Welcome to the Indoor Cycling Association
When Heart Rate Interpretation Goes Wrong
This is a discussion of a Joe Friel article on a common misinterpretation of a heart rate response to training. DON’T LET THIS BE YOU! Make sure you understand how your riders’ heart rates respond to training! In this post is a list of resources and articles (some free, some books, some premium articles) to help enhance your understanding of heart rate. This is important EVEN if you don’t teach with a HR monitor. It also helps your coaching using RPE and optimizes your use of power training. Read more…
Leap of Faith, Part 2: Breaking Free
How do you break free from your fears? How do you embrace bringing new ideas, new content, and new experiences to your studio and your students? Read more…
Italian Music for the Giro d’Italia!
If you are planning on doing a Giro d’Italia stage, throwing a little Italian pop, hip-hop, a soundtrack classic, or a fun cultural tune will make your ride even more authentic and exciting! Here is a bucket playlist of 175 Italian songs to spice up your Giro playlist. These also work well for an around-the-world theme ride. Read more…
Recover Faster
Whenever I think of recovering faster, I hear my grandfather in the back of my head telling me to sleep faster when I only had four hours until the morning. By no means do I want you to start shortchanging your recovery time nor try to psychologically speed up the process. I do want you to consider how fast your heart rate recovers and learn some valuable information you can provide to educate your riders.Read more…
Profile: North, A Journey Up Everest
Billy Coburn, Star 3 Spinning® instructor and occasional contributor to ICA, was moved to put together a fundraiser ride for Nepal earthquake relief. He had a profile he created last year called North, about summiting Mt. Everest, so he resurrected the ride for his event. Thank you, Billy, for sharing this with all instructors!Read more…
Leap of Faith, Part 1: Fear
In order to help our students improve and progress, at times we have to put ourselves “out “there.” We must take the risk of presenting new experiences, which include new information, profiles, music, cueing, philosophies, and techniques. As a result, we step, and sometimes even leap, outside of our comfort zone.Read more…
How To Very Quickly Organize a Fundraiser
Want to organize a ride for victims of the Nepali earthquake? Here is a checklist on how we created a successful fundraiser in three weeks for both the tsunami disaster of 2004 and Katrina in 2005. Whether you plan on a small event for just one class, or want to spearhead a larger more coordinated event several hours long, this checklist will give you some ideas on what to do.Read more…
My Favorite Threshold Workout: Over/Under Intervals Redux
Over/Under Intervals are some of my favorite training sessions to improve lactate threshold. They are hard but doable with proper training, they take great focus, and they keep riders engaged. In this profile, I put a different “spin” on an old favorite!Read more…
Why Do Some People Get Fitter Faster Than Others?
Have you ever known someone who was a “fast responder”—someone who got fit really fast? Then others who did not respond at all to the same training, even though they were consistent and committed? Science can now answer why that happens.Read more…
Ask the Expert: Do My Legs Have a Zone 5?
After I posted my most recent profile, EDM Muscle Madness, a number of instructors said their riders found it difficult to push into Zone 5 during the strength intervals, even though they were riding as hard as they could. Are these riders doing something wrong because they are not able to hit Zone 5?Read more…