Spin In

How can spinning on an indoor bike be an adventure? It’s sheer and unadulterated boredom, isn’t it? Grinding away in your basement (or health club) on the nowhere road while sleet batters the windows and streams of toxic sweat drip from your nose. Some adventure. Most people would rather slither around on icy roads and battle wind chills that would turn a polar bear blue rather than stay indoors to ride an indoor trainer.

But indoor exercise is a great way to get fit and lose weight. Do it right and, yes, it’s even adventuresome. There are many advantages to indoor cycling and even some tricks to make it enjoyable.

Why should you consider indoor training?

You can ride any time. If nasty weather has socked your town in a pall of rain or sleet, you can train indoors in the warmth and comfort of your home. No soaked feet, no slippery corners to negotiate, no stripe of mud and water up your backside. And, if your days are full to the brim with work and activities, like most of us in this time-pressed age, trainers are great because you can squeeze in a workout even in darkness. Is your only exercise time at 6 a.m.? No problem—head for the basement, get on the trainer, and crank away. Can’t ride until you get home from work? Even though you saw your precious daylight training time vanish as you sat fuming in a traffic jam for an extra hour, you can still ride indoors when you finally get home.

Equipment

For a wide selection of top-quality indoor trainers, check out Performance Bicycles at http://www.performancebike.com Virtually all adult bikes fit indoor trainers. But if you have a mountain bike with knobby tires, you’ll need to buy a tire with smooth tread for the rear wheel—unless you get a trainer that applies resistance on the rim rather than the tire.

Saves you time. Cycling outdoors, especially in cool weather, can be a time-consuming way to exercise. You have to pull on tights, a jacket, maybe long-fingered gloves and a helmet liner. Performing a pre-ride safety check and rounding up your helmet take more time. Then you often have to ride for 20 minutes through traffic lights to get to good bike routes—if they’re available at all. And after sloppy rides (and it seems that the roads and trails are always wet this time of year) you have to clean and re-lube your bike. One hour of quality exercise time can expand to two hours quickly. The solution is to ride the trainer. Simply pull on shorts and a tee-shirt, fill your bottles and switch on the VCR. And when you’re done, you don’t have to clean off dead earthworms and assorted other biohazards that your tires have kicked up onto your bike.
Banish road hazards. Let’s face it—the roads are getting more dangerous. Cyclists have always had to contend with unleashed dogs, angry motorists and potholes hiding in shaded parts of the road. But with more and more motorists using the roads (and increasing numbers of walkers, inline skaters and runners using the mis-named “bike paths”) tempers are getting short. Sometimes it isn’t much fun to fight all the obstacles for the sake of a few minutes of cycling bliss. The solution? Ride indoors in the safety of your living room. No carnivorous dogs attacking (unless you’ve angered the family mutt), no potholes lying in wait, no stressed-out commuters screaming.

Indoor tips

Before you head downstairs and start pedaling away in front of The Brady Bunch reruns, here are some tips to make your ride a lot more fun.

	Limit your exposure. Time passes more slowly while you’re training indoors simply because there are fewer things to think about. Your mind isn’t occupied with keeping the bike upright, dodging hazards, and worrying about the proper gearing for the next hill. Indoor riding can be a form of sensory deprivation—time crawls in direct support of Einstein’s ideas on relativity. The solution is to keep your workout short. A good rule—keep your sessions short, but realistic. Get on, warm up, go through a specific and varied workout, then hit the shower. A trainer is ideal for intense and structured workouts but quickly becomes a medieval torture machine if you stay on too long.
	Variety is the spice of life. Never do the same thing for more than a few minutes at a time. Shift gears, stand up, pedal with one leg while resting the other on the back of the trainer, go hard, go easy—anything to give your mind a break.
	Engage your visual cortex. Because your brain doesn’t have the usual bike-handling and navigation demands that it contends with during outdoor rides, keep it stimulated. Music works well, but most riders find they also need something to look at. Old movies, TV news and quiz shows work great. Perhaps best of all is a bike race video. There’s something inspiring about watching great climbers tackle the Alps or 50 riders, shoulder-to-shoulder at 40 mph, sprinting for a Classics victory. (For a great selection of race videos, check out World Cycling Productions: http://www.worldcycling.com)
	Keep cool. Without a cooling wind, you’ll heat up quickly while riding in your own stale air indoors. So mount a big box fan five or six feet in front of your face to create an artificial headwind. It will evaporate the gallons of sweat you produce, keeping your core temperature down for a better, more comfortable workout.
	Drink, drink, drink. All the warnings about hydration in normal cycling go double indoors. Drink at least one big bottle per hour. Sports drinks work better than plain water because they replace carbohydrate, extending your energy levels.
	Sign up for a cycling class at your local health club. Often generically called “Spin” classes, these group hammer-fests are a great way to add variety and interest to your indoor riding—and meet other fitness enthusiasts as well.
So if cycling indoors eliminates all the danger and inconvenience, how can we call it an adventure? The big advantage of indoor cycling: It allows you to carefully monitor your workout. You control the intensity, distance and time of every session. Regardless of how much fun it can be to ride the open road, indoor exercise is a much more structured and effective workout for time-challenged riders. And, hey, improving your fitness and cycling ability is the biggest adventure of all.

A Sample Indoor Cycling Workout

Minutes 1 to 10. Warm up by steadily increasing the gearing and the cadence. Start in a low gear with an easy spin of about 70 rpm (revolutions per minute; count every time your right foot hits bottom). Every minute, increase the cadence by 10 rpm until you get to about 100 rpm. Then increase the gearing, drop the cadence 30 rpm and repeat the process.

Minutes 11 to 17. Pedal with one leg for a minute, then switch legs. Rest the non-pedaling leg on the trainer stand.

Minutes 18 to 25. In a moderate gear, ride steadily at an effort level of about 8 on a scale of 10. Work hard but not all-out.

Minutes 26 to 30. Spin easily in a low gear to recover.

Minutes 31 to 40. Alternate one minute of hard riding with one minute of easy spinning.

Minutes 41 to 45. Warm down by reversing the warm-up procedure—decrease the cadence and gearing at one-minute intervals until you're spinning an easy gear at a relatively low cadence of about 70 rpm.