Senseless Spinning
A burst of snowy and icy winter weather shut down the roads more completely than usual this December, forcing a retreat to the spinning class a bit earlier than normal. Entering the squalid little room full of pounding music, I remembered the inadequacies of spinning cycles, and how those harm the experience and value of the training that is possible with indoor riding.
I attend a spinning class at a local gym. It's pretty fun overall, and a good workout, but after going a few times, a factor that I'd only realized as a passing annoyance finally crystallized as a pure inadequacy -- you can't set a quantified resistance on a spinning cycle.
It took a few classes in a relatively few days to see the problem. Before, I'd gone about once per week, so usually had the same instructor. Attending more often let me see the variance between instructors, which made clear the problem with normal spinning cycles.
When I work out on a stationary bike in a regular gym, usually you set the resistance within a range of numbers, and you can go up or down by some perceived percentage. Best of all, if you travel and go from gym to gym, you can set each bike to the same resistance level, and have comparable workouts.
In a spinning class, you rarely get the same bike, and even if you do, someone else has used it and set it up for themselves. So, you have to adjust everything (no problem), and then find a resistance level to start.
This initial resistance level can be described by instructors as "like you're on a flat road" or "just a comfortable pace" or "about a 5 or 6 on a 10-point scale". It all depends. And so the trouble begins. Increasing resistance then can be described as "increased 6%" or "increase a quarter turn" or "increase to about an 8 or 9".
If you're fortunate enough to consistently get the instructor who at least strives for quantitation ("about a 5 or 6 on a 10-point scale"), things can seem OK. But when you move from this class to the one in which effort is described based on turns of the resistance knob or percentages of an unknown basis, you're lost. And, worst of all, you are not able to compare the workout or effort to the prior class'.
Cycling is about consistently maintaining or improving abilities for long-term achievement. Spinning classes pose a problem for cyclists trying to stay fit in the winter, because they don't allow for longitudinal comparisons on a known basis. Too bad. With just a few changes -- more consistency between instructors, or numbers on the bikes' dials -- it could all work so much better.
At least the music's usually pretty decent . . .
I attend a spinning class at a local gym. It's pretty fun overall, and a good workout, but after going a few times, a factor that I'd only realized as a passing annoyance finally crystallized as a pure inadequacy -- you can't set a quantified resistance on a spinning cycle.
It took a few classes in a relatively few days to see the problem. Before, I'd gone about once per week, so usually had the same instructor. Attending more often let me see the variance between instructors, which made clear the problem with normal spinning cycles.
When I work out on a stationary bike in a regular gym, usually you set the resistance within a range of numbers, and you can go up or down by some perceived percentage. Best of all, if you travel and go from gym to gym, you can set each bike to the same resistance level, and have comparable workouts.
In a spinning class, you rarely get the same bike, and even if you do, someone else has used it and set it up for themselves. So, you have to adjust everything (no problem), and then find a resistance level to start.
This initial resistance level can be described by instructors as "like you're on a flat road" or "just a comfortable pace" or "about a 5 or 6 on a 10-point scale". It all depends. And so the trouble begins. Increasing resistance then can be described as "increased 6%" or "increase a quarter turn" or "increase to about an 8 or 9".
If you're fortunate enough to consistently get the instructor who at least strives for quantitation ("about a 5 or 6 on a 10-point scale"), things can seem OK. But when you move from this class to the one in which effort is described based on turns of the resistance knob or percentages of an unknown basis, you're lost. And, worst of all, you are not able to compare the workout or effort to the prior class'.
Cycling is about consistently maintaining or improving abilities for long-term achievement. Spinning classes pose a problem for cyclists trying to stay fit in the winter, because they don't allow for longitudinal comparisons on a known basis. Too bad. With just a few changes -- more consistency between instructors, or numbers on the bikes' dials -- it could all work so much better.
At least the music's usually pretty decent . . .
posted by Recycled Cyclist | 1:57 PM
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