looks like i lived through it

Published Tuesday, April 11, 2006 by geo | E-mail this post

I didn't think it would happen. Somehow I managed to survive my first spin class. Since it was at 9:30 I was expecting it to be all stay-at-home moms, especially since my gym has a daycare, but there was one single looking chick and two older guys. They all blew me away, but at least I more or less made it all the way through. The instructor was making us stand a bit more than I could handle. Because I have so much weight I had to turn the resistance very high to not spin out of control when I'm standing, so when I sat down after it made it nearly impossible to pedal.

My heart rate was ranging between 155 and 185 during the entire 45 minutes, which I think is pretty good for me. It's somewhere between the bottom of zone 4 and the middle of zone 5 for me. Wow, that's extremely high!

I don't know what the average reader knows about heart rate zones, but I learned everything I needed to know from this site. Basically you take your maximum heart rate and divide it into zones by percentage. There's an alternate way of figuring it out by using your resting heart rate, which may or may not be more accurate, but it's not the way I'm calculating. I'm using this as a guide, more or less.

The Heart Rate Intensity Zones are divided as follows:

Zone 1 65% of MHR (recovery rides)
Zone 2 65-72% of MHR (endurance events)
Zone 3 73-80% of MHR (high level aerobic activity)
Zone 4 84-90% of MHR (lactate threshold(LT,AT); time trialing)
Zone 5 91-100% of MHR (sprints and anaerobic training)

A rough way to calculate your MHR is (maximum heart rate) is to take 220 and subtract your age in years from it. I should be 189, but I gave myself a MHR test last year and came up with 195, so this year I'm using 194. My heart rate zones look like this now:

Zone 1 97-116
Zone 2 116-136
Zone 3 136-155
Zone 4 155-175
Zone 5 175-194

They say zone 3 is the best zone to burn fat and aerobically train, zone 4 is where you go anaerobic, and 5 is just for sprints. It looks like I might have been going a little bit crazy with that. I like it. I'm going to go back. It certainly is a lot more fun than using weights...

2 Responses to “looks like i lived through it”

Tawny on 4/11/2006 02:10:00 PM

I'm really excited that you made it to the class and you survived. You're more hardcore than I am, I haven't tried spinning yet, mostly because I just do a mix of Body Pump, running and yoga, but now that you've done it, I'd be curious to give it a try.

You do know that if you keep going back to spinning (like 3 times a week or even 2, if you alternate it was actual bike rides) and keep eating well, you're going to drop weight really fast?

Oh yeah - in regards to your results using our handheld scale last night, here are a couple of links for you, so you understand what the numbers meant:

http://www.healthchecksystems.com/bodyfat.htm

(Hooray on your body fat score!)

And this one will calculate your BMI and let you know if you're in a healthy range:

http://www.healthchecksystems.com/bmi.asp

Congrats again on spinning, I'm impressed! :)
geo on 4/12/2006 12:44:00 AM

I'm excited too! You need to come try it sometime soon. It's really not as bad as I thought. Well, maybe it was a little, but if I can do it... ;)

Do you remember what the handheld scale said? Wasn't it like 25-ish? I suppose I should make a note of that as well, since I'll probably be trying it again later. Maybe the one I tried at the gym was purposely miscalibrated to make us all look worse than we actually are? Hrm... do I smell a conspiracy?