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).

Wednesday morning @ Recycle

I hit up the 6am, sold out Reboot class this morning in the South End.  Something that always amazes me about Christina our instructor (and pretty much each of them @ Recycle) is how she can even manage to speak by the end of class.  I’ve never been able to …

The Reboot class mixes up spinning with one or two tracks working on arms.  Today’s arm track was the worst (best?) I’ve ever done.  For the entire song we lifted our whole arms over our heads and did some tricep-working skull-crusher-type moves.  This got tiring quickly.  We continued by arching the whole arm / weight apparatus left and then right, to the music, like we were directing traffic.  If the cadence was about 80 bpms, the song lasts for 4 minutes, and we hit a move on every other beat, that’s still 160 reps on our arms.  Spinners were dropping (their arms) like flies (who have arms?) like I’ve never seen before in that class; I’m not sure a single person finished the exercise the whole way through.

Also I’m going to start another motif on this blog whenever I hear songs in spin classes that have language relating to spinning.  I’m going to call these spinclusive lyrics (see the new label, below).  Being somewhat self-referential, they remind me autological words, which my friend Alexandria (@allyeats)recently pointed out to me.  I’ve got a few of these on the backburner for y’all, but Christina popped out a new one today and I was loving it.  The song is Kick Push by Lupe Fiasco*.  We were hitting our downstrokes and upstrokes to the beat at a pretty high resistance while Fiasco was singing “kick, push, kick, push, kick …”.  This is a prime example of the spinclusive lyrics, describing exactly what we were doing with our legs as the song was playing.  You can see the smirk on my sweaty face whenever I recognize one.


* I’m nominating ‘Lupe Fiasco’ for All-Time Favorite Artist Name

Tuesday evening @ CAC

This was my first RPM spin class with David, the group fitness instructor over at CAC.  I have taken a few other group classes over there (body pump, zumba, and body combat*) with David and his energy translates perfectly into RPM.  He was co-teaching with another instructor (Izzy, I think, and I fear that I may be mispronouncing the name >.<) and began by giving everyone some really good instruction.

Here is a picture of the CAC spinning room from above.

You can see that it is a converted racquetball court, and they have made some efforts to ensure good sound quality there.  Actually CAC’s former spinning room was it’s main group exercise room – a big, open space – and bikes had to be pulled off of the wall as class started, and replaced when it finished.  This is a clear improvement; I’m happy to see the redoubled effort on their spinning program.

Back to the class.  One thing that strikes you immediately with David is how motivating he is.  He’s super positive and smiles full-time, even when it’s a grimace-smile and you can tell he’s working really hard.  I worked somewhat hard through the first 2/3 of the RPM class (some seating sprints with low-moderate resistance were tough) but where the workout really climaxed was on the last song, the RPM-ified version of Linkin Park’s Numb.  We’re crushing the hill at 80% or 90% of our max resistance for the majority of the song until the last hill climb.  David rallied the troops (not many instructors do this weel) and elicits yells, grunts, and hoo-ahs from the spinners.  The final < 1 minute of climb was so intense I was lightheaded.  Water bottle: emptied.  Great class.

*shameless plug: everyone who can should start attending the body combat sessions over at CAC because my awesome wife co-teaches there somewhat regularly, and is working to get certified by Les Mills (being certified as an actuary only takes you so far).  She’s a bad-ass.

Tuesday morning @ BSC DTX

Meredith packed another class full today, which included my former coworker Rachel (@creativeactuary) along with most of what I’ve seen as The Regulars there.  Last week I rode down the elevator after class with just one Regular, an older gentleman who usually sits at about the centroid of the room of bikes.  “Meredith’s been kicking my ass for a few months now; I’m hooked.”  This is a standard reaction: spinning does not discriminate on age or gender when it comes to working out, and Meredith is a prime conduit for the experience.

Today’s particular ass-kicker, if you were honest with yourself, was to Ke$ha’s Tik Tok.  The honesty here is key since spinning is an at-your-own pace sort of exercise.  There is plenty of encouragement from the other group members and from fierce instructors like Meredith, but you could go through class just piddling around for 45 minutes if you’d like.  I don’t like, though.

On Tik Tok, we spun at a medium-high resistance, with wicked intense accelerations in the saddle during the choruses followed by brief stints in position 3.  I forgot my bottle of water today (big mistake) and I was punished for it.  Victory was claimed, though, at the end of the routine: I walked out energized for quite a long day.

Thursday morning @ BSC Copley

I got to the gym a little earlier than usual to do some bicep and back workouts.  Ever since recycle has got me lifting weights while spinning, I’ve decided that I could definitely afford to be a little stronger here.

Meredith teaches on Thursday mornings, and the class is completely full (with waiting list) because these folks know what’s good for them.  Some familiar songs popped up during the spin class, including Womanizer (just now finding out that this is by Britney …) which, when taught by Meredith, is like your bike just transmogrified into an obstacle course.  We’re working triceps with upper-body pushups on the handlebars, we’re sprinting in positions 2 and 3 (and 1, if you’ve got the energy), we’re crunching quickly for an ab workout.  It’s all there.  And hardly anyone can keep up.

I drank 20 oz of water prior to class, 20 during class, and I’ve already finished the next 20 at work.  Were the Mrs. and I to be here during the Thanksgiving week (Meredith says she is teaching a ton in town), I’d probably try to OD on this class before OD’ing on Turkey and mom’s stuffing, but we’ll be back at home.

Wednesday morning @ Recycle

Our instructor Christina gave us no rest this morning.  I showed up at 5:50 and 5 bikes were already taken, giving early indication of the fervor of the group.  The class was almost all 70’s and 80’s songs, including In the Air Tonight by Phil Collins, wherein we climbed for the first few minutes pretty heavily, saving our last bit of strength for the notorious drum segue (we were reminded to think: Mike Tyson in The Hangover)

Perhaps I’m just coming across this trend but my last couple of classes have pushed me through some challenging work in position 2.  Christina beat the sweat out of us through Funky Cold Medina, and then we had a monster climb with Another One Bites the Dust.

It helps that Christina (and really, each of the instructors this blog has mentioned) is up there working at least as hard as us in class.  Front row bikes only intensify the workout.

ps – fun fact.  I heard on this Radiolab podcast that – because CPR must be executed at just the right bpms – it can be useful to have a song you know singing in your head at approx. 100 bpms.  One of those useful songs is: Stayin’ Alive by the Bee Gees.  A second song?  Another One Bites the Dust.  (eesh)

Tuesday morning @ BSC DTX

I felt like Meredith was on a mission to punish me for spinning too much.  After last night’s class I was un peu fatigué but one goal I have is to continue to push myself a little harder each week, lest I get complacent or lackadaisical.

So with the exception of a couple of moderate climbs we were flying at low-medium resistance the whole time, all over the bike.  I didn’t make it through the MJ song, but I gave it my best at the time.

I snapped a couple of shots of the bikes at BSC DTX (I will go more in depth into various cycles eventually on the blog) so you can see what we’re working with:

And here is the cycling studio from the outside:

All photos I post will be collected on the photo page for a cumulative gallery of spinning.

My legs feel pretty much wasted away about now, though this is my preference as my job involves sitting at a desk or a conference table most of the day.

Monday evening @ Recycle

Aly taught a Remix class at the studio tonight.  This class combines 45 minutes of spinning with 30 more of yoga.  I'll tackle each in turn.

The spinning was agressive (eventually I'm going to run out of synonyms here ...) with a couple of hill climbs - some in the saddle.  The undercurrent of the exercise - we probably jammed it like 4 or 5 times - was a quick run in position 2.  This puts serious tension on your quads and also your knees.  I find sometimes after an entire week of spinning that during the final workout my knees will ache a little during intense position-2 workouts.  In these cases I'll play it safe and slow down a little, or put more pressure on the handlebars (thereby taking pressure off of the knee).  Seriously, though, I don't know where Aly gets the energy; she was non-stop and the rest of the class was struggling to keep up.

I don't feel quite qualified to give any opinion on a yoga class - this was actually my first routine (did I hear her call it a 'practice'?).  I'm pretty happy with myself that I stuck it out and went through each of the motions.  I imagine my amateurishness was pretty obvious to everyone, but even to this layman the positions and stretches and deep breathing were just what I needed after the intensity of the spin.

I had a pretty hard day at work, and this Remix spin and yoga class gave me a little Serenity Now moment on the way home.