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Training Indoors...exercise your mind as well as your body

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Here is an article from my personal training newsletter from 2009, it has some good advice about contraindicated movements that instructors are still performing.

I’m taking an indoor cycling class when the instructor does something that is not only unusual, but also potentially dangerous.

 

Unfortunately, some of these moves are neither

safe nor effective and could lead to injuries among

participants. That’s why we’ve tapped leading experts

from various indoor cycling programs to shed light

on some of these contraindicated moves. They’ll also

reveal what it takes to create a good cycling class and

why coaching is more important than instructing so

you’ll never have to rely on these moves again.

 

Five Common Mistakes

One of indoor cycling’s biggest advantages is

its simplicity. “You sit or stand, change resistance

and pedal,”. “It doesn’t get much more difficult than that.”

Yet in recent years, instructors have made cycling

more difficult, and several reasons may be to blame.

For starters, many cycling instructors come from

aerobic fitness backgrounds, and transitioning from

the aerobic arena into indoor cycling can be challenging.

“Group fitness instructors are often [accustomed]

to such complex choreography that when they face

the simple design of cycling classes, they’re lost,”

that participants are getting bored riding bikes,”

As a result, instructors employ creativity

and make up moves that aren’t real to the road.

While these moves might seem like fun to participants,

they aren’t always good for them. “Some of

these moves are contraindicated, which jeopardizes

participants’ health,” adding that we have seen many insane things in cycling classes, including a national TV show that removed the saddle

so participants couldn’t sit.

 

So what are some of these contraindicated moves? Take

a look at five of the top offenders:

 

Out-of-control cadences: If you’ve never cycled outside,

it’s easy to ride indoors with cadences that are too fast.

Yet if you were to ride that quickly on the road, you wouldn’t

get anywhere. Plus, super-fast pedaling doesn’t provide much

of a challenge for your body. “You might have the perception

that you’re working hard, but you’re only as productive as

the power you’re producing,”.  If you use

lower resistance and higher cadences, you have lower power

output, which means you’re not challenging the cardiovascular

and muscular systems as much and will have a harder time

reaching your goals. Super-fast cadences also pose dangers to the hips, knees and ankles.

To keep participants in control, do cadence checks where

you ask participants to count pedal strokes. For instance, do a 10-second count and then have them multiply by six to

determine their revolutions per minute (RPM). Cycling manuals recommend that cadences not exceed 110 PM.

If you or your participants are going faster than that, add resistance to slow the legs.  You might also replace the

word “sprint” with “surge” or “power surge.” “To most

students, the word ‘sprint’ means pedal as fast as you can,

which is a recipe for disaster,” she says. Instead, to do this

right, make sure participants have enough resistance on their bikes. Then ask them to add more leg power to that already challenging resistance, and you’ll successfully execute a surge.

Conversely, pedaling too slowly (under 50 RPM per

Schwinn), can cause the legs to fatigue before achieving

much of a cardiovascular benefit. suggests that if you

keep cadences between 60 and 90 RPMs in class, “you’ll

always be able to find the workout intensities that make

indoor cycling such a great workout.”

 

One-legged cycling: Professional cyclists will do onelegged

cycling on machines that measure force output produced

by each leg. Yet in an indoor cycling class, explains,

Power output typically is not measured so the value of

one-legged cycling is questionable. Besides, cycling is a twolegged

sport, and reducing it to one leg makes no sense.

More importantly, though, removing one foot from the

cage or clip increases the likelihood of getting hit in the calf

by the pedal and causing serious injury.

The risk increases in dimly lit studios where participants can’t see their bodies clearly. Regardless of light level, however, instructors should never ask participants to remove their feet from the pedals while they’re riding.

 

Push-ups on the handlebars: Have you ever seen a

cyclist do this on the road? Then why do it in class? Besides, doing push-ups on a bike doesn’t provide enough challenge to build strength, and they make participants move unnaturally on the bike, which could put them in compromising positions. “Save push-ups for when you’re on the floor and grounded to the earth,”

 

Isolations: You might love telling students to freeze

their upper body while in a standing position so they feel

a burn in their quads. Yet the long-term ramifications

could be tremendous. “You’re placing undue stress on the

hips, knees and ankles,”, “which could cause serious injury.” Instead, find ways to challenge the quadriceps more safely. One suggestion: Move into a standing position, but increase the resistance and cadence slightly so it feels like a difficult road. You’ll then feel that same burn without the dangers.

 

Designing Classes With Safety and Efficacy in Mind:

Now that you know what doesn’t work, let’s look at what

does work in indoor cycling classes, tackling this important

question: How do you create safe, effective and fun indoor

cycling classes without these moves?

 

Can you answer three questions at any time in your class:

1. What’s the goal? (e.g., Are they trying to pass five

riders to make it to the top of the hill first?)

2. How should the work feel? (e.g., Comfortable? Hard?)

3. And finally, how long will the work last? (e.g., Thirty

seconds? Four minutes?)

 

Once you learn how to become a better coach, you’ll

no longer have to rely on contraindicated or questionable

moves to fill time in your cycling classes. No doubt you’ll

also hear how much more participants are enjoying your

classes. In the end, you may even boost the numbers in

your cycling classes, and that’s the ultimate compliment

any instructor can receive.

 

 

I just watched the most hilarious youtube videos of these horrible classes, they made me laugh so hard.  I don't want to post the links on my site because they will give instructors more awful ideas...below are 2 replies... 

I don’t know who is dumber? The “instructor” or the “students”?

I never heard about you before, but I couldn’t agree more with you, I’m so glad to know that I’m not the only one thinking this way. It is so obvious that these are not actually spinning instructors. But sadly you can see these kind of huge mistakes on certified instructors too. There’s also another issue that it’s no mentioned here, and that’s the intensity of the classes. I use to see a great % of instructors who teach every single class like if it was a race day. They don’t have the common sense to think on curves of training or even on the stimulus intensity on each exercise. Meaning, no recovery, no warmup no cooldown. Let’s be honest, a 5 minutes cooldown after an intense hard workout with sprints or even after a long climb it’s not enough to remove the lactic acid on your muscles.
Now, why is that they do that kind of mistakes?
I tend to think it’s a mix of things.
1. There’s a certain number of instructors that doesn’t care…
2. Some times instructors feel the pressure of their bosses to have their classes with no vacants and sadly, people (students) use to think that the only good class is a hard or intense class. So intructors tend to take that way of thinking too.
4. And this I think it’s te most common issue, is that some instructors just DONT know anything about training physiology. Why? and to be honest again with you, spinning program just tells you how they think a training should be but doesnt really teach you how to do it. Yeah sure it’s your responsabilty to keep going to the education courses, but in the meantime between your certification and the moment you’re actually a certified instructor you have 6months working and teaching classes without knowing how to apply what you’ve learned.

This of course applies to instructors that know nothing about physiology or training. Sadly they are a huge number. I can always remember finishing the certification day and thinking, I’ve been all day there and the only thing I’ve learned is how they think you should set up the bike. The rest, on how to make a plan, how to program that plan and how to periodize it was something I allready knew.

Sorry if my english is not that bright, you can obviously tell that english is not my mother language.

 
*No affiliations with Mad Dogg Athletics Inc, and Spinning, Spin or 24 Hour Fitness.  This is Donna Lau's Private and Personal website