mega high power modes like emtb or of course turbo and keep your heart rate way way down there if you wanted to but when it comes to building up like a Bas Level Fitness I found that the blue mode or tour plus to be exactly what I dreamed of having all those years ago in that mode I'm able to keep my heart rate like perfectly in zone 2 because it only adds additional power when you need it and so it just sort of evens out your effort throughout the whole ride no matter what's happening and the really important second part of that because I know I can pick and choose the amount of effort I want to put in on a ride by ride basis or even a Climb by climb basis I actually get out to ride Trails way more often than I ever have before which UPS my fitness even further and not only my fitness but my my downhill riding skills cuz I'm just hitting way more downhills Do I miss regular bikes? let's see here who whoop whoop whoop don't fall over all right all got a couple rapid fire questions from you all that came in do I ever Miss regular bikes yes and I will tell you when I do and why I do in in a quick second here Do I ride it at DH parks? what do I do at downhill mountain bike parks like at Whistler do I ride the ebike at least with the Ibis Oso the one that I have it's like a Burly do everything mountain bike that has a motor and so definitely ride it at downhill mountain bike parks I have mine in the extended travel mode so I've got 180 in the front and 170 in the back perfect bike park specs but what I'll often do in this situation if I know I'm just doing lift access I'll take the battery out why not pull the battery out um with the Osos the the battery cover is attached to the battery itself and so once I take the battery out I just use a little strap I don't even know I'm supposed to do this but I pull the battery out put the battery cover back on the frame and just use a strap to strap it on there and then voila you got yourself a pretty sick Park bike do I Am I damaging the trails? think I'm damaging the trails with my ebike definitely not before owning one I probably would have said yeah probably but in reality that's just not the case and the reason for that is that this is not a motorbik bike it doesn't have a ridiculous insane amount of power to it they say it basically brings a regular person's leg strength to the strength of like a like a World Cup level cross country athlete and so where we live here in camore Alberta there's a place called The camore Nordic Center and it's where a huge amount of our riding zone is and at the camore Nordic Center ebikes aren't allowed but they hold National and international CrossCountry events all the time where they bring in like the best of the best and all of those Riders riding on those Trails have the same amount of power as I do on this thing and so no there's no more damage to the trails than anything else I I thought that maybe with an ebike you'd be spinning out a lot and like kind of grinding down the trails a bit I never spin out on this bike I do have like beefier knober tires than I maybe normally would on a regular bike just to make sure I have tons of traction and I'm never breaking loose so yeah no extra damage being done here but it's a good question um but going back to the whole downhill thing on an ebike or even just like just doing a lot of downhill riding on an ebike what I found and you know like we're fortunate enough to be sponsored by Ibis and we have access to regular bikes as well so in my garage I have ebikes and I also have regular bikes like the hd6 and and the ripmo and let me tell you when you've done a whole bunch of downhill riding on an ebike and then you switch back over to a regular bike that's like 25 lbs lighter it's sort of like uh like training with a weighted bat or like running with a weighted backpack all of a sudden taking that extra weight off let me tell you all of a sudden you are sending that downhill section like the Earth has half as much gravity all of a sudden and I can definitely see why a lot of World Cup Downhill Racers train on ebikes now Why they're dangerous of course having said all that owning an ebike can be dangerous for Fitness if not used wisely when I first got the ebike I found myself just doing the same exact rides that I normally would maybe trying going doing some of the higher elevation stuff that I wouldn't normally but if you're just doing the exact same Loop but on ebike all of a sudden you're out riding for only a third of the amount of time especially in the higher modes you're just going to lose out on some Fitness cuz your ride's going to be over way faster so one thing I definitely recommend is just getting out there for longer rides or doing two or three laps of the the loop that you would normally do around here we have some really awesome high elevation stuff which normally even in my best physical condition would be really really really difficult for me to get up there and go and see now I take this big rig up there it is a blast and I'm getting a solid workout because I'm just being out there pedaling for long enough now let's hear What Beth thinks about eeeebs from Beth because she has seen more benefit from an ebike than anybody else I know because of my health issues enclosing spondilitis chronic migraine attacks my energy levels just vary daytoday a lot but having an ebike means that I can get out way more and so it's actually been a big tool in just making mountain biking more accessible for me no matter how I'm feeling so one of my only experiences with ebikes was watching people fly past me up the hills and so I assumed that when I got an ebike I would be flying up the hills and leaving my friends behind and not have friends to ride with but as it turns out you can actually turn down the power on an ebike and you get to decide how fast you want to go and how much power you want to have and so you can actually ride with your friends and hang out with them whether you're on an ebike and they're on a regular regular bike or not and maybe that sounds kind of silly like obviously you can turn down the the power on an ebike but when the only experience you've had is someone flying past you really fast on an ebike by themselves by themselves uh you just don't know any different and I didn't so with an ebike I have a choice to ride at the ENT density I'm up for that day which means I can actually get out more often than ever if I'm feeling a little bit tired I can still go out for a ride if I had to say one thing I don't like about the ebike it would have to be the weight of it um it is significantly heavier than a regular bike um just having to lift it and move it around is actually a challenge for me and so yeah the other day we were riding on the trail and there was a down tree and I had to lift it over those are just things to think about if you're uh what style of bike rack you have anytime you have to lift it is going to be a different experience okay so now here are my top My Top 3 LIKES three things that I love the most about own I mean everybody uses ebikes differently but here are my my personal top three reasons for loving an ebike and then my top three gripes about ebiking and I'll end with the very very biggest one that was super surprising for me number one the ebike makes filming so much easier and I know this is a very specific to me kind of problem but a lot of the times you know we're not filming trail riding videos So Much Anymore there a lot of like how-to content like how to how to jump and how to Corner and all those things and typically we have to do a lot of pedaling to get to where we need to be and then after that you're doing dozens of of laps like hiking the bike back up filming a section hiking back up filming a section all for the next day to two days so you just let off there you let off at the sign man this is the best part honestly I'm not doing anything this is so good and being able to either get towed by this thing or just be on the ebike we're able to get more footage and better footage because we're not freaking exhausted by the time we get to the top of lap one number two we live in a town that is quite literally filled with Olympians like actual Olympians and just super super fit people in general and so for somebody like me who's in like decent shape gets asked by most of the locals around here to go for a ride I you a lot of times I'll say no because they're going to have a miserable time CU I'm holding everybody up and I'm going to have a miserable time cuz I'm on death's door cuz my heart rate is at like 200 the whole time honestly the fitness level of people around here is ridiculous this thing right here is the great equalizer now I can say yes to any ride with anyone and I know that everyone's going to have a great time the third real big one that I love the most about this bike is that it turns what otherwise would be kind of like petal boring flat Trails into essentially super fun downhill Trails because you're able to carry so much more speed on those sections that would normally be super boring there are so many trails in my area that I look at in a totally different way now they're all a blast heck even a lot of the uphills are fun all right and now for the Dark MY Top 3 GRIPES Side of owning ebikes you all know if you like if you've seen any of my review videos that have to do with products that complicate my riding experience they generally don't get a very good review from me and for the most part these things you don't really have to worry about them much at all but there are way more systems at play you got to keep that battery charged there's just more to go wrong on an ebike of course we've had really really good luck with these things I've had to take one of them into the shop once to a official Bosch service center and had them do St thing I don't even know and I think that's probably the part that like bugs me the most is that just like with newer cars I don't really know what to do under the hood but like you know from from the old 80s cars that I used to drive everything's just right there I know how to fix these things but there's just technology going on over here that I I just don't know what to do with um oh side note uh somebody noticed that I was running GX transmission on my Oso and a couple years ago I put out a video about GX axis and I hated it I thought it was like really bad idea but transmission specifically on an ebike I think is a great idea because one of the things that's happened to me since owning an ebike is you very quickly chew through drivetrains um I've been through one set of absolutely everything on this bike already like ground down to the nub um but we swapped it out with the GX transmission which actually comes on these bikes now like the Osos and for regular bikes I think transmission again I I I don't think it's a very good idea at all it doesn't make any sense to me whatsoever especially for like high performance athletes where they need to like sh shift really fast anyways that's that's for a whole another video but for an ebike uh the GX transmission system I think is awesome cuz it only shifts when it's ready to shift so when you're under load with all these Watts going on I'm wearing through this whole system way slower than I did on the previous system which is just like a standard GX drivetrain but yeah wearing through Parts faster wearing through back tires faster wearing through the chain and and especially the the rear cassette all that kind of stuff you're just going to wear through stuff faster on an ebike all right now for the part that I dislike the very most about an ebike ride it's kind of hard to describe and anytime I've ever shared this with somebody most of the time they just stare at me blankly but when I'm on an ebike on a very ebike ride like in one of the higher power modes and of course like let's well let's just think back to when anybody first tries gets on an ebike you put it into turbo mode and You Haul ARS up the trail pretty much keep it in turbo mode the entire time max power go go go and that is pretty fun but right from the very first time that I did that in turbo mode on this bike behind me I finished out the ride and I felt like something was missing I felt like I missed out on something that I love about mountain biking and it was the part of the ride that I was most excited to delete and I'm talking about the slow quiet climb when you're on your regular mountain bike climbing on up the trail things are slowed down things are calm things are quiet sure you might be breathing through your eyeballs but that as I found out is a really restorative time for me and when I got on the ebike through it in turbo mode and went for it it felt like like I was just smashing downhill the entire time that's even like the little phrase for this bike behind me downhill both ways which I think is really really cool and fun in a lot of cases but if I'm just taking ebiking in that sort of aspect where it's just turbo mode everywhere you're just on high alert from beginning to end of that ride cuz you have to focus on the uphills like you normally would just have to do on the downhills but on a regular ride you know 3/4 of the time you're on your bike you're climbing what I really love about a mountain bike ride is having those two things work well with each other having that slow calm quiet section of it where you have time to think through whatever's H happened in your day or whatever or chat with your friends and then the opposite side of that when you're flying downhill and you can only focus on what's going on in that exact moment in time having both is important to me maybe not for everybody but definitely for me and I never realized that until it was gone now of course fortunately on these bikes as I mentioned earlier you can decide what you want to do how much effort you want to put in so you can go down and turn the whole bike off if you really want true climb challenge or you can just throw it in uh eco mode like green mode which honestly if you ask me just kind of picks up the slack of the extra weight of the bike and so I found myself even though I have the ability to go and do a huge giant lap of my lunch ride in I think it was like 26 minutes start to finish I just don't really do that anymore I leave turbo mode alone other than like you know the straight Parts just getting to the trail but once I get there I turn the power mode down and I'm able to just like chill out and think so yeah and through that I think it just comes back to what I like the most about the ebike is that I can choose whatever kind of ride I want to be on that day it I don't wanna fight no more. just gives you options so I hope this was helpful for anybody looking into possible ownership of an ebike let me know if you have any questions down below or if anybody has any thoughts or suggestions like other ebike owners that you want to put down in the comment section you would bring huge value to all the viewers of this Channel and I appreciate it a lot thanks for watching we'll see you on the next one cheers fight no more and I'm have tell you I'm sorry didn't mean go oh [Music]