Here’s a little nostalgic fitness bike story for New Year’s Eve although I wish it had a better ending.

As I was checking the latest prices on the fitness bikes reviewed on this website this week I discovered that almost all of the Livestrong bikes on the Livestrong website now say that they are “Sold in Canada Only” and most of the Livestrong bikes at Amazon are out of stock or no longer available.

When I looked into this further I found out that Johnson Fitness (the maker of Livestrong Fitness products) will no longer be coming out any new Livestrong products and once the existing stock of these products online and in stores are sold out they will no longer be available.

This is, of course, all due to the Lance Armstrong disaster that happened earlier this year. Although the Livestrong Foundation and Livestrong Fitness has cut all ties to Lance Armstrong the brand has been seriously hurt by his situation and consequently Livestrong Fitness products will no longer be produced.

This is a sad situation for the brand since the Livestrong Fitness Bikes were (and still are if you can find them) very good products and Johnson Fitness also made significant contributions to the Livestrong Foundation from the sale of these products.

We have had a number of Livestrong Bikes on our “Best Buy” page over the years but I have had to remove the latest models due to the limited (and sporadic) availability. The most recent Livestrong Best Buys on this site were the Livestrong LS6.0R Recumbent and Livestrong LS5.0U Upright. At the time of this blog post these 2 bikes are available on Amazon at a reduced price but they were unavailable yesterday so their availability seems to be quite sporadic.

Johnson Fitness will, of course, still honor their warranties on all Livestrong fitness products for the full term of the warranties (Johnson Health Tech, the parent company for Livestrong fitness products, is a very reputable company and they are not going away (just the Livestrong brand)).

One of the contacts that I have at Livestrong told me that the Livestrong brand still sells well in Canada which is why they are still selling them there. I guess that the Canadians were not let down with the Lance Armstrong doping scandal as much as those of us in the USA were.

Livestrong LS28IC Lance Armstrong tribute bike.

It was so cool for us to have a 7 time Tour de France winner here in the US until we were all let down by Lance Armstrong finally telling the truth about his drug use during his yellow jersey, TDF winning days.

As a matter of fact, back when Lance was still a hero, Livestrong even produced a high-end, limited edition indoor cycle, the LS28IC Indoor Cycle that was all about Lance and his 7 TDF victories. This was a very well made, commercial quality indoor cycle with drop down handlebars that was very popular with the visitors on this website. The people that purchased this indoor cycle got a very good bike and I suppose it might even be some kind of collector’s item at this point.

Although Johnson Fitness (officially Johnson Health Tech) will not be coming out with new Livestrong fitness products they still continue to produce other commercial and in-home fitness products. The high-quality in-home brands that are still made by JHT include AFG and Horizon.

I was fortunate to be able to review and ride the latest Horizon Fitness Bikes at Johnson Fitness’s headquarters in Cottage Grove, Wisconsin on my last visit there this past summer. I was very impressed with their latest Upright Bike, the Horizon Comfort-U and their latest Recumbent bike the Horizon Comfort-R. Both of these bikes are now available online and at a 10% discount on the Horizon website if you use the discount code “about10” available only from this website.

Another nice thing about the Horizon website is that they just revised the site to use a responsive, mobile friendly design ~ like this website 🙂 ~ so those of you that use your phones and tablet computers to surf the internet will find these sites easy to read and navigate without having to resize the screen or scroll back and forth ~ I am still amazed at how many other sites are still not mobile ready.

So there you have our last blog post and news story for 2013. Here’s to hoping you all have a safe, healthy and Happy New Year!!! Cheers!