ps. has anyone tried spinning yet? it looks fucking totally cool, but the group action really looks like it'd seriously annoy me. Kelley
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Well, I do the sloppy version at home with a bike stand. It has interesting results, which are a little amazing. It actually helps uphill cadence, even with little resistance on the stand. I use my old ten speed, (front 53-49, rear 23-13). What amazes me, is it only takes a few sessions before the longer term effects show up. In other words, you don't have to kill yourself to get benefit right away.
What is interesting, is that it takes between fifteen and twenty minutes before I start to feel the physiological effects and they come on all of a sudden: a warm flush in the upper body, heavy perspiration, elevated heart rate, but little leg or muscle fatigue. I try to keep it going for about an hour but usually get too bored after forty-five minutes. I have a low tolerance for this kind of thing so I do it while watching tv news---which I also have a very low tolerance for.
I think of spinning as some kind of minor miracle because the benefits later in riding seem much more pronounced than I expected. I should get a damned book and heart monitor and do it properly, but even without any of that, it works. There is probably some physiological treatise on it, but I suspect it works by stressing the glycogen cycle(?) in some particular and specfic way (increasing accumulation?), which would account for the strange delay at the beginning of the session. Looking it up just now, some student study concluded:
"We conclude that endurance training results in an increased ability to accumulate muscle glycogen after exercise and that this increase is associated with increased GLUT-4 content in trained muscle. This adaptation to training should be beneficial for performance of daily bouts of glycogen-depleting exercise." (Hickner et al.)
(http://student.biology.arizona.edu/honors99/group7/discussion.html)
Chuck Grimes