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#1
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Spin Classes or indoor tainer.
Well, the rain has hit the bay area and the outlook is for more of the same so I suppose that I have to get on the trainer. I have my speaker charged up and music ready from the phone and the Ridley is a very comfortable bike to spin for an hour. My brother doesn't like to ride anymore since he was only a 100 feet from his condo returning from a ride and fell off on a speed bump while not paying attention. So he takes spin classes instead. Seem pretty silly to me but he is a hell of a lot better than my other brother who has become a vegetarian because he "doesn't like people that hurt animals". This is the guy that used to kick the dog and wring the necks of chickens if no one was looking. My suspicion is that he doesn't want to pay for dental work and his teeth hurt so he eats soft food. He doesn't mind eating fish so I expect he doesn't consider evolved dinosaurs as "animals".
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#2
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Spin Classes or indoor tainer.
On 12/2/2019 12:16 PM, Tom Kunich wrote:
Well, the rain has hit the bay area and the outlook is for more of the same so I suppose that I have to get on the trainer. I have my speaker charged up and music ready from the phone and the Ridley is a very comfortable bike to spin for an hour. Speaking of that: Any advice on staving off terminal boredom while cranking a trainer? I don't think I've ever been able to stand it more than 20 minutes. Reading doesn't work for me; I find myself reading the same passage over and over. Television doesn't work for me for (almost) any purpose. Podcasts almost helped, but I couldn't find one that really interested me, and most were still longer than I wanted to ride. Going to a spin class and having my ears assaulted by rock or disco isn't my style. What do you folks do? -- - Frank Krygowski |
#3
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Spin Classes or indoor tainer.
On 12/2/2019 11:05 AM, Frank Krygowski wrote:
On 12/2/2019 12:16 PM, Tom Kunich wrote: Well, the rain has hit the bay area and the outlook is for more of the same so I suppose that I have to get on the trainer. I have my speaker charged up and music ready from the phone and the Ridley is a very comfortable bike to spin for an hour. Speaking of that: Any advice on staving off terminal boredom while cranking a trainer? I don't think I've ever been able to stand it more than 20 minutes. Reading doesn't work for me; I find myself reading the same passage over and over. Television doesn't work for me for (almost) any purpose. Podcasts almost helped, but I couldn't find one that really interested me, and most were still longer than I wanted to ride. Going to a spin class and having my ears assaulted by rock or disco isn't my style. What do you folks do? Get a "smart" trainer and participate in a virtual cycling world. For me that's Zwift. Over decades I've tried reading and TV while on the trainer. For a while I tried watching pro racing recordings while on rollers, but at every turn I veered to the side. I was just like you, after 20 minutes I was miserable. Then I got a semi-smart trainer used on Ebay and could ride real-world courses simulated on video (scenery moved at speeds dictated by my speed, resistance dictated by the digitally-recorded gradient of that part of the course). I was astonished that 40-60 minutes were tolerable and verging on fun. Seeing the visual of the top of a rise does astonishing things to your (well, at least my) hind brain, making the whole thing a surprising approximation of "real." And you get to ride interesting places, e.g. the Galibier or the Stelvio. Then I splurged on a fully modern "smart" trainer and started "Zwifting." Zwift gives you (thousands of) other riders to interact with, you can pace them, you can draft them (and the resistance reduces). The virtual Zwift courses are far more interesting than the real-world videos I've tried, having terrain that varies more, and over shorter distances. An hour on Zwift (for me) is even enjoyable; I've ridden longer bouts on it (up to several hours) which would be just inconceivable watching TV or reading a book. This is even ignoring the gameified aspects that Zwift has added. If you're data-obsessed, you get a lot of it, and it really can improve your fitness quite a bit, or maintain it if you're already fit. Mark J. |
#4
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Spin Classes or indoor tainer.
On Monday, December 2, 2019 at 11:05:21 AM UTC-8, Frank Krygowski wrote:
On 12/2/2019 12:16 PM, Tom Kunich wrote: Well, the rain has hit the bay area and the outlook is for more of the same so I suppose that I have to get on the trainer. I have my speaker charged up and music ready from the phone and the Ridley is a very comfortable bike to spin for an hour. Speaking of that: Any advice on staving off terminal boredom while cranking a trainer? I don't think I've ever been able to stand it more than 20 minutes. Reading doesn't work for me; I find myself reading the same passage over and over. Television doesn't work for me for (almost) any purpose. Podcasts almost helped, but I couldn't find one that really interested me, and most were still longer than I wanted to ride. Going to a spin class and having my ears assaulted by rock or disco isn't my style. What do you folks do? -- - Frank Krygowski That's why I have one of these Smart Speakers and put an hour music program on. Generally rock is better than concert music since it is a better beat for it - Huey Lewis and the News. Billy Joel, etc. |
#5
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Spin Classes or indoor tainer.
On Monday, December 2, 2019 at 5:16:29 PM UTC, Tom Kunich wrote:
So he takes spin classes instead. I haven't replaced my bicycle trainer since the last one wore out. I was never going to be a spinner anyway, and the rowing machine is anyway at least theoretically better all-round exercise. The most fun exercise machine I ever had was called a "Nordic Air Walker" and was designed to emulate cross-country ski walking with poles, so your arms and legs and lungs got a workout. Unfortunately, the cardio-physios hated it with a white-hot fury, because it is basically a one-speed machine, hot from the word go, "accelerating your heart too suddenly". My cardiologist doesn't only want me to warm up before I ride, he wants me to "warm down" after every ride, and the same in the winter in my gym. This Nordic Air Walker was bought from a mail order company as an experiment, didn't cost very much (a few hundred euro) -- and was built with plain metal bearings by incompetents or crooks. Aargh. I wore it out in a month or two, and the physios were hard put not to cheer, so I didn't replace it. So the thing I do most days for exercise is walk on my treadmill. It's set up so that on nice days I can look out of my window over a patio shaded by an old eucalyptus to the stables and the orchard beyond. Deeper into the winter, when the branches are bare, I can see across the stream in the gully beyond the orchard and up the other side, more than a mile away, a couple of houses on the other side of the "block"; sometimes my pet foxes and hedgehogs come out to sit and watch me exercise. But mostly I exercise in the middle of the night, and then I watch movies from our huge collection of DVDs, relayed from a Mac to my iPad on the treadmill, or Netflix, or I read books and magazines on the iPad, or even work, editing something. I use the treadmill because it has all kinds of medically approved programs which work you up gently from a low speed/inclination to nine minutes of raised respiration*, and then back down in steps. I just use one half-hour program, and after that set the thing to a steady trudge of 3-4.5kph, and one step of incline, depending on how I feel that day. Mostly I regulate my exercise, beyond the structured base half hour, by time on the machine rather than speed, from a minimum of an hour total on it, at least once a week but usually three times a week two hours total, more rarely as much as three hours. The problem with the treadmill, regardless of the professionals approving of it, is that it needs to be supplemented with exercises for your upper body and arms, so I keep small barbell weights on a stand (actually a Lowther horn speaker enclosure -- see me building it he http://www.audio-talk.co..uk/fiultra...20T91HWAF3.jpg ) and use them while on the treadmill.. For music I have complete sets of Mozart, Bach, Liszt, etc, lots of Gregorian and Greek Orthodox chant, with the Bach cantata in the Ton Koopman recordings being a favourite. Fortunately the winter here is pretty short -- the first frost was yesterday, 2 December, and by noon it was a nice enough day for my wife and I to walk to lunch in a local restaurant. Some years it has been possible to cycle again not too long into the new year. Andre Jute * I suspect that one will get more benefit from performing the same short sharp programme twice a day rather than the extended virtual trip I take once a day, but that's common sense, not hard knowledge: even when I trained under Dr Danie Craven, one of world's great experts on the development of athletes, I couldn't be bothered with jock-talk and jock-expertise, and sweaty boredom of that nature, reckoning that there would always be someone who would know, and that my time was better spent on the arts, automobiles and speedboats, and of course women. |
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