by Jim Karanas | Oct 18, 2026 | Master Instructor Blog
By Team ICG® Master Trainers Jim Karanas and Joan Kent
Over 12 years ago, Jim developed an athletic training program that eventually earned the tagline “Stop exercising. Start training.” At ICG®, we think there’s a difference between the two, one that people ask about frequently. Training encompasses more than the physical aspect of the ride.
Currently, training versus exercise is a popular topic. An internet search readily reveals the ongoing discussion, with suggestions and ideas as to the difference.
According to some sources, training is based on having a purpose, setting goals and achieving specific results. Exercise, in contrast, has been said to lack focus, goals or purpose. Training is said to be intense and engaging. Exercise is said to lack intensity and even be boring.
But are those really the differences? Say someone wants to lose weight and begins the following process: an indoor cycling class on Monday, an elliptical workout on Tuesday, a kickboxing class on Wednesday, Bikram yoga on Thursday, treadmill running on Friday, and body conditioning on Saturday morning.
Is that exercise or training? There’s a goal/purpose. The activities listed would provide intensity, plus variety to prevent boredom. Yet the weekly plan looks more like random exercise than structured training, so the differences must lie elsewhere.
We think the above distinctions are only part of the difference between training and exercise, and not necessarily the key points.
First, for a workout plan to be training, it probably needs to be progressive. Progressive training might start with foundation-level workouts and move into more intense levels of effort that are also designed to make the participant stronger in the activities. For that to be effective, the activities might need to be limited (say, to indoor cycling and treadmill running), rather than a hodge-podge of many unrelated things. Specific adaptations occur more consistently when the activities are specific, too.
Limiting the activities and following an overall progression wouldn’t preclude changing the format. But changes would be designed to elicit a specific training outcome for each session, rather than simply to prevent boredom, and the student is made aware of that objective.
The progression might culminate in performance events. A lot can be said about athletic performance, and will be in another post, but maximum efforts differ from what could be called “pseudo-hard.” People who love to work hard are typically talking about pseudo-hard efforts, rather than max.
Attitude or mindset is also important. It’s not simply working out to drop a few pounds, but training to develop our consciousness, nourish our body, change and quiet our thoughts, and balance our mind. Let that be the philosophy. Workouts without philosophy lack consciousness. Training is about bringing consciousness into the process. When we focus on what we’re doing and stay highly conscious of all of it, it’s never boring. It’s simply what is.
To maintain presence, we need to recognize the intrusion of thought immediately and bring awareness back to the moment, no past, no future. A sense of self in the moment is the way to turn off the mind. If we project into the future, the mind comes in like a tidal wave and sucks us into a stream of thought. Thoughts create time, make minutes feel like hours, and rob us of the desire to continue.
Then there’s pain. Or more precisely, the approach to it. We’re all familiar with “no pain, no gain” and the attitude that pain — certain types, at least — can be good because it means the workout is beneficial.
There’s also the “Hulk Will Smash” approach: the more it hurts, the more I like it. Grrr. Fanatics with no sense beyond the muscle of exercise may use that to complete their workouts, but addiction to pain isn’t training.
Training is a more mindful approach to pain that involves feeling it, fully understanding it, being sensitive to it — and putting a space around it, becoming nonreactive.
In what we do, pain is inevitable. But it’s just a trigger. It may stimulate resistance that compares to an emotional state. As our emotional threshold rises, our reaction to the pain changes. It doesn’t feel any better. It just doesn’t bother us as much. The warrior chooses death. Athletes choose physical pain, or at least non-avoidance of pain. As the polarization in our mind diminishes, our emotional reaction to the pain becomes one of acceptance or even dismissal.
Any athlete can recall having had the time of his/her life despite feeling pain during an event. A couple of decades in the fitness industry make it clear that anyone who wonders why an athlete would do something unpleasant, like push through pain to reach a goal, can’t adhere to a fitness program for any length of time.
Tools such as consciousness, presence in the moment, attentiveness, curiosity, non-reactivity, and so on are ultimately ways to add balance. Training tests our effectiveness with them. Exercise lacks these tools.
Originally posted 2012-03-26 09:52:29.
by Jim Karanas | Oct 15, 2026 | Master Instructor Blog, Mental Toughness
By Team ICG® Master Trainer Jim Karanas
As you may know from reading these posts, I’ve written about motivation in several of them. I’m often asked to speak to groups about motivation, or write about it in newsletters that go out to athletes. It typically happens in January, because the expectation is that everyone has de-tuned over the holiday season and let their fitness and discipline slide. Since I don’t look at motivation or athletic training in that way, there doesn’t seem to be any reason not to write about it in July.
True, motivation probably is a good topic for the first newsletter of a new year, but I still consider it somewhat ludicrous. I’ve read too many articles about “getting started again” or “staying motivated”. In my mind, training never stops. You can be in an ICU after having open-heart surgery to repair a malfunctioning mitral valve with a congenital defect, and still train. You may not be logging miles, but you can train.
Physical training seems to me to be a natural process that incorporates conscious development and the integration of mind, body and emotions. It’s a form of human development that produces greater insight. If you approach your training in this way, it can and will enhance virtually every endeavor you undertake. You may even improve your performance as an athlete. At the very least, you’ll get more and take more (i.e., use more) from the experience.
When you understand this, training becomes an experience that engages you throughout your life regardless of circumstance. If for some reason you can’t train your body, you can still train your mind. If for some reason you can’t focus your mind, you can practice firing your emotions, or stimulating your will, or reducing your anger, or accepting what you are and are capable of doing.
Once you head down that path, there is no more stopping and starting. You may take a physical break, but, if you lose touch with what your training means to you, you’re simply exercising. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. It just has the capacity to be so much more. (See The Tao of Training, Part 1 and Part 2.)
If you tend to take a physical break during the holidays — and that could even include the long Independence Day weekend some may recently have taken — hopefully you feel rejuvenated when you return, rather than “out of it”. If you’re beginning a training cycle, you need to plan your competition phase: which races you will enter and your specific goals for each race. Decide which races are the most demanding and/or the ones in which you wish to perform best.
If you find metrics motivating, it could be worthwhile to find out where to obtain a fitness assessment that you know how to interpret, or that a coach can interpret for you. If not, begin with your base. Keep your training relaxed and comfortable and enjoy this phase.
Re-establish your drive by committing time and energy to understanding the motivation behind your training. If your motivation has not evolved, and you find yourself training for the same reasons you did last year, say hello to a plateau.
Maybe instead of turning your attention to getting back in shape, your first priority should be to determine the reasons you will log more miles — or train with greater commitment — this year.
Then do it because you know exactly why you want to.
Originally posted 2013-07-21 08:19:37.
by Jim Karanas | Jul 26, 2026 | Engage Your Students, Master Instructor Blog
By Team ICG® Master Trainer Jim Karanas
I’ll switch gears from my recent posts on using public speaking techniques to enhance our teaching to talk about what we say. In The Art of Cueing, I discussed the use of cues to bring depth to the class and make it more than just a workout. Cues concerning the science, the music, the video, your personal experience, even philosophy can make your class more interesting and more impactful.
Philosophical cues are the most difficult to incorporate. Instructors don’t typically cover philosophy when they teach because they don’t think people want to hear it, or they don’t feel comfortable talking about it. Someone who doesn’t teach might say the first is true. But maybe that person hasn’t yet heard a well-delivered philosophical message and is just uninformed.
I understand not feeling comfortable talking about it and will address that later.
Adding philosophy to a class so it doesn’t sound like preaching is what I call “messaging.” A class without messaging is just a workout. It might even be a good one. But the instructor’s power will weaken over time, just like playing the same workout video over and over. It diminishes with no message. All the public speaking techniques in the world can’t compensate for a class that lacks substance.
Unforgettable lyrics are unforgettable because they send a message. A public address goes viral on YouTube when it sends a message. Messaging will touch a person’s life beyond the great workout you just delivered and compel him/her to come back to your class again and again.
What’s a message? Any life concept that you bring to the class and that can be experienced in the class as result of the training you’re providing. A couple of examples:
Focus
Coaches often tell you to “stay focused” but rarely tell you how. Focus is not simply directing your attention to what you’re doing. That leads to thinking. Thinking will weaken focus. Focus is complete engagement in what you’re doing. A focused mind pays no attention to distractions. Fast descending takes focus. If you’re not 100% engaged and non-reactive to distractions, you might crash. How do you train yourself to be this way — not just during a dangerous descent, but right now, so you get the most from your workout? That’s the essence of our class today.
Motivation
Something that happens outside of you that you consider “motivating” is not a strong incentive. You might see someone overcome great adversity or hear a story that strikes a personal chord with you and feel filled with motivating energy. These external motivations work temporarily, but have far less impact than motivation you generate by yourself. I want you to look at motivation as something personal. Then you have the ability to train and get better at it. You can train yourself to be motivated the way you train anything else.
When you understand how to do this, motivation is endless, limitless. The only time you won’t feel motivated is when it’s a personal choice, and you’ll recognize it as such. You’ll no longer look to me or to anyone else to motivate you to train. You’ll rise to the occasion again and again because you’ve trained yourself to do so. I’ll show you how to do this in today’s workout.
As an instructor, all you have to do now is deliver a physical practice (the day’s ride) that delivers the results you just promised to deliver in your message. If I’ve enticed you, and you want to learn how to focus or be consistently motivated, the solution is simple: Come to my class. That’s the power of good messaging.
The messages you can deliver are many: how to engage fully, how to sense meaning, how to expand your concept of what you can do, how to sense your life energy, how to direct it, how not to react to adversity, how to develop discipline, how to go beyond hope and fear, and on and on.
How do you, as an instructor, learn to deliver these messages, both verbally and physically? First, you must want to. Second, you must become a student of philosophy. You study and you ride, and you bring the lessons that you learn from your study to the bike, and then to class.
I have a small library of what I call my “Life Books”. These are about 10 books that I have found extremely helpful. I’ve read each of them dozens of times. A good philosophical book is one you immediately realize you need to reread. My first Life Book was Way of the Peaceful Warrior: A Book That Changes Lives.
It was the first book to encourage me to approach my training from a conscious perspective. I have several copies with dog-eared pages and many handwritten notes throughout.
Physical movement has been part of spiritual training for thousands of years. It was not meant to provide exercise. Daily activity was supposed to do that. Keep a conscious attitude, go beyond the workout, and deliver a message every time you teach.
Originally posted 2015-01-07 07:16:21.
by Jim Karanas | Jun 27, 2026 | Class DVDS & Videos, Master Instructor Blog
Everything changes…
By Team ICG® Master Trainer Jim Karanas and ICG® Marketing & Product Director Gary Warren
Forward Motion Video was first produced for, and used in, Indoor Cycling classes in the form of DVDs. DVDs paved the way for production companies like Virtual Active to bring Hollywood-level filming to the fitness industry.
We would never detract from the contribution these DVDs and their producers made to the indoor-cycling industry. Going forward, however, there’s a point of contention that we consider critical: continuing to use DVD as the medium for providing forward motion video.
In response to Jim’s last post, “Video Done Right”, Gino Nacey, one of the pioneers of Forward Motion Video, offered his “1% disagreement” and commented, “as long as the DVD is played on a big screen, I don’t really see why we should knock it — if all a site can afford is a projector, screen and some DVDs then if the video is well done, they should have a great experience.” We appreciate Gino’s feedback.
DVDs are seen by some in the industry as a good option for clubs, a way to provide a quality visual experience in an indoor cycling class. ICG® believes that, at this time, DVDs will do more to inhibit the development of both indoor-cycling programs that offer video and the instructors who teach with it.
DVD is being superseded as technology progresses. Despite DVD’s low initial purchase cost for club owners, is it really forward-thinking and fit-for-purpose with respect to the skills instructors need to develop to enhance their classes with video, as they do with music? We believe DVD limitations are one reason more instructors don’t teach with forward motion video.
What can an instructor truly do with a DVD? The instructor can’t alter the programming or investigate the synergies that exist between music and video. The profile is unchangeable. DVD length can’t be altered to fit the music. That limits the music that can be used with the DVD. The instructor can’t swap out portions of the DVDs, which makes it impossible to alter the profiles to create endless class variations.
DVDs lack the essential tools the instructor needs, such as selecting and changing footage at any given point in a profile, repeating parts of a video, skipping parts of a video, or switching to panoramic footage for water breaks or to shift the experience. Even more importantly, DVDs don’t permit the instructor to keep the footage running to match the music track length, or vice versa. Any of the above can be done — with one touch — with a system like Myride®+.
DVD offers the same ride time and again, and the ability to use different music is limited.
The use of DVDs for virtual classes may seem to make sense initially, particularly if the voiceover coaching and the music are good. Again, the number of different rides is limited because DVD footage is fixed and can’t be reprogrammed. Also, quality of filming comes into play because Standard Definition on a large screen looks unrealistic.
But it’s more than that. Virtual classes have to be highly advanced in coaching, graphics, filming techniques, post-production techniques, and exhibit extremely compelling locations because they now do what instructors do — lead the class. We also have to push the limits of technology to enable consoles to provide “virtual class” schedules, where console and projector turn on and off at selected times to enable the club owner to offer classes without an instructor present.
It takes a platform of technology that can continue to grow to make the experience (and the buyer’s investment) stronger over the years without fading. Sustainability is key, and DVDs can’t make the cut.
Are DVDs passable? For the retail market, yes. But for sustainable commercial operations where the consumer is savvier and more demanding as competition rises, perhaps not.
Finally, our tree-hugging moment. DVDs are not green and create an enormous amount of waste product that is eliminated with the use of advanced digital technology. CDs and DVDs don’t decompose. Their composition is too complex to make large-scale recycling possible, unlike aluminum, glass or paper. So old CDs and DVDs must be shipped to a special center for recycling.
Then there’s packaging. 85% of under-24s believe that downloading music can help save the planet by reducing the packaging, waste, and carbon emissions involved in producing and transporting CDs and DVDs to shops.
Here’s what video in indoor cycling needs:
1. Improved content-delivery tools for video that offer increased programming features, designed to enable instructors to utilize this new asset fully and owners to embrace the ROI they can get from video done right.
2. Increased availability of high-quality video through network delivery that will enable us to bring new video to our customers as easily as we bring new songs.
3. Improved filming and post-production techniques to enhance immersion and raise the member experience and the demand for video.
4. A shift away from a retail product that’s not green and that experts say won’t be around much longer.
We believe Myride®+ fulfills these needs, except item 2, which it will in the immediate future.
As always with new technology, there’s a higher initial cost — in this case, for the digital media console and the HD projector. But let’s not confuse initial cost with “total cost of ownership” (TCO). The cost of a DVD media system may be low, but it wastes money if it’s not sustainable and/or doesn’t fully meet the market’s needs. As demand increases and more companies play a role in development, digital video costs will decrease. Continuing to advocate DVDs, which give the club owner a cheaper option without a complete understanding of its limitations, will hinder forward progress.
The end result seems inevitable, and DVD may delay the transition but won’t prevent it.
ICG® respects Gino and his organizations for all they’ve done to pave the way. But ICG® can’t recommend adherence to an outdated form of presenting video to the Indoor Cycling industry.
Originally posted 2012-08-13 07:47:25.
by Jim Karanas | Jun 9, 2021 | Master Instructor Blog
By Team ICG® Master Trainer Jim Karanas
We’re not wired to seek out pain. Human evolution developed and adapted a neurological system and sensory perception for reducing pain and seeking pleasure.
Easy-to-moderate cardio conditioning is of a manageable intensity that feels good. Once someone gets past the initial discomfort of moving the body and sitting on a saddle, riding a bike is pleasurable.
So why do we take our students past that point and encourage them to hurt? And why do we do it ourselves?
There are plenty of good reasons. But the focus of this post is how to encourage new students to recognize the benefits of training at high heart rates and willingly ride into hurt.
Spiritual teachers speak of consciousness, that transcendental thing with the mind that goes beyond the physical universe. What’s interesting is that more and more studies show that the mind relies upon the physical processes of the brain, yet no one knows exactly how.
In Buddha’s Brain, Rick Hanson and Richard Mendius describe how human survival strategies have led to human suffering. That’s not the topic of this article either, although it’s a fascinating read. One of these strategies has a direct impact on training intensity — the fact that humans are wired to “hold onto fleeting pleasures and escape inevitable pains.”
Haven’t you ever noticed how counterintuitive it feels when you contemplate a training or event that will hurt? The guiding principle in the human body is homeostasis. Exercise in general takes us out of homeostasis, and high intensity will take us far out of it — or, in the case of an ultra-endurance event, for a very long time. You might overlook pain for a while if you see enough ads with models and athletes, or read what celebrities do to stay fit. After a time, though, it all sounds somewhat ridiculous. Yet this is what we tell our students to do.
Understand that this is not wrong. There are many reasons to exercise hard and experience hurt. But hard training becomes exhausting unless there’s a reason for it that goes beyond the usual stuff the industry throws at us — caloric burn, muscle confusion, muscle shock, looking great naked — and the gadgets to make those things happen.
Working with your mind to encourage your body is central to every path of psychological and spiritual development. “Shocking” the body grossly misrepresents the process. There’s no surprise. We willfully take the body into discomfort for reasons that have little to do with how our physiology reacts to the stress.
The physical benefits of hard training are well documented: increased aerobic capacity, improved ability to burn fat, enhanced metabolic boost, reduced risk of diabetes, reversal of Metabolic Syndrome, greater longevity, increased lean body mass, greater insulin sensitivity, and more.
So, physically, it’s good for us to go hard. As an instructor, you can recite the above list of benefits every time you take heart rates up in class. It might start out convincing, but the impact of the list will diminish over time, even though the benefits still apply to your students’ physiology.
Hurt requires a better reason than the benefits list for our students to keep embracing it during training. Again, neurologically, we’re wired to avoid it. That’s why we feel apprehension and anxiety before every hard effort that produces serious discomfort.
You’re on a ride and turn into a stiff, 25-mph headwind that reduces your speed on a flat road to a soul-destroying 6 mph in your easiest climbing gear. You must ride in that direction for another 50 miles. Endurance will not get you through that ride. Strength will not get you through that ride. None of the physical attributes you may have developed through your classes and training will get you through that ride. Only resilience will.
What is resilience? A dictionary definition centers on the ability to recover quickly, to bounce back. In this context, it could be seen as an attitude: ‘It’s not that it doesn’t hurt. It’s just that it doesn’t matter.’ More precisely, it’s a non-attitude — a non-reaction to the hurt that then leads to acceptance. Bouncing back would be the result.
The road is the road. Being a cyclist means accepting it without judgment. Facing a headwind for 50 miles might be the toughest thing you’ve ever done, but it’s not really good or bad. It’s what is.
All the cardio conditioning in the world will not teach you this. You must willingly go into the hurt and discomfort to train yourself to accept what is. The conflict the pain causes you also provides you with the opportunity to overcome it.
The Zen behind it is ‘no attachments, no aversions’. That way, you’re always present in the moment, working with what is, and whatever happens is OK. It’s as applicable in a cycling class as it is on the road. It’s as applicable in life as it is in training.
The question is whether your students would be willing to hurt to develop these things — focus, presence, acceptance, resilience — and whether you’re willing as an instructor to develop them enough to teach them.
That’s why we ride hard enough to hurt.
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Originally posted 2012-06-18 08:23:31.
