Thursday morning @ BSC Copley

BSC Copley is located close to my work, so my morning gym routine involves packing all of my clothes, my suit, sandwich, apple, water bottle, etc., strapping on the iphone headphones, and asking (begging?) Siri to play the next episode of the Stuff You Should Know podcast (this week's was on Air Force One: awesome) as I walk.  As I write that it sounds a little exhausting but it's become second nature since I realized that I like to get my workout over with at the beginning of the day.  Also it makes the rest of my day that much better: I have more energy and my brain is already fired up for dealing with them pesky state regulators.

Meredith's class this morning (11/17) was just such a spark.  I appreciate how she's brought some of the Reboot class tactics (crunches and tricep exercises) to her other classes.

When I first contemplated writing this blog, one of the posts I had in mind discussed Meredith's playing of Dream On by Aerosmith.  It's probably the most exhausting (read: rewarding) way to end spin class that I've been a part of thus far.  The meat and potatoes of the ride are sprints (6 in total I think; 5 all in the last 1:45) done at very high resistance, in position 3.  Think of the little guitar pulses that happen after the lyrics "... the good lord-a take me away" - that's when they occur.  I end up naturally isolating my torso / hips while we crush out the sprints, which are about 8 seconds long.

Back in April I took her class at BSC Government Center and I recorded my heart rate.  You can see my effort in the following graph:

I don't recall the rest of the class but here I've isolated my heart rate during the sprints in Dream On - it was the last section of class (top-right of the above):

I hope to post more of these heart rate graphs and correlate them with the various exercises we do during class in the future.  For instance, you can see around the 10-min mark that we were sprinting (180 bpms) and that my average heart rate crept up slowly throughout the class (I believe the mean was 157).

I'll be posting about my double-header last Friday in a bit; I'm on Thanksgiving vacation right now in Florida and taking it a little easy (hence the light spin schedule on your right).