Welcome to the The Weekly Ride by Cycling Fusion
No more hunting for new music or counting out cues to develop your ride profile. Here is your ready to ride profile for a fully choreographed ride, that can be displayed from your phone, or printed out onto cue cards for your class. This ride is timed out, down to the second, to make your life as easy as possible!
Puppies always work… when you can't find a suitable image 🙂
Spinning® Instructor Krista Leopold is back with another of her awesome class profiles!
“There are two types of people: The ones who give you 50 reasons it can’t be done … and the ones who just do it.” — Hoda Kotb
Two Types of People Tabatas
I created this ride to help riders see themselves as the second type of people: those who just do what needs to be done, and do it well. It is high-intensity training with two distinct blocks of work, the second of which consists of 2 sub-blocks. For that reason, this profile can easily be picked apart and used for classes that are formatted as 30, 45 or 60 minutes.
Block 1 is 30 minutes long and is the foundation for Block 2. In block 1, riders perform 5 best-effort intervals that gradually decrease from 4 minutes to 10 seconds in duration. Using this progression, Block 1 helps riders discover their true “all-out” intensity.
Block 2 is also 30 minutes long and is broken into 2 halves, each half consisting of gradually increasing intensity, followed by performing the Tabata IE1 protocol on the bike, and then recovering.
Instructors who teach 30-minute classes can easily divide this ride into its 2 blocks of work to ride in consecutive classes. Instructors with 45-minute formats can use Block 1 and block 2a. The full profile clocks in just right for a 60-minute class.
At the end of Krista's presentation she references two past podcasts that featured Lawrence Biscontini.
ICI Podcast 236 Scripted Starts and Flawless Finales Part 1
ICI/PRO Podcast #237 — Scripted Starts and Flawless Finales Part 2
Here's Krista's Spotify playlist Two Types of People Tabatas PRO/Playlist
Download the written presentation here.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
We're a little less than a month away from the Day Light Savings time change – Sunday, November 6. I've always considered that the un-official start of the Indoor Cycling season; rolling the clock back an hour makes it easier to commit to that 5:30 am class and you're certainly not going to be riding after work… in the dark!
So October can be a great time to polish up on your presentation skills. What follows is one of my all-time favorite interviews, featuring master Educator Lawrence Biscontini. I say favorite because not only was Lawrence a joy to talk to, but the importance of delivering a well crafted class introduction really helped to improve my classes.
Give it a listen and see if you agree.
“Great actors don’t show up on set and improvise as soon as the camera starts rolling. They practice putting their own personality into the words scripted for them…. Practice delivering your opening and closing scripts and you’ll be as polished as a professional actor.” So says Lawrence Biscontini in his Scripted Starts and Flawless Finales article in the October 2012 issue of the IDEA Fitness Journal.
Lawrence describes the 8 essential points that he feels you should be including in the first few minutes of your class in this episode of the Indoor Cycle Instructor Podcast.
After recording this with Lawrence, I felt strongly that including a Scripted Start in every class is another Best Practice that will help improve your class presentation 🙂
Show notes: I reference a past post about creating a theme song.
Next, Lawrence walks our PRO members through the 7 components of an effective (and memorable) transition – he'll explain why you should stop referring to the end of your class as a “cool-down” – ICI/PRO Podcast #237 — Scripted Starts and Flawless Finales Part 2
Download the transcript of this podcast.
You can listen to this interview below or subscribe for Free to our Podcast in iTunes.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Welcome to the The Weekly Ride by Cycling Fusion
No more hunting for new music or counting out cues to develop your ride profile. Here is your ready to ride profile for a fully choreographed ride, that can be displayed from your phone, or printed out onto cue cards for your class. This ride is timed out, down to the second, to make your life as easy as possible!
Type 2 diabetes is epidemic in this country, and typically begins with insulin resistance.
What we usually read or hear about insulin resistance is that it’s a result of overweight/obesity. This is not always the case, since the reverse can be true. Insulin resistance (IR) may actually cause overweight. What’s important to remember is that no matter which comes first — IR or overweight — the metabolic consequences are exactly the same.
This post is on the role that dietary sugar and fructose can play in causing insulin resistance, and the ways in which that can happen. IR appears to result from changes in both receptor number and receptor activity or sensitivity.
A high-carbohydrate diet can lead to IR, particularly if the carbs are high on the glycemic index. Sugar would be a prime example of a high-glycemic carb. High-glycemic carbs are quickly absorbed and trigger a high insulin response. The high levels of insulin secretion can in turn lead to a diminished response by the body to insulin, due to something known as “down-regulation”. Down-regulation is a term originally borrowed from brain chemistry research. It refers to a reduction in both the number of insulin receptors and the sensitivity of the receptors. The changes mean that whatever insulin is available no longer works as well as it did before.
Down-regulation is even more likely to occur for someone who is carbohydrate sensitive. Carb sensitivity is an exaggerated insulin response to sucrose or other carbs. The possibility of down-regulation of insulin receptors is even greater with that extra-high insulin release. And down-regulation of insulin receptors occurs fairly rapidly.
So eating sugar — especially lots of sugar, as might occur with sugar addiction — can cause insulin resistance.
What about fructose?
There’s a rather odd adaptation here. Fructose has been shown to change muscle fibers from type 1 to type 2b. Type 1 is a high-endurance fiber that responds well to insulin, while Type 2b is better for explosive power but less responsive to insulin. It has been suggested that this is the mechanism behind the well-known fact that fructose triggers IR. Yes, the original research was done on animals, but studies on human subjects have shown similar results — although training can modify the results somewhat.
The bottom line is that fructose — which, as you may recall, is half of the sucrose molecule — may cause insulin resistance in this interesting way. It might even be hypothesized that sucrose (granulated table sugar that everyone knows is junk) is capable of causing insulin resistance through both mechanisms: down-regulation of insulin receptors and modified muscle fiber type due to the fructose in it. Especially if it’s eaten in large quantities — for example, by someone who's addicted to sugar.
Please recall that all research seems to confirm that the fructose in sucrose is what makes sucrose the junk that it is.
Healthful recommendations? Skip the sugar, definitely skip processed fructose or concentrated fruit juice used as a sweetener, and get your wholesome nutrients primarily from vegetables and only incidentally from fruit. It’s not what you’ll hear most places, but it may work better than what you will hear elsewhere.
This look may not always be appropriate when you teach.
This was awkward. Have you ever had a dream where you're naked in some public space? Well yesterday I wasn't dreaming, I was dressed, but inappropriately it turned out. The feeling I had was very similar.
That's because yesterday I had the privilege of taking a class at The Firm in Minneapolis. They were the very first official Johnny G Spinning® studio in the Midwest – introducing Indoor Cycling to us here in the frozen north around 1995*. As far as I know, they could be the oldest operating indoor cycling studio. Do you know of another?
I had met the one of the owners, Neil Miyamoto, at IHRSA. I sheepishly told him that I hadn't been to his studio for about 20 years. Turned out he understood us suburban folks don't stray far from home. To remedy that, Neil invited me to come downtown to see his club and meet his wife Kelly. She actually started The Firm back in 1986. Our plan was for me to take a class and schedule a time for me to interview Kelly. I'm guessing there's a lot of new studio owners who would love to know how The Firm as been so successful, for so long.
So yesterday was the day and as I'm driving into the city, I'm thinking; who comes to a 3:00 pm class, on a Saturday?
I got checked in, quickly dressed and ran up the stairs to a nearly full studio. My quick count showed about 50 riders… many of them watched me as I walked in. And a number continued to look at me. Not in an unfriendly way, no. Their expressions seemed friendly enough, some even smiled as they continued their appraisal of me. I started getting that awkward, I'm standing out like a sore thumb, feeling as I set up my bike.
What are they looking at? Could I be the only new guy here… Is that it?
Then it dawned on me. I was the only person in the room wearing a full cycling kit – my Life Time Cycle Team bicycle jersey and matching bib shorts. There were lots of t-shirts, running shirts, ripped sweatshirts, women's workout tops, gym shorts, regular shorts and yoga pants – but nothing remotely like what I typically teach in. 50+ people and I only could see three pair of bike shorts. No wonder people were looking at me funny. I couldn't help but think how silly and out of place I looked. What was I thinking?
They're not cyclists
This experience has me re-considering something I feel I've mistakenly believed; at some level all indoor cycling participants are cyclists and I should look like a proper cyclist (to set a good example) when I teach.
These folks at the Firm seemed to really enjoy riding indoors, wearing whatever they wanted, but by no stretch were they cyclists.
Kelly (the Instructor) was wearing a cute top and yoga pants. Nothing to distinguish her role as the leader. She looked like her tribe and her tribe looked like her… and they fill the place, on a Saturday afternoon, in part because she makes everyone feel comfortable. There was no pretentious; look at how cool I look in my fancy getup.
In fact the entire club is much the same. Simple concrete floors and white walls. Quite a change from the cherry walls and bamboo flooring where I normally conduct class.
So what to wear?
This picture is of Stages Indoor Cycling Master Trainer Doug Rusho, at a past ICI/PRO conference. Notice there's nothing that screams I'M A VERY SMART LOOKING CYCLIST in what Doug is wearing. He looks sharp and professional, but nothing about his shorts or shirt would communicate; I'm a hard-core cyclist. If you aren't a hard-core cyclist like me, well… you might not fit in here. Which I'm now concerned I have been communicating (and not always subtly) to the people who come to my classes.
*1995 is my best guess. Amy was originally certified and her club (The Flagship Athletic – now a Life Time) added Spinning around 1996.