In the 90s, mum and I went to fitness classes together, but ever since I qualified as an instructor – I’m Spinning-certified and also have Stages Beat, PT and weight loss certifications – I’ve lived elsewhere in the US and even overseas. It meant mum could never come to my classes.

In 2019, my husband and I were living in Dubai with our five-year-old son and two-year-old daughter and I was missing teaching. I’d given mum my old indoor bike, so I decided to create a workout video for her. The first recording was dreadful, so my husband – who was getting back into videography – filmed it for me and we uploaded it to YouTube. 

“We have 275,000 cycling and 100,000+ strength subscribers, allowing this to be a full-time job for my husband and me”

Mum did the workout, but so did other people, so we decided to create more. We weren’t very consistent at first, uploading just one or two a month, but uptake began to grow organically from people searching YouTube for indoor cycling content. There was one video in particular, a cycling class for beginners, that did really well. Things took off from there. 

We then launched a separate Strength channel two years ago. Cycling is a great stress-reliever and a fun way to sweat it out, but strength is also crucial if you want to change your body.

How has your community grown?

We’ve never really done any marketing, but we now have 275,000 indoor cycling subscribers and over 100,000 strength subscribers, many of whom are unique to strength. 

For over a year now, this has allowed Kaleigh Cohen Fitness to be a full-time job for my husband and me: I do the workouts and Jason does the production and editing.

All our workouts are free for everyone to use, so the majority of our income comes from YouTube AdSense, sponsors and regulars who choose to purchase our US$15/month Kaleigh Cohen Fitness membership. This gives them early access to all workouts posted on YouTube, a monthly Zoom ride, a private Discord session where we can discuss anything from goal-setting to nutrition, and free downloadable bundles of support material for all our Cycle and Strength programmes.

Tell us about your content.

I used to struggle with confidence and self-image and indoor cycling helped me in the most amazing ways, so it’s at the heart of what we do. I want to help others take that crucial first step, because you never know what will happen from there!

That’s why, although I encourage people to challenge themselves – getting stronger on a bike to be stronger in life – I never want anyone to feel a workout is too hard. My role is to uplift and motivate and make you feel glad you pressed ‘play’, and of the 110,000+ clicks we get each week, around half go on to do the whole class.

Most classes are pre-recorded and 20–30 minutes long; each takes around 20 hours to design, film and edit, so we upload one or two a week. We ride to the beat, although it isn’t rhythm cycling: I include sprints, climbs and jumps and every song has its own focus. 

“My role is to make you feel glad you pressed ‘play’. Of the 110,000+ clicks we get each week, around half go on to do the whole class.”

However, we do have a 45- to 60-minute live ride every Saturday, with around 500 participants each week. People join from across the world, including a lady in New Zealand who’s cycling in the middle of her night! There are lots of regulars, so people know each other and interact in the live chat; a US$1.99/month YouTube channel membership gives you a badge by your name and unlocks special emojis to use in our live chats. 

“We’re so grateful to have almost fallen into this and to have so many people coming along for the ride”

Our community really does make what we do so special, and it’s also the community that shapes what we do: we listen to what they tell us in the live chat and on our social platforms and gear our content around this.

What are your USPs?

I use non-mainstream music and really harness the lyrics to mean something in class.

I keep it real. If I mess up in class, I go with it. If you allow yourself to be vulnerable as an instructor – to just be yourself – you’re more approachable.

And I explain why we’re doing things, sharing the knowledge I’ve gathered over 15+ years to ensure there’s purpose in every workout.

What are you most proud of?

What really inspires us are the stories of how we’re changing lives. One lady who’s been with us from the beginning has lost 100lbs. One man broke his back, but he’s worked back up and can now cycle for 45 minutes. We’ve had people going through cancer treatment, telling us we’ve helped them overcome things they didn’t think they could.

We’re just so grateful to have almost fallen into this and to have so many people coming along for the ride.

The post Kaleigh Cohen Fitness appeared first on Ride High Magazine.

“We celebrated RPM100 in style,” says Les Mills programme director Glen Ostergaard. “We had 175 BODY BIKES in the room, a great crew on-stage, the event was sold out, and everyone was really into it and there for the right reasons: to celebrate and have fun.

“Through music and language, the class wove a wonderful journey through the history of RPM”
Glen Ostergaard – Programme director, Les Mills

“Through the music and the language we used, the class wove a wonderful journey through the history of RPM, from its very beginnings to where it is now and where it might go in the future.

“We honoured the late Mike McSweeney, who sadly passed away last year, but who created RPM and designed the first 25 releases. We recognised some of the key presenters over the years, many of whom were in the room. We acknowledged the current generation of presenters on-stage. And we spoke about the generations to come: our own children who one day will take the baton from us. There was a lot of feeling and warmth in the room.”

He adds: “Musically, the warm-up track in RPM100 is the same as in RPM1: Raincloud by Lighthouse Family. You then go on a musical journey, gradually moving through the eras until you get to the sounds of today. There’s a retrospective feel while still using mainstream tracks that everyone will know. And this wasn’t just for LA: this is also the RPM100 playlist for clubs, while the RPM100 class on LES MILLS+ will use footage from LA.”

Celebrating together

He continues: “For me personally… Well, it wasn’t about me, but RPM was the programme I started with – I’ve designed it since release #26 – and it was great to still be there and be part of it.

“It was great to have BODY BIKE onboard too: I love the bike, and the BODY BIKE team really helped us make the event something very special. So a big thanks to them, and to all the organisers who made this a fantastic celebration and a really nice moment for the programme.”

“BODY BIKE was honoured to partner with Les Mills International to power the cycling sessions at LES MILLS LIVE LA – SPRINT, THE TRIP and RPM100 – with 175 limited edition Smart+ bikes designed exclusively for the event,” says Uffe A Olesen, CEO at BODY BIKE International.

“This was a fabulous milestone for the most famous indoor cycling programme in the world”
Uffe A Olesen – CEO, BODY BIKE International

“These were an incredible few days and I was so excited to attend in person, connecting with fellow indoor cycling enthusiasts and feeling my passion fuelled by the exceptional presenter team. The energy and enthusiasm in the room perfectly encapsulated why we love what we do.

“The filming of RPM100 was a particularly special moment, fuelled by great memories of the friendly and charismatic Mike McSweeney. This was a fabulous milestone for the most famous indoor cycling programme in the world.

“Our thanks go to BODY BIKE APAC director Lee Smith for his hands-on commitment to the event’s success, and of course to Les Mills for choosing to celebrate this epic milestone with us.”

The post RPM 100 appeared first on Ride High Magazine.

I was a professional cyclist when I was younger, in the German national youth team from the age of 16, competing on the road, in the velodrome, on mountain bikes.

I also embraced indoor cycling, starting out as a participant in 2011 before becoming an instructor in 2017. Then something happened that made indoor cycling even more important to me. In 2018, I had a serious bike accident outdoors, breaking my arms and my knee and only surviving because I was wearing a helmet. I lost the confidence to cycle outside.

Indoor cycling became my go-to workout. It’s the time when I switch off and forget about the world. There’s nothing I enjoy more, and it really doesn’t take much effort to get on the bike once you have one at home. I aim to share that passion with everyone who cycles with me.

“Even if you’ve never done indoor cycling, don’t ever worry that you won’t be good enough to do my classes”

At the moment I’m not teaching live, in-person classes – we moved house recently and there aren’t any cycling studios nearby – but I’d like to in the future. For now, alongside my main job as a teacher, I pour my passion into Cycling Sophie – my online platform.

What inspired Cycling Sophie?

In the pandemic, people who had previously done my live, in-club classes were writing to me and asking for help in staying active during lockdown.

We, my business partner Jan and I, looked at the existing online cycling content and didn’t find anything that inspired us. We had a vision of free-to-use indoor cycling workouts that would cater for all different levels – beginner, intermediate and advanced – with workouts ranging from 15 to 90 minutes, and where my passion would really come across.

“Indoor cycling is my go-to workout. There’s nothing I enjoy more, and I aim to share that passion with everyone who cycles with me.”

We uploaded our first piece of content to YouTube in January 2021, with a goal of changing how people feel about indoor cycling. Certainly in Germany, it’s always been seen as a tough workout where the room is full of men in lycra. I wanted to change that and spread my love of indoor cycling to new and younger audiences.

What do you offer?

We offer rhythm and performance-based cycling, but music is key to every class so it never feels like a chore. Once I’ve decided what I want to achieve with each class, who my participants will be, what they need and what techniques will support them, I move straight on to music. I always have a good mix of genres – hip hop, rock, Latin, K-Pop and so on – as well as different beats and cadences.

We also train using Myzone heart rate zones in every class, so it really is just about you and your body. Even if you’ve never done indoor cycling before, you don’t ever need to worry that you won’t be good enough to do my classes.

We upload two new workouts a month to YouTube, mostly in German. Although we started out producing English language content for a global audience, now only one class in every four is in English. That’s one of our biggest USPs: our production quality stands out, as does the quality of the workouts, but it was when we started focusing on German language content that our YouTube user numbers soared. There just wasn’t anyone else doing this for indoor cycling in Germany, and the demand was high.

All our content is currently free, although you can support us financially if you’d like to.

You’ve partnered with Wexer…

Core Health & Fitness got in touch to say they were interested in working with me. Core owns Schwinn, but it also owns digital fitness brand Wexer, and I’m delighted to say that Cycling Sophie is now live on Wexer Virtual – the in-club system – and Wexer Mobile.

It’s really exciting, because it gives us a chance to reach people who cycle in clubs and who might not have come across Cycling Sophie yet. We’ve started with 30 workouts on the Wexer platform and will regularly add new content.

What are you most proud of?

Cycling Sophie is about to reach 1 million YouTube clicks and we have around 11,000 subscribers to our channel – men and women from Germany but also around the world, from the UK to the US, Australia to Russia to Mexico. We also have 2,300+ followers on Instagram. I’m hugely proud of how many people we’ve reached already.

“Focusing on German language content made our user numbers soar. There wasn’t anyone else doing this for indoor cycling.”

I’m also proud of how many lives we’ve changed. I get messages on a daily basis – and I try to reply to them all – thanking me for providing such good content for free. It’s what inspires me and the team to keep going.

We’ll continue to offer free content, so everyone has a chance to access indoor cycling and feel the passion I feel for this beautiful sport.

What next for Cycling Sophie?

We’ve just moved up to a new level with YouTube, so we can now also offer a paid-for membership. We’re aiming to launch this by the end of this year or early next, and it will unlock another two pieces of content each month. There may even be different levels of membership if you also want tutorials, nutritional advice and so on, and potentially resistance workouts too.

Because I believe that’s key to the future of indoor cycling: we need to focus on fusion workouts, combining indoor cycling with resistance training. You simply won’t get results through cardiovascular workouts alone.

We also need to support people in adopting a more rounded approach to health generally. I have a Masters in PE and English philology and I want to draw on all of this, as well as my own experience as a cyclist, to communicate – in a way that’s really easy to understand – how you can combine nutrition and different exercise disciplines.

“Cycling Sophie is now live on Wexer – a chance to reach people who cycle in clubs, who might not have come across us yet”

Longer term, I also dream of having my own indoor cycling studio, but for now I’ll focus on channelling my passion and expertise to the people on the other side of the camera – whether they’re at home or using my content in the gym – to bring them the positive energy of indoor cycling.

The post Cycling Sophie appeared first on Ride High Magazine.

THE CREATOR

Renata Jarz
CEO, House of Workouts

”When Spinning started around 25 years ago, it was hugely popular and studios were packed,” says Renata Jarz, CEO of group exercise programming specialist House of Workouts. “But as the years have gone by it’s become skewed towards men, at least in mainstream clubs. It’s the same guys you see out on the roads, focusing on performance and metrics. It’s become a badge of honour to go as hard as possible in class.

“As the emphasis has moved in this direction, we’re seeing fewer new people coming in to the discipline. The boutiques are an exception – they’re doing well at attracting Gen Zs – but elsewhere, indoor cycling has become a love-or-hate class with the same regulars all the time. And those regulars are getting older. Younger people just aren’t gravitating towards it.

“If we want indoor cycling to thrive across the whole sector in the future, we have to do something to attract younger riders now. We need a new approach.”

User-centric programming

This realisation led Jarz and her team to create a new programme – SclptCycle – that she describes as “a body-shaping programme that happens to be on a bike”.

She explains: “Whenever we create a new programme, our research always begins with the end user. And what we’re seeing quite clearly – both in the different cycling classes we’ve sampled and from member research at my own club – is that people don’t necessarily want to push themselves too hard.

“Younger women in particular… they want to do something, but the idea of a really tough workout stops them going to the gym at all. They want to move, but they also want to feel comfortable and have fun. They want to do things because they enjoy them, not because they feel they have to. For them, something really is better than nothing.

“They also want to feel successful from the word go. All the complex choreography we see in cycling classes… it doesn’t always work for people. It’s great for some markets – places like Amsterdam, for example – but not so good elsewhere. I call it ‘catwalk programming’. It’s up there as the exciting new concept, but it isn’t instantly ‘wearable’ outside of the big cities.

“I think that’s one of the big mistakes our sector makes: we lose sight of the consumer. People who love fitness design programmes for other people who love fitness, forgetting that this audience is relatively small.

She continues: “For SclptCycle, we took the essence of the catwalk programming – the fun, the dancing on bikes, the great music – and we modified it. We made it more accessible. We created an easy-to-follow class that’s about entertainment, fun, moving on your own terms and releasing stress, with a festival vibe courtesy of a great soundtrack.

“We’re very clear in our guidance to clubs: don’t launch SclptCycle with your regular Spin or Sprint instructors in the saddle.”

“We also made it a full-body workout by adding special tubular hand weights that you use while seated on the bike – but importantly, not while you’re pedalling. The grit inside the tubes shifts from side to side so it really works your core, not just your arms. They were designed for us by a Dutch physiotherapist and they’re great: we already use them in other House of Workouts programmes.”

A targeted audience

SclptCycle soft-launched at Saints & Stars in early September and has since been introduced at a number of clubs in the Netherlands. And the new programme is getting a lot of great feedback, says Jarz: “Younger girls and women love it. It isn’t just for women, of course – we’ve recently done a brilliant session at Nike HQ in the Netherlands, where men as well as women loved it. But we are unashamedly making women our primary audience, with branding and marketing that’s quite feminine. We’re deliberately marketing in a way that sets the right expectations, so we’re less likely to attract – and potentially then disappoint – hardcore Spinners.”

She adds: “Honestly, our sector needs to be a lot more diverse in its cycle programming. In all other group exercise disciplines, you’ll find more targeted classes. But in cycling, there still seems to be a belief that one class can fit all. It can’t. It shouldn’t even try. Not every class has to be for everyone.”

Quarterly releases of SclptCycle will encompass programming and music. “Instructor standards have sadly dropped over the last 10 years, as everyone now expects to be qualified in just a couple of days,” says Jarz. “Pre-choreographed programming helps ensure a consistent class experience.”

Alongside these quarterly releases, which all SclptCycle licence holders will receive automatically, House of Workouts will also sell special, limited edition classes via its app.

A new breed of instructor

Speaking of instructors, says Jarz, the secret of SclptCycle’s success will be very careful recruitment. “It doesn’t matter how great a programme is,” she explains. “If you market it wrong and use the wrong trainers, it won’t be successful.

“If we want to attract our intended audience to SclptCycle, hardcore has to go out the window. The whole thing has to be presented right.”

With this in mind, two-day, in-person instructor training workshops focus on fun and participant happiness rather than data. “We turn instructors into entertainers, teaching them to deliver our classes with a wink and a smile,” says Jarz. “Some people get it quicker than others, but we have tools up our sleeve to help people understand this is a new approach to cycling and they should leave all their preconceptions behind.

“We’re also very clear in our guidance to clubs: don’t launch SclptCycle with your regular Spin or Sprint instructors in the saddle. They will be too set in their ways. Bring in and train different types of people to coach this new class; you can always introduce your existing cycle instructors later, once they’ve experienced SclptCycle and are open to this new way of teaching.”

Growth plans

SclptCycle will be live in around 50 clubs in the Netherlands and Belgium by 1 January 2023, with BasicFit also set to introduce the class to its cycle studios in January.

“In the longer term – maybe six months to a year – we may make SclptCycle class content available digitally too, but for now it will only be available as a live class,” says Jarz. “That contact with the instructor, that social aspect… particularly for a programme like SclptCycle, that’s so important.”

THE EARLY ADOPTER

Debbie Koekkoek
GX manager, SportCity

”We see SclptCycle as a great fit for our SportCity brand,” says Debbie Koekkoek, group exercise manager for the Netherlands-based chain of 113 health clubs.

“We’re an all-inclusive operation in the value segment and we want to make sports and fitness accessible and enjoyable to all.

“Live group exercise is an important part of what we do, and that includes our fantastic SuperCycle studios – our indoor cycling brand – where we offer freecycle classes and Les Mills RPM across the board. Some clubs also offer Les Mills Sprint.

“Compared to five years ago, though, we’re seeing indoor cycling lose ground to other types of class – mind-body, for example, which is booming across our estate. Then you look at how well the indoor cycling boutiques are doing, filling their classes throughout the day. I want more for our SuperCycle studios!

“There’s definitely a male bias among our indoor cycling regulars at the moment, so we wanted to find something that could attract a new audience, getting more women into the studio. We’re proud to be the first sports club chain to introduce SclptCycle to the Dutch fitness market.”

“I’m not normally an indoor cycling fan, but this is different. You almost forget it’s a cycling class!”

A true fusion class

Koekkoek continues: “I’d been searching for something new to introduce to our SuperCycle studios and I heard about a new programme: SclptCycle. I went to a trial class at House of Workouts and was immediately very enthusiastic about it.

“I’m not normally an indoor cycling fan, but this is different. You almost forget it’s a cycling class! Our other cycling classes are all about cardio. SclptCycle is a total body workout. It’s a total experience.

“Having done boutique cycle classes where you use light weights while pedalling, I was surprised when in SclptCycle we suddenly turned up the resistance as high as possible – so we couldn’t pedal – and picked up the resistance training tubes. I know these tubes from the BRN classes we already offer at our clubs – another House of Workouts programme – and they give your upper body and core a seriously good workout. I think it’s brilliant to introduce them into the cycling studio. It ensures SclptCycle is a true fusion class, not just about the bike.

“And that’s why I love it, and why I believe it could be just what we’ve been looking for: the concept that brings more people, and especially women, into our cycling studios.”

Time to think different

“By the end of 2022, SclptCycle will be available in multiple SportCity locations,” says Koekkoek. “Classes will be led by SportCity instructors who haven’t previously been indoor cycling instructors. They currently teach classes such as BRN or BodyShape and they’re all enthusiastic about teaching SclptCycle. I truly believe their regulars will follow them into the cycling studio.

“Because the way we’re talking about SclptCycle, it will appeal to a new audience: it’s a party on a bike, a full-body workout, a calorie-burner. It’s a class where you use the bike as just one of the tools to achieve a fantastic full-body workout that’s also great fun, with great music and great lighting.

“If it turns out our regular cyclists also love the class, with its 45-minute format complementing the 60- and 30-minute classes already on our timetable, that’s a positive outcome too. But it is something a bit different and I fully expect it to bring new people to group cycling.”

 

THE PARTNER

Uffe A Olesen
CEO, BODY BIKE International

”BODY BIKE is thrilled to be selected by House of Workouts as the preferred bike for its fantastic new SclptCycle programme,” says BODY BIKE CEO Uffe A Olesen.

“As soon as we met with Renata and her team at House of Workouts, we knew this was something we wanted to be part of. Their passion is so infectious. The way they see things so fresh and exciting. Their desire to do things differently so creative and inspiring.

“And over-arching all of this is a wonderful, overwhelming sense of fun in everything they do, including this vibrant, positive, life-affirming new indoor cycling programme. It feels like no coincidence that SclptCycle has come out of party-loving Holland! Who wouldn’t want to be part of this?”

He adds: “With so much stress and negativity in all of our lives right now, SclptCycle is a programme the world really, really needs. It isn’t about stats. It isn’t about pressure to perform. It isn’t about comparing yourself to others in the room. It’s about happiness, escapism and fun”.

“I believe it has all the ingredients to be the next global fitness phenomenon.”

“There’s an overwhelming sense of fun in this vibrant, positive, life-affirming new programme”

Working in synergy

Olesen continues: “Beyond the SclptCycle programme, there are also lovely synergies between BODY BIKE and House of Workouts that make our partnership very natural.

“Both of us are based in Europe, where we build things that last; our shared passion for indoor cycling is matched only by our mutual determination to achieve the highest possible quality in everything we do.

“Renata wanted a bike that would provide an exceptional ride class after class, year after year. BODY BIKE delivers on that.

“Our companies both have strong environmental and social agendas too, including a focus on diversity and inclusion in the workplace: we both employ people with disabilities in our manufacturing processes. Meanwhile, BODY BIKE Smart+ OceanIX is built using plastic from recycled fishing nets – we’re working on other sustainable products as we speak – and House of Workouts’ weighted tube, the other piece of equipment used in SclptCycle, is manufactured using recycled aluminium. The plastic will soon be recycled too.

“It feels like no coincidence that SclptCycle has come out of party-loving Holland! Who wouldn’t want to be part of this?”

“Those tubes are available in all sorts of colours and can be branded or have slogans put on them – yet another opportunity to have fun when delivering SclptCycle in your club. Meanwhile, BODY BIKE’s covers are available in 10 colours and can accommodate all sorts of branding and imagery to create a studio with a real wow factor.

“Together, BODY BIKE and House of Workouts want to bring new life to cycling studios by making indoor cycling fun again – through the programming, the environment, the marketing, the instruction, and of course the ride.”

BODY BIKE and House of Workouts will be together at FIBO 2023, offering a chance to see SclptCycle in action. “Make a date for 13–16 April, Exhibition Centre Cologne, to visit a very special stand indeed,” says Olesen. “Hall 6, stand A13… Meet us in the woods!”

The post Reinventing indoor cycling appeared first on Ride High Magazine.

It’s true that in the US, Mindbody recently reported a 39 per cent drop in cycling class attendance (Jan–July 2022 vs Jan–July 2021). Yet it’s important to note that group cycling wasn’t the only discipline to feel the pinch: yoga was also down 31 per cent, dance 14 per cent, CrossFit 9 per cent. Equally important to note that this is data for a market hit by Flywheel’s demise and SoulCycle’s multiple studio closures.

Meanwhile, other brands are doing well – even in the US. Barry’s is moving ahead with the roll-out of its RIDE x LIFT concept, for example (see trend #7), while Xponential’s CycleBar now has more than 260 studios open and agreements signed to move into Japan, Australia and New Zealand.

And indoor cycling remains the #1 group exercise format in markets like the Netherlands, where concepts such as Holy Ride have been inspired and shaped by customer demand.

So, the fall isn’t universal. Indeed, as Peloton adjusts and restructures for a world in which consumers have a choice about where they exercise, it seems in-person is where it’s at once again. 

The key is this: indoor cycling is still very much alive when done well. Whatever their model, fitness facilities must continue to innovate and experiment within their cycle offering to keep it relevant – a go-to workout – in an era in which Experience, with a capital E, is now the customer expectation. 

Of course, there’s only so much you can do on a static bike, so experience will lean into the environment, soundtrack, community and vibe you create as much as the programming (which, incidentally, still has scope for innovation – see trends #7 and #10). 

As Holy Ride’s Tom Moos told RIDE HIGH earlier this year: “Indoor cycling will become increasingly immersive and experiential. There are still a lot of dark boxes at the moment!”

#2 Boutiques buddy up

Ever since the pandemic wreaked havoc on the fitness sector, many standalone – and especially single-discipline – boutiques have been finding it particularly hard-going. 

“Even pre-COVID, businesses in our sector had struggled: there were record attendances at boutique studios, but head office costs made it hard to make money,” the founders of UK-based United Fitness Brands (UFB) told us when we interviewed them in May 2022. “We realised there was an opportunity to drive significant economies of scale by joining forces.”

It therefore comes as little surprise that more and more boutique brands are ‘buddying up’, coming under one roof at head office, in-club, or both. 

UFB, for example, has now brought together four boutique operations, primarily at a head office level but also via a number of dual-brand locations in London. Its founders told RIDE HIGH they now hope to create multi-brand studios in smaller cities across the UK.

Elsewhere we’re seeing different takes on buddying up. In the Netherlands, Urban Gym Group (UGG) has brought multiple fitness brands under its umbrella, including boutique brand HIGH STUDIOS. Offering strategic guidance, shared resources and a cluster approach to conquer target cities – notably Amsterdam – with its portfolio of brands, UGG has also grown the reach of HIGH STUDIOS by creating HIGH-branded group exercise studios inside its ClubSportive and Trainmore clubs.

“Ever since the pandemic, many standalone and single-discipline boutiques have found it hard-going”

Then there’s newcomer Drop Fitness (see our chat with founder Jeb Balise in our special cost of living supplement: A Global Crisis?). Drop opened its inaugural site in New Jersey, US, in May 2022, bringing together four existing, third-party, best-in-class boutique brands alongside private training and a gym floor. All available on a ‘pay for what you want, when you want’ basis, Drop pays each boutique brand a revenue share.

“It’s a great way for boutique brands to grow and scale across the country, beyond the big cities where they traditionally operate,” says Balise. “For a boutique to come out to the suburbs on its own would cost so much time, energy and money, all for a 2,000sq ft space. Town planning permissions can sometimes be brutal, and doing it for a 25,000sq ft space is much more efficient.”

Expect to see more of this in 2023 as boutiques battle to weather not only the repercussions of the pandemic, but now also the energy crisis, spiralling inflation and expectations of salary increases.

#3 A sustainable agenda

Environmental sustainability has been on the agenda of most businesses for years now, and we’ve seen some moves in the right direction within the indoor cycling sector. Operators such as the UK’s 1Rebel have been free from single-use plastic for a while now, for example, while Terra Hale markets itself as ‘London’s first eco-friendly fitness destination’, generating electricity from its indoor cycling classes (see our special supplement: A Global Crisis?)

From a supplier perspective, BODY BIKE OceanIX is the eco-warrior’s indoor bike – the first in the world to be manufactured using plastic from recycled fishing nets – and in 2021, BODY BIKE also launched a best-in-class eCargo bike. “It’s a bit of a departure from our usual fitness sector territory, but we have the capacity in our factory and it just feels like the next ‘right thing to do’,” said CEO Uffe A Olesen.

But as the energy crisis ramps up, gas and electricity prices threaten the very existence of our sector and the world accelerates towards a climate crisis, clubs can’t view sustainability as a mere passion project. It has to be embedded at the heart of what we do – and as Terra Hale proves, bikes aren’t just energy-efficient thanks to not needing power. They can also be energy generators. Now is the time to explore this potential.

“Bikes aren’t just energy-efficient thanks to not needing power. They can also be energy generators.”

#4 No digital divide

Over recent years, hybrid models have been the hot topic of the fitness sector. Now the buzzword is ‘omnichannel’.

“As the number of channels proliferates, equal importance must be given to digital and in-person,” advised Paul Bowman, CEO of Wexer, in RIDE HIGH #16. “Every customer will use multiple touchpoints and expect to dive straight in to a familiar experience each time. 

“The challenge for clubs is to deliver exactly the same user experience whatever the point of entry.”

While we’re seeing a growing number of third parties creating digital content for both in-club and at-home use, Bowman believes clubs’ own star trainers are key to a consistent experience. It’s why Wexer’s ecosystem now allows clubs to stream self-produced content not only to at-home digital platforms, but also onto the big screen of in-club virtual studios.

“Every club operator should maximise opportunities to put their own stars in front of their customers”

“If you’re looking for an advantage over the big digital players and the global fitness influencers, your team of local rockstars with their loyal member followings is it,” Bowman advises. “Every club operator should be maximising opportunities to put these stars in front of customers, both on-site and at-home. And that means creating digital content fronted by them.”

For a great example, look no further than Thailand’s trailblazing Absolute Group, which was quick off the mark in identifying the dual value of digital content for at-home as well as in-club, launching its Absolute X hybrid studio concept in 2022. 

“With this second distribution channel, we’re very happy to continue investing in high-quality digital content,” confirms founder and CEO Ben Karoonkornsakul. 

It can be an expensive undertaking, yet members will forgive lower production quality if they’re seeing their favourite instructors on-screen. Expect more branded digital experiences that cost-effectively maximise yield and usage of cycling studios, as well as supporting members at home.

#5 A new reality

In summer 2022, RIDE HIGH spoke to Emma Barry – global fitness authority and renowned group exercise expert – and Les Mills legend Steven Renata about indoor cycling past, present and future.

In our chat, Barry was hugely enthusiastic about the digital innovations coming down the line for group cycling. Some of the topics she touched on might reasonably expect to be a trend in their own right, but in our top 10 we’ve pushed them all together into one digital innovations trend that hints at an exhilarating future for indoor cycling.

We’re talking AR, VR, the metaverse. “Anything that brings digital enhancement into the real world for an extended, mixed reality – especially when it includes a social element of cycling together, remotely,” says Barry.

“We’ve seen the rise and fall of Peloton and friends, but they’ve unquestionably given a huge nod to health and wellness along the way, driving up awareness of fitness and just how good the experience can be, as well as showing us all how ‘sticky’ an online community can be.”

She continues: “Once they get the eyewear down, the bike is the perfect tool for AR and VR. We already wear sunglasses when we’re riding outside, so once the headsets aren’t so large and sweat-inducing, that’s going to be very interesting. We’ll literally be able to be in another world as we cycle. 

“AR will be able to transpose all kinds of information and metrics to those who are motivated by data”

“AR will be able to transpose all kinds of information and metrics to those motivated by data: personalised power output, position in the pack, headwind, lighting, direction cues and so on. VR will be able to emulate and enhance existing worlds, such as the great races around the globe: the Ironman World Championship in Kona, the Tour de France, the Red Bull UCI Pump Track World Champs. We’ll be able to achieve unlimited participation and presumably get to sync data to achieve validated comparison. 

“Weaving in and out of the metaverse – the meeting place of different realities – will become more seamless and enhanced over the next 20 years as we take our data and avatars with us across the various worlds to achieve our own unique goals. 

“Finally, one really cool thing I saw at CES 2020 was Delta Airlines’ unveiling of Parallel Reality, designed to tailor a passenger’s experience using biometrics. We’re talking complete immersion in an opt-in, personalised experience – and it’s now being trialled at Detroit airport.

“Essentially, multiple passengers can look at the same screen but only see their own unique travel data: their flight information and directions to the gate, weather at their final destination, directions to a Sky Club – all in the language of the passenger’s choice. 

“It’s not too much of a stretch to see how the fitness data we already cast to screens – heart rate, for example – could be expanded on and personalised in an equally meaningful way.”

 #6 Self-determination

While it’s true that not everyone wants to focus on metrics in their workouts – it’s why rhythm cycling has become so popular the world over – nevertheless there are many fitness fans around the world who like to keep track of their progress. And of course, whether you’re an app developer or club operator, this data can be gold dust; used well, it is the source of unparalleled behavioural insights and the basis of a personalised experience.

Yet the question remains: who owns this data? And increasingly the answer is: the individual. If you buy into that – and at RIDE HIGH, we do – then our role as fitness providers must be to help people make sense of their data, giving them the insights and understanding they need to plot their next steps, without overstepping the privacy mark. 

This will be a challenge as exercisers increasingly mix and match workout locations and platforms; it will first require a willingness to openly share data across platforms, so the individual can opt into and be presented with one cohesive picture of their efforts.

This is why BODY BIKE has already done away with consoles, instead allowing exercisers to download its app and use their own mobile phone as their console. They then immediately take their data away with them at the end of each workout. It’s also why the BODY BIKE Strava club was created, allowing exercisers to upload their BODY BIKE indoor cycling workouts into their Strava account. They can then share workout data with fellow enthusiasts and access a full record of all their cycling sessions in one place. 

We need more of this moving forward, putting members and their progress first by making data sharing easier – especially if we are to avoid tech fatigue as digital solutions continue to proliferate and it becomes harder and harder to access one clear picture.

#7 Fusion workouts

We’ve reported previously on the growth of fusion cycling classes and now, in 2023, this trend looks set to go up another gear, with the likes of Barry’s rolling out RIDE x LIFT.

The class follows Barry’s tried-and-tested formula, whereby members alternate between cardio and strength-based programming. In this case, however, the bike replaces the treadmill of the brand’s signature bootcamp class, making for a more accessible and lower-impact workout.

Why is this trend so interesting? Because it ticks so many boxes: a chance for operators to create something unique for their clubs – a signature, branded experience – and for members to take part in a ‘bang for their buck’ workout that keeps them engaged, gives them a great all-round workout and offers high perceived value for money. 

As clubs continue to innovate to keep their cycling workouts fresh, fusion classes will become an increasingly popular tool.

#8 An educational experience

The future of indoor cycling will, we hope, see instructor education become more specialised. 

RIDE HIGH recently spoke to Angela Reed-Fox of the Indoor Cycling Institute, who told us: “Many instructors just want to excel at indoor cycling: the discipline is heading into its own space and that’s entirely right. 

“I believe it’s outdated to expect instructors to also have a certificate in gym instructing, PT or exercise to music. Cycling shouldn’t be CPD on top of one of those qualifications. Rather, there should be regularly updated, indoor cycling CPD on top of a dedicated, entry-level indoor cycling certificate.”

Hear absolutely hear. For an excellent discussion on how indoor cycling education and qualifications need to evolve to give us the instructor workforce we need for the future, check out our recent panel discussion here. 

“Many instructors just want to excel at indoor cycling: the discipline is heading into its own space and that’s entirely right. It shouldn’t be CPD on top of other qualifications”

#9 Recovery-plus

Recovery is one of the buzzwords in the fitness sector right now; RIDE HIGH has already reported on how this is impacting programming in the indoor cycling arena. 

But what about instructors? For a long time almost disregarded in this respect – expected to simply keep going, churning out class after class after class with little rest – attention is finally turning to helping indoor cycling instructors avoid downtime through illness and injury, and ultimately extend their careers. 

In the UK, Susie Millen’s My Vocal Fitness focuses on preserving instructor voices. RIDE HIGH stalwart Noël Nocciolo does similar in the US under the banner of PEP for FitPros. 

“As fitness professionals, we learn about almost every muscle in the body,” says Millen. “Rarely, though, are we taught how to use our voice or a microphone effectively. The result: instructors across the planet aren’t vocally ready to teach the volume of classes they’re timetabled to deliver each week. Their voices become unreliable, deteriorating, even lost.”

Meanwhile, power training expert Hunter Allen recently offered RIDE HIGH some incredible insights into the physiological strain placed on cycling instructors’ bodies, in a fascinating feature on the Training Stress Score. 

“After six weeks of instructing two cycling classes a day, an instructor’s chronic training load could be 160 – the same as a pro cyclist at the end of the Tour de France,” he explained. Little wonder, then, that injury and illness are so common among frequently timetabled cycle studio stars. 

Our view: when it comes to our workforce, it shouldn’t just be about recovery. We need to see a much greater focus on prevention of injury and strain, bringing longevity to instructors’ careers in a healthy and sustainable way.

#10 A broader church

Over the last couple of years, we’ve seen fitness newcomers finally turning to our sector, their newfound appreciation of our value born from the pandemic. In turn, a more diverse global member base is gathering – one that spans a broad range of fitness levels, experiences and expectations.

On the one hand, says global fitness authority Emma Barry, there are now more people enjoying ‘The Sport of Fitness’ – being fit for fit’s sake and finding a favourite exercise genre, rather than training to be fit for a sport. 

Yet at the same time, we’re also in an era when – still jaded by the pandemic – many are exercising for reasons that are as much mental, emotional and even spiritual as they are physical. “People are looking for entertainment, they’re looking for release, and most of all, at this time in history, they’re looking for joy and hope,” confirms Barry. 

This diversity in the member base holds an important lesson for indoor cycling instructors and providers, as Tash Marshall Bean explained in a recent interview with RIDE HIGH: “With the pandemic bringing a wave of new people into fitness, it’s more important than ever that we take classes back to basics. 

“I’m currently seeing far too many instructors making the choreography too complicated for their riders and leaving people behind. Every single participant must feel successful, and instructors must (re)learn how to integrate new riders with well-versed riders to achieve this.”

“The more generic the experience, the less likely you are to really engage someone. We need targeted classes.”

Even better, said Louise Ager in the same panel discussion, would be a return to “diversity in class styles to support a broader audience in indoor cycling”. 

She added: “The more generic the experience, the less likely you are to really engage someone. We need targeted classes that have a purpose and an intentional audience: classes for beginners, for overweight people, for seniors, for endurance enthusiasts, for those short of time, for fans of different music genres.”

This conscious targeting is exactly what House of Workouts has done with the launch of its new SclptCycle programme.

One thing is for sure: moving forward the indoor cycling sector must work to ensure its product delivers strongly to an increasingly diverse audience.

The post Trending now appeared first on Ride High Magazine.

What do I mean by that? Heart rate training has been around for many years and it’s an important and valid metric. It shows the intensity of your intention – how hard you’re trying to push yourself. That’s very useful for instructors in particular, allowing them to read the room and understand the effort each participant is putting in. With the addition of colour zones, it’s also easy to understand and can be very motivating in a class environment.

However, the issue is this: there are many factors that can impact someone’s heart rate. It isn’t exclusively a response to training. Yes, your heart rate could be high because you’re really pushing yourself in your workout. However, it could also be high because the room is too warm and you’re over-heating, you’ve had lots of caffeine, you’re stressed, or because of a number of other external factors.

In short, HR training tells you how fast your heart is pumping, but it doesn’t tell you why. It can also vary quite notably from day to day. Plus, heart rate zones are based on your max HR – a figure that doesn’t change as you get fitter. It means you can’t easily track or build on your progress.

How is power different?
Whether you’re in a studio or on the road in the rain, 200 watts is 200 watts. This is why I refer to power as the ultimate training dose: you can very precisely specify a number.

Let’s take the analogy of weight training. Month one, you might have 20kg on your bar. Next month it’s 30kg, a few months later it’s 50kg. The weight is your training dose and the rising number reflects the progress you’ve made. It’s the same with wattage: you can see your improved performance on the power meter of your bike as your output rises from 200 to 220 to 240 watts over time.

Then there’s a measure called FTP – functional threshold power – which is a great tool for a class environment. Every individual can calculate their personal FTP, which is directly related to their fitness level. Rather than specifying a wattage, an instructor can then specify an FTP percentage they want the class to ride at. In turn, this ensures every individual is working according to their current fitness level – but also at exactly the right load for the training goal.

I say ‘current’ because your FTP will rise as you get fitter. If there’s a day when you’re tired or stressed, you may not hit the same output as on a day when you’re fresh, but overall – over time – your FTP will increase as your fitness improves. That provides a great sense of accomplishment and motivation to keep going.

How does FTP work?
Your functional threshold power is the highest average power (wattage) output you can maintain for an hour, going as hard as possible for the whole hour. You then take that average wattage as 100 per cent and build your training zones around it.

Zone 1, active recovery, sees you cycling at 55 per cent or less of your personal FTP. It’s an important zone in every class and for every cyclist: it stops you training too hard and ensures you’re ready for the next effort.

“Every individual can calculate their personal FTP, which is directly related to their fitness level. An instructor can then specify an FTP percentage they want the class to ride at.”

Zone 2, endurance, is where you could spend all day cycling. You’re at 56–75 per cent of your FTP, and as the name suggests, it’s about improving your endurance.

Zone 3, tempo, is a zone most people could stay in for perhaps 30 minutes to a couple of hours – or eight hours if you’re a pro cyclist! You’re now working at 76–90 per cent of your FTP, and the benefit here is improved aerobic capacity and muscular endurance.

Zone 4 is your FTP zone, and this is the measure that really defines your fitness. It’s a bit like the one rep max in weight training: you quote your FTP to someone and it’s a shorthand for how fit you are. In this zone, you’re working at 91–105 per cent of your FTP, and translated to real world cycling it’s about how fast you can ride outside: with an FTP of 180 watts, you might be able to maintain 15mph; 220 watts and you’re looking at perhaps 20mph. Physiologically, it’s about improving overall cardiovascular fitness and the body’s ability to handle lactate in the blood.

Zone 5 – 106–120 per cent of FTP – is the VO2 max zone. We’re talking three- to eight-minute all-out efforts, as if you’re riding up a steep hill. You’re training your body’s ability to bring oxygen into the lungs and from there to the bloodstream and the muscles; your VO2 max is the efficiency with which your body can do this, and it can be improved with training.

Zone 6 is anaerobic capacity, spanning 121–300 per cent of FTP. We’re talking very intense intervals of perhaps 30 seconds to two minutes only, and it’s about improving your ability to produce energy without oxygen. Working in this zone brings a rounded approach to fitness.

Finally, anything above that is zone 7 – neuromuscular power. Think of it as your very best sprint for five to 15 seconds, which might typically be anything from 700–2,500 watts. This is pure muscular strength building.

How do you calculate FTP?
As I say, FTP is about going as hard as you can for an hour, but not everyone wants to do that – not even pro athletes! There are a few shortcuts, but I believe the best is a 20-minute test that you can run as a class.

You start with a 20-minute warm-up – or 10–15 minutes if you want the class to fit neatly into an hour’s slot – including 3 x one-minute fast pedals to wake up the legs.

Then you do five minutes cycling as hard as you possibly can to exhaust the body’s anaerobic capacity – something that could otherwise skew the results – before 10 minutes of recovery, cycling at around 65 per cent of your capacity.

“Test your FTP every eight weeks; fitness generally changes in eight-week cycles. To keep progressing, re-set training zones around your rising FTP.”

Only then do you do the 20-minute time trial, striking up a strong, steady wattage that you think you can maintain for 20 minutes; you can tweak as you go, because we take an average reading, so don’t start too hard! Your FTP is your power average for the 20 minutes, minus 3–5 per cent to even more accurately estimate what you could do in an hour.

The class ends with a cool-down of 10–15 minutes’ easy pedalling.

People often object – they say they’re tired by the time we do the time trial – but that’s the whole point. We’re trying to approximate what you could do in an hour, so you have to be a little fatigued when you begin the 20-minute test.

Crucially, you should re-test your FTP every eight weeks, because fitness generally changes in eight-week cycles. To keep progressing, you need to continually re-set your training zones around your rising FTP.

Do you always favour power training?
In a word, yes. It’s a great way to scale for everyone in the room, so they can train in the same zones and progress together but without having to achieve the same wattage.

It’s also possible to create classes around specific training objectives. “On Monday, our class will train the cardiovascular system with relatively low force; on Tuesday we’ll focus on improving our FTP, with 4 x 10 minutes at 95–105 per cent of FTP; Wednesdays will be all about improving anaerobic capacity, with short, hard efforts of 30 seconds to two minutes; Thursday’s class will focus on VO2 max, with three- to five-minute intervals, but we’ll throw in five muscular strength intervals first.” And so on.

Not every FTP zone is suitable for every level of fitness, though, so classes should be clearly labelled for their training objectives, benefits and level of experience required. Unfit beginners should focus on zones 1–3, for example, but note that it doesn’t get progressively harder from zone 1 up to zone 7: fitter beginners could do zone 7 and even zone 6, provided intervals aren’t too long and there’s plenty of variety in the class.

On the other hand, if you put a beginner straight into an FTP intervals class, I can pretty much guarantee they’ll never come back!

This is the beauty of power training, though. You know exactly what energy system you’re training – VO2 max or threshold power, for example – which is something other modes of training don’t allow for.

“How you create your wattage is important. In a general-purpose class, aim to push people out of their cadence comfort zones.”

Where does cadence (RPM) fit in?
Cadence can be a challenge for many people in a class, especially beginners who aren’t used to moving their leg muscles in a pedalling motion. At first, people generally want to pedal slower – perhaps 70–80 RPM – until they get used to it.

However, cadence is a very important metric, as power = force x cadence. You can produce 1,000 watts by cycling at a slow 40 RPM with the resistance cranked up to 20, or you could cycle at 150 RPM with the resistance at 5 and still produce 1,000 watts.

At face value, that may seem like the same outcome, but how you create your wattage is important: in this example, the 40 RPM approach is about producing the watts through force, which means you’re training muscular strength; the 150 RPM approach produces watts through speed and trains cardiovascular fitness.

When you teach a general-purpose indoor cycling class, you should aim to balance load between the muscles and the cardiovascular system. You need to push people out of their cadence comfort zones, helping endurance runners build muscle and weight lifters improve their cardiovascular fitness. You should also move people through the different FTP zones to work on strength, cardiovascular fitness and muscular endurance. This is how you use power training to improve all-round fitness.

Get in the zone

Monitoring your % FTP

If the key to effective indoor cycling is working to specified percentages of your personal FTP – well, how exactly do you do this? Easy, says Allen: with indoor cycling bikes now boasting advanced computers, you simply enter your personal FTP at the beginning of class and the console will show you what % FTP you’re hitting throughout the workout.

BODY BIKE Smart+ goes a step further. Believing that exercisers should have clear ownership of their personal data, and that operators should have future-proofed bikes, BODY BIKE got rid of integrated consoles around five years ago. In their place, an app that links seamlessly to any BODY BIKE Smart+ bike, transforming exercisers’ phones into portable consoles that can be upgraded with each app update, and that let exercisers carry their data with them.

The latest app update, launched in April, features in-saddle installation: simply pedal for 30 seconds and the upgrade is installed on your phone, bringing your previous training history across with it. Alongside a host of new features, including achievement-based status updates, are all the old favourites – not least a number of FTP features.

There are two FTP tests you can do on your own – a five-minute test and a burnout test – which, as BODY BIKE CEO Uffe A Olesen explains, “allow people to easily do a test themselves at any point, rather than having to wait for their club to run a class as Hunter suggests”. Alternatively, if you already know your FTP, you can simply store it in your personal app settings.

You then monitor your % FTP during class by tapping the middle of the wattage ‘target board’ to reveal your % FTP figure.

% FTP is just one of numerous metrics that can be tracked through the BODY BIKE Smart+ app, alongside % max HR, cadence, kilometres travelled, calories burned and workout duration.

The post Power Play appeared first on Ride High Magazine.

Sarah Ramsden, owner of Sports Yoga, explains: “Repetitive sessions on the bike can shorten your hip flexors, quads, hamstrings, calves, groins and ITB; stiffen your ankles; and cause chronic over-lengthening and weakening of the lower and upper back.

“Mostly this shows up as back, knee, neck and wrist pain – but crucially, all that shortening of muscles also makes you less comfortable, less efficient and less powerful on the bike.”

Fortunately, there is an answer: yoga and pilates. These complementary disciplines not only reduce pain and risk of injury from extended periods in a cycling position, but can actually improve your performance on the bike.

Our experts share their views, and it makes for interesting reading whether you’re an indoor cycling enthusiast or a club looking to advise cyclists on how best to structure their training plans.

Glenn Withers

Co-founder, APPI

I coach a training course – Pilates for Cyclists – which is actually designed with road cyclists in mind, but which also has relevance for regular indoor cyclists.

The course covers three key areas: endurance, which is more relevant to road cyclists than those doing 50-minute indoor cycling classes; strength, and how pilates can build this in a relevant way to improve cycling performance; and flexibility, looking at how pilates can improve mobility and ease common areas of tightness among cyclists.

The course is designed to help cyclists understand what the posture they adopt on a bike does to the way their body functions – the tightness it causes in the hip flexors, for example, and the tension it can cause in the mid-back if they’re over- or under-reaching – and how pilates can help. It also looks at how specific, at times modified, pilates exercises can strengthen the muscles used in cycling to improve output.

Improved flexibility is a benefit however often you’re in the saddle. Even if you only do one indoor cycling class a week, pilates can help balance out the tightness this can cause, improving mobility and flexibility to increase comfort and efficiency on the bike.

For example, a good pilates for cyclists programme will incorporate some thoracic mobility exercises, because when you’re on the bike, the mid-back is held so stiff that it can cause tension and pain. Similarly, your hip joint never fully extends when you’re on a bike, so you can get very tight at the front of the hip and need to open this up.

“The more core control you have, the more likely you are to get power out of the legs and avoid placing stress elsewhere on the body”

Core strength is also important even at the one-class-a-week level: the more core control you have, the less likely you are to have ill effects from the bike position, and the more likely you are to get power out of the legs and avoid placing stress elsewhere on the body. Even just doing one indoor cycling class a week can cause problems if you have a weak back. By developing core strength, pilates can help you avoid injury.

If you’re doing a class every day, however – or if you’re using indoor cycling classes as part of your road cycling training – then it’s a different story. It’s still about injury prevention, because you’re holding an unnatural cycling position even more regularly, but pilates can also help improve your performance and output.

If you look at which muscles need to work during a pedal cycle, it’s your glutes to start off, with power coming from the back of your hip; then at the bottom it’s your foot, ankle and calf mobility; and to pull back up and over it’s your hamstrings. So, if you want to use pilates to improve your performance, you need a combination of exercises that strengthen the cycling muscles: the core, glutes and hamstrings predominantly.

Crucially, you need to train these muscles in the range that they’re required to produce on the bike. That means tailoring pilates exercises to the bike position – training the glutes to produce power from a flexed hip position, for example, and the hamstrings to activate in a bent knee position – so there’s carry-over to improve performance on the bike.

Cycling isn’t just about leg strength, though: you need a strong core to transmit the power into the legs, and to protect the spine so it doesn’t lose efficiency in the way you ride a bike. In fact, research shows there’s a significant decrease in power output through the upper or lower limb with just a 20 per cent decrease in your core strength.

However, if you rely on cycling classes alone to train these muscles – or if, even outside your cycling sessions, you only train them within the range that cycling allows – then tension and tightness will ensue. It’s why a good pilates for cyclists programme will incorporate lengthening and mobility as well as strengthening.

Sarah Ramsden

Owner, Sports Yoga – UK

First of all, it’s important to note that flexibility gains are performance gains. Stretching your hip flexors, for example, allows you to get your hips forward when out of the saddle and drive even more power through the whole length of the leg. Good hip flexor length also allows you to drive more power through the full range of the quads when seated.

Meanwhile, better pelvis mobility – groin, ITB and hip flexors – increases efficiency by reducing wiggle on the saddle, especially when you’re tired, and better ankle mechanics allow pain-free hitting of power through the whole ankling pedal motion.

Performance gains can also come from a strong core and glutes. Good torso control keeps your sitting bones solid on the saddle, so power is driven straight to the pedal. It stops your hips swinging when you’re out of the saddle, too, driving all power straight through the pedal. Strong glutes also add power to your pedal stroke when standing.

“The multi-directional movement of yoga, plus all that stretching, helps you recover faster. Your ride the day after yoga will feel easier.”

But your glutes and abs aren’t really trained during a cycling class: the forward hunched position means your abs won’t fire, and sitting on your butt means you don’t use your glutes much. You’ll need to train these muscles elsewhere, and yoga is the perfect solution.

Then there are the recovery and injury prevention benefits of yoga. Its multi-directional movement and stretching helps you recover faster. You flush out metabolic waste, pump fresh blood through, untether tissues that have become stuck and tight, and re-set the length of your muscles. You feel less fatigued and your ride the day after yoga will feel easier.

By lengthening shortened muscles, a good yoga class also reduces niggles and chronic problems. Free from pain, you’re then back to adopting efficient positions on the bike, able to increase your time in the saddle and continue cycling for years to come.

On the flip side, fail to stretch alongside all your cycling and you’ll develop loads of compensatory ways of moving; you’ll get too stiff to move with good posture. This will injure you in unpredictable ways and make living a full life difficult. You might still be comfortable on the bike – that fixed position ends up being the most comfortable – but your everyday movement gets less and less.

And, of course, a hunched, rounded upper-back position on the bike eventually becomes a hunched, rounded upper-back position in life too: probably not the look you’re after!

In short, yoga as a complement to cycling works. You’ll feel easier and freer. You’ll injure less and chronic problems will slowly subside. Your efficiency and power output on the bike will improve. You’ll increase your training and go on for longer. Your body and your cycling will love you for it.

Sarah Ramsden is a registered teacher with www.yogaallianceprofessionals.org

Shelly Zehari

Co-owner, Fit House – Israel

At Fit House, we believe people should be able to do cardio, stretching, stability, strength and core work all in one place, so we have four studios under one roof: cycling, pilates reformer, barre and functional.

We also mix and match as part of this approach. For example, one of our signature classes – Arms Booty Core Cycling (ABC Cycling) – combines pilates and cycling in the same class. You do an interval on the bike, then come off and do some pilates arm exercises before getting back on the bike, then off again for pilates core work, and so on. You get your cardio hit from cycling, but you also train your arms, core and glutes in a series of pilates exercises.

People love it, because in 60 minutes they get a full-body cardio and strength workout. It also introduces cyclists to pilates, and pilates enthusiasts to cycling, which is great. We run our ABC Cycling class six times a day, it’s so popular.

“We’re very clear in our belief that all our disciplines are deeply connected, and that doing a bit of everything will get you better results”

But importantly, this isn’t just for a novelty factor. We’re very clear in our belief that all our disciplines are deeply connected, and that doing a bit of everything will get you better results. For example, the data gathered by our BODY BIKES shows that people get more out of their cycling workouts if they also do pilates: better RPM, better power output, better calorie burn. We have hard evidence to prove this.

Why? It all starts with the way you sit on the bike. If you do pilates, you know how to hold your body in the various positions you adopt on the bike. You know how to engage your core, you know how to breathe, you have the strength in your shoulders to stay high. Your chest is open, everything is open, and you’re stronger in every position so you’re supporting your body properly. In turn, you feel better, stronger, and can work harder. You maximise everything you do on the bike.

You also don’t get to the end of a cycling class feeling like you’ve only worked your quads: you’ve engaged your body properly, so you feel it in your glutes and hamstrings too. You’re also less likely to suffer pain in your lower back after an hour on the bike, because you’ll have engaged your core throughout the class.

Pilates and cycling really is such a great combination. Cycling isn’t just about getting on a bike and moving your legs; the body awareness and strength you get from pilates helps you get so much more out of it.

The post Go the extra mile appeared first on Ride High Magazine.

We know the recovery time between workouts is key to extracting maximum gains from those workouts. Elite athletes have known that for years, and it’s presumably part of Peloton’s rationale in relaunching Peloton Yoga earlier this year. But what about recovery as an integral part of the workout experience?

Baking recovery in

What sparked my thinking was reading about a new initiative from London-based boutique operator Digme Fitness, which partnered with Hyperice during lockdown to offer at-home recovery programmes for its members. Getting in touch for this feature, I discovered this concept was now expanding in-club, with a dedicated ‘Recovery Space powered by Hyperice’ launched at its Moorgate studio last month. More on that in just a moment.

And what about during class? My thoughts moved on to Victus Soul, another London-based boutique whose founders I interviewed when the studio opened a few years back. Here, a full five to seven minutes of every HIIT class is spent on active recovery, with members educated around the importance of this. We’ve brought co-founder Paul Trendell in to share his insights as part of this RIDE HIGH discussion.

So, I started wondering, are other cycling operators missing a trick in not building more recovery into their class schedules, both from a physical and a mental health perspective? And certainly post-COVID – with many people’s fitness levels having taken a hit – might baking recovery into the programming itself make cycling more of an achievable re-entry point to regular exercise?

Our chats with experts from across the sector make for interesting reading…

A dedicated recovery space

Geoff Bamber – CEO, Digme Fitness

“In 2020, we witnessed an increased interest in 360° wellbeing, with our members starting to look at improving all aspects of health – not just exercise but also nutrition, sleep, stress and mindfulness. In the process, they became even savvier about their workouts and the tools needed to maximise and improve their performance. Recovery is, of course, a key part of that.

“Our digital fitness director Dan Little sums it up perfectly when he says: ‘We so often neglect the need for recovery, yet it provides us with the biggest advantages when approached correctly. I would actually go as far as to say that you don’t need to train more. You need to recover more and maximise your lifestyle with purpose and confidence through recovery training.’

At-home origins

“We therefore partnered with Hyperice – a brand that’s safely brought technology previously reserved for elite athletes to the mass market – to launch a new ‘Recover with Hyperice’ concept to our Digme at Home offering during lockdown. This was introduced in December 2020 as a series of on-demand videos focusing on activation, maintenance and recovery.

“Using the Hyperice Hypervolt percussion gun – which we sell through the Digme Shop – and led by Digme instructors Dan, Ben, Kate and Chloe, the guided sessions range from four to 24 minutes.

“We had thousands of members taking part in Digme at Home classes throughout lockdown, so our ‘Recover – Powered by Hyperice’ sessions were designed to complement these, each targeting different muscle groups so members could choose the most suitable one based on their activity.

“The launch went incredibly well – we sold out of the products in the first week – so we’ve now brought recovery into our studios, too. Our members want to be able to work out more frequently, avoid injury and maximise their performance. Our focus on recovery supports this.

A new recovery space

“Last month, we launched a new Recovery Space in our Moorgate studio – a first for London. It’s an open space with two Digme-branded lazy boy recliner chairs, each with their own Hyperice Normatec system. This uses dynamic air compression to deliver a restorative leg massage, bespoke to the user’s needs, that’s been shown to increase circulation and improve recovery rates.

“We also provide noise-cancelling Urbanista headphones so members can zone out and enjoy their recovery session in peace.

“Our members want to be able to work out more frequently, avoid injury and maximise their performance. Our focus on recovery supports this.”

“With a retail price of £1,195, the Normatec product isn’t as affordable for members to purchase for home use, but recovery is so important to our members that we wanted to make it available in-studio. We’ve initially launched with a 25-minute session that costs one class credit (£22 for a single credit; reduced rates for credit packs) and are creating content – in collaboration with the Hyperice team – to educate our members on the benefits of recovery for their training.

“In our other studios, we’ve introduced Hyperice Recovery Towers: two Hyperice Hypervolt percussion guns, two Hyperice Hypersphere vibrating massage balls and two Hyperice Vyper vibrating fitness rollers. Members can use these for free between scheduled classes, with our on-demand recovery sessions still available to follow through the Digme app.”

Recovery for health

Odile Philipson – Group cycling instructor & Vinyasa Yoga teacher

“We cannot live at 100mph permanently. We cannot push our bodies (and brains) all the time without repercussions. For every action, there’s a reaction.

“I start with that principle and I ask myself: ‘When I make the class do X working zone, what effect does that create in their bodies? What do they need to be able to continue in an optimum manner after that zone?’

“Active recovery phases do that job, giving enough time to recover without cooling down too much. Post-training recovery, even a post-cycle yoga class, completes the reset of body and mind.

“It’s why I use recovery zones at various stages of each class, giving members the tools to achieve the training and feel great at the end.

Integral to the programme

“To integrate active recovery within an indoor cycling class, it helps to understand aerobic vs anaerobic training zones and how the body handles each. It also helps, as an instructor, to remember that members’ bodies will respond differently from yours. I encourage everyone to listen to and respect their bodies, accept there will be good and bad days, and recognise when to push and when not.

“I always instruct extra recovery time for beginners, too: ‘If you need to take a break, here’s a good place for it. If you want to stay with me for a more active recovery, continue at ‘X’ RPM.’

“How I choose the active recovery length depends on the effort theme of the class: pyramid training, endurance training, Russian steps, neuromuscular intervals, a mix of endurance/ hills/ sprints… All require different active recovery lengths.

“Cycling studios are high-energy places where egos wind themselves up into a tizz of competitiveness”

“For example, if we’ve just done a pyramid section and I know there’s another coming, I’ll make the class take a four- to five-minute recovery. Without this, they won’t be at their optimum – in terms of heart rate, lactic acid or rate of perceived exertion – to give their best effort in the second pyramid. They’ll find it too hard, give up on the effort and not have that happy feeling of achievement at the end.

A need for education

“It can be a hard message to promote, though, because group cycling studios are high-energy places where egos and minds wind themselves up into a tizz of competitiveness. I do my best to guide everyone through the correct zones in a controlled manner, but not everyone will listen.

“Indeed, before I’d built up trust among my regulars, I could feel the energy in the room change when I made participants take a longer mid-class break than they were used to. Two minutes into the recovery, I could almost see a ‘this is boring’ thought bubble above some of their heads, and they’d start pedalling too hard again.

“Equally, though, I could also see the discrete nods of agreement from triathletes and road cyclists, as they already appreciated the importance of active recovery – of reining in your ego for long-term health and fitness.

“During longer recoveries, I therefore explain the ‘why’ – I call it ‘the science bit’ – and remind members of what’s coming in the next working phase. When we’re halfway through that work and I remind them of the long recovery, they understand why we did it!

Achieving balance

“Ultimately, recovery is part of training. It makes you stronger, keeps you safe from injury and protects your immune system. All the top athletes and coaches know this. We have to adapt it for recreational indoor cyclists, but the science and logic stands whoever you are.

“Recovery is an almost invisible investment. It requires education, a leap of faith and a long-term vision”

“In fact, recovery is arguably even more important for the amateur than for the professional. A professional can be supported with regular massage, coaching, monitoring for anomalous physical response, training programmes with integrated recovery which may include enforced rest. Amateurs’ bodies and minds are dealing with a job, potentially sub-optimal nutrition, stress and fatigue from other areas. They come to class to forget their troubles, get fit and finish up feeling good about themselves. Recovery in the right places will help them achieve that.

“So, I do hope the future culture of cycling won’t just be about who has the highest Watt output or the fastest sprint RPM.

“Recovery is an almost invisible investment, though. It requires education, a leap of faith and a long-term vision.”

Fusing mental & physical health

Veronika Becker – Area station manager, FIRE Fitness

“Recovery is so important after any HIIT session, ensuring you stretch out the muscles that have become compacted during the workout, but it’s especially important after a cycling class. Sitting on a bike, you’re in a forward lean with your hip flexors doing most of the hard work. If you also work at a desk, you’ll be in a similar position for most of the day, making it even more important to stretch.

“But not everyone realises this, or wants to do a pure recovery class, which is why we created RIDE YOGA – a class that focuses first on your cardio, with 30 minutes of heart-pumping sprints and climbs on a bike, then 15 minutes of FIRE Yoga.

“The way we see it: not everyone will use up a class credit for a recovery class, but if they do RIDE YOGA, they at least get 15 minutes of it.

Yoga for all

“In RIDE YOGA, there’s an element of recovery between songs during the ride, but really this 30 minutes is about pushing yourself. It’s only in the final 15 minutes that we celebrate the wins, cool down and stretch. That’s enough to reduce lactic acid and soreness, eliminate toxins, keep muscles flexible, increase blood flow and focus on yourself.

“Our trainers decide which yoga movements to do based on the intensity of the ride and how much yoga experience participants have. We generally focus on simpler moves, though, as the class attracts lots of people who don’t normally ‘do’ yoga.

“Not everyone will use up a class credit for a recovery class, but if they do RIDE YOGA, they at least get 15 minutes”

“The moves also vary by time of day. In the morning, a smooth, easy flow lengthens and resets the body after RIDE, bringing energy and balance to start the day. In the evening, we opt for something a lot more restorative; the ride uses up whatever energy we have left from the day, then we go to the mat to ease physical and mental tension, helping us start the next day feeling fresh.

“We use recovery-orientated vocabulary throughout the 15 minutes and don’t make it too spiritual; the words you choose as a trainer are so important in creating the right mental images. Most trainers set a topic for the day and focus on that, with a few mindful reminders, and we find fans enjoy the educational element.

“For some of the men in particular, it’s their only yoga for the week, but the stretching means they aren’t sore the next day and are ready to train again. They get more out of every workout and report fewer injuries.

Mental meets physical

“And this is so important to understand: if you do the same exercises repeatedly, you end up with imbalances in your body that increase the risk of over-use injuries. That’s bad news for members, whose workout routines take a hit, and bad news for operators, because it can create negativity towards your programmes.

“Since lockdown, fitness enthusiasts are looking to combine their physical and mental wellbeing in one class”

“It’s why we take recovery very seriously and continuously educate our fans, and we’re finding interest in recovery classes is rising.

“As a result, I recently created a class called REGENERATE, which is completely focused around stretching, fascia release and core strength for stability. We use foam rollers, balls and yoga movements, and are about to take it to the next level by introducing Hyperice massage guns and Hypersphere massage balls. We run these classes at the weekend and are over the moon with how they’ve been received to date. Once people realise how good it makes them feel, they usually come back for more.

“Another interesting trend is the growing number of people who, since lockdown, have recognised the deep connect between physical and mental health. We’ve experienced a rise in fitness enthusiasts looking for ways to combine their physical and mental wellbeing in one class, rather than as two separate activities. If you, as an operator, can offer a hybrid class that embraces both mental and physical, I believe you’ll be able to satisfy a market you may not have attracted before.”

EXPERT INSIGHT

Do HIIT responsibly – Paul Trendell, co-founder, Victus Soul

“When we first came up with the Victus Soul concept – combining running, boxing, HIIT and recovery – the idea that people would spend up to seven minutes on recovery at the end of a HIIT class was unheard of. The norm was a couple of minutes of cool-down.

“We deliberately set out to do things differently, with the final five to seven minutes of every Victus Soul class dedicated to active recovery built around a primal movement flow.

“Why? Because proper recovery is crucial for continual improvement. That’s as true for indoor cycling as it is any other form of high-intensity exercise.

“Active recovery reduces the build-up of lactic acid and minimises post-exercise stiffness, helps alleviate fatigue, promotes blood flow to joints and muscles and allows some recovery time for the mind, too.

“But it does require education. At the beginning, many people dismissed the idea of spending so long on recovery and would leave before the end of class. Very few people do so now, though. They’ve come to appreciate that, given the appropriate rate and type of recovery, higher training volumes and intensities are ultimately achievable without the detrimental effects of over-training. They’re able to do more sessions.

“We’re so convinced of the value of active recovery that we almost see it as ‘doing HIIT responsibly’.”

EXPERT INSIGHT

Missing a trick? – Richard Earney, national director of programming, Midtown Athletic Clubs

“Whether you’re a die-hard spinner or a weekend warrior, all the HIIT- and HISS-style classes on gyms’ timetables – coupled with a modern lifestyle that sees us hunched over a computer by day and binge-watching Netflix by night – means it’s vitally important to build some recovery and regeneration into our lives.

“Of course, HIIT and HISS has its place. It works. But too much of a good thing isn’t always a good thing.

“What’s needed is a shift in both mindset and programming, with every operator thinking about how to bake recovery and regeneration into their offering – and how to educate members along the way.

“At Midtown, we’ve built out two signature programmes: ReGen and StretchRX.

“For ReGen, think 60 minutes of myofascial release and trigger point work with foam rollers, tennis and lacrosse balls in our Samadhi (mind-body) studio. The lights are low, the room is warm, instrumental jazz plays in the background. It’s an experience: painful, but rewarding. It’s strategically placed on our group programming schedule and we’re seeing members – myself included – go out of their way to attend, building this class into their weekly routine.

“Meanwhile, the methodology of the StretchRX programme involves 30 minutes’ stretching and mobilisation using recovery and percussion tools. Carried out on massage tables in stretching and recovery areas around the club, this is a paid session delivered by a StretchRX coach.”

EXPERT INSIGHT

Know your audience – Jon Johnston, Reiver founder + UK distributor, BODY BIKE

“I suspect most gym-goers have a maximum of three or four workout days a week, which may make recovery less of a priority in their minds. However, doing nothing isn’t always the best recovery tool, and operators may be missing a trick – particularly for beginners and older adults – if they aren’t including some easier, recovery-focused (or simply steady state aerobic) cycling sessions on their timetables. A great option for a more sociable class, this is also an opportunity to educate on important but often overlooked aspects such as cadence, technique, mobility – and, of course, recovery.

“Structuring recovery into the programming is also vital for experienced, regular exercisers, albeit the format may differ. For example, the concept of polarised training – making easy sessions easy and the hard sessions properly hard – is gaining popularity in ‘serious cycling’ and has been shown to be very effective in steering riders away from a middle zone where levels of fatigue increase and improvement plateaus.

“Goal-orientated workout periodisation isn’t something clubs and studios have really got on top of yet, though. Periodisation is all about dividing a training season into smaller, more manageable phases, structuring training – including when to increase or decrease workload – to bring an individual to peak performance at the right time and manage performance across a long period.

“At the heart of this is avoiding overtraining – and with it the risks of injury, burnout and reduced workout motivation – making it as relevant to gyms as to serious cyclists. This is something the gym industry needs to get much better at, with more structure in the programming from week to week and much more focus on individual goals, fitness levels, motivation and time available to train.”

The post Is recovery the new fitness? appeared first on Ride High Magazine.

“If you consider the word ‘activist’, it means someone who brings about change,” explains Caroline Macklin, head of brand for Virgin Active. “We’ve listened to our members, upped our game and hired the best of the best to channel their vast knowledge into bringing about change in our group exercise offering.”

“In other companies, you have a head of group exercise,” adds SJ Aboboto, Virgin Active’s cycle activist. “Virgin Active has done things differently, bringing in expert instructors to each dedicate themselves to one of the ‘big five’ disciplines. It’s about getting the very best out of each product, raising things to an experiential level that heightens member satisfaction and encourages people to try new things and mix up their workout routines.”

Here, Aboboto tells us about the new group cycle programmes she’s created for Virgin Active, with a roll-out that starts this month.

What’s the rationale behind the new programming?

We’ve set out to define who we are – to define the Virgin Active experience across all our disciplines – so whichever club you go to, you know exactly what you’re going to get.

Within that, it’s important that the experience is unique to us – that we own the product and are able to keep evolving it – so each activist has been busy creating signature classes that bring the boutique studio experience into our clubs.

“We’ve set out to define who we are, so whichever of our clubs you go to, you know exactly what you’re going to get”

What this means is that, while instructors of course inject their unique energy and personality into their classes, the formats themselves will now be consistent – and classes of a consistently high quality – across all our clubs and studios.

This is an important change from where we’ve been up until now. In cycle, for example, all classes have historically just been called Group Cycle, with the style and format varying from instructor to instructor. Our new programmes will ensure a consistent, and consistently great, member experience.

What cycle concepts have you created?

I’ve designed four new signature classes: MOVE, TEMPO, POWER and PRO.

MOVE is a boutique-style concept that’s all about cycling to the beat: lots of choreography, upper body and weights. We don’t use the console at all in this class.

POWER is a performance-based class that’s similar to outdoor cycling, with an emphasis on technique and moving in and out of the saddle. The console is very important in this class, focusing on data as you push towards benchmarks and goals.

“I’ve had lots of instructors initially tell me ‘I only instruct power’, but by the time they’ve done the training, 90% have changed their minds”

TEMPO is a hybrid class that fuses power and rhythm cycling: some sections are simply to the beat, others are more focused on the console. There’s an option of upper body movement, but it’s more basic than in MOVE and if it isn’t your thing, that’s cool – just ride.

And then PRO is all about a connection between the bikes and a big screen at the front of class, with a heavy focus on data.

Each class has a blueprint, a journey to follow, with instructors able to inject their own musical choices onto this. Anyone wanting more guidance can access monthly templates with suggested music tracks – mixing genres, tempos and RPMs so there’s something for everyone – and more details on choreography.

What does this variety achieve?

First of all, it’s about inspiring new people into cycling, as well as keeping existing cycle fans happy with different styles of class: some like data and pushing themselves hard, others like to be distracted from the workout with music, choreography and upper body work. You have to ensure there’s something for everyone.

It’s also about ensuring instructors are happy, with a class style that fits the way they like to teach. If we want to deliver the best possible experience for members, they must be comfortable with what they’re teaching.

That said, the training process has been really interesting. I’ve had lots of instructors initially tell me ‘I only instruct power’, but by the time they’ve done the training – I train everyone in both programmes – 90 per cent have changed their minds.

Even if they don’t teach both, it’s really important to have a knowledge of both programmes, to answer member questions and to understand there’s no right or wrong. As long as everything you do on the bike is safe and has a purpose, it will bring something to the workout.

For example, the upper body weight track is something a lot of people question, because the weights aren’t heavy and the wattage not high. That’s true, but it brings fun, rhythm and co-ordination. It has its own benefits, so I’m keen that everyone is educated across all formats.

Really, my advice for members and instructors is the same: Just come and try it!

Tell us more about the training.

Even if you instruct at Virgin Active already, these are new products, so we’re supporting instructors with two weeks of e-learning followed by four weeks of face-to-face practicals and webinars. Finally, before go-live, there’s an assessment where you deliver a 20-minute ride including intro and outro.

“I constantly have an eye on how I want to evolve the product – where we can take it, what trends we can explore, what trends we can create”

We also take instructors to our Aldersgate club, our first full-experience studio, to get a real sense of how an immersive boutique experience should feel for our members.

Alongside this, we’re also developing our own Level 2 indoor cycle qualification, which we’ll release in Q4 of this year and run through The Virgin Active Academy at our Mansion House head office.

What’s the roll-out plan?

We’re initially launching TEMPO and POWER, with MOVE and PRO to follow shortly after.

TEMPO and POWER will launch in eight clubs this month and then roll out from there. In the classes I’ve been instructing recently, I’ve effectively been instructing TEMPO and I’ve had amazing feedback, but it’s still been under the Group Cycle label.

How about online classes?

We have a purpose-built studio at Mansion House where throughout lockdown, us activists have been filming classes for Virgin Active’s app; I’ve been doing cycle and dance.

This started during lockdown, but digital content was always part of our strategy and feedback from our members has been really positive. Club+ members have access to all our digital content included in their membership. Online+ members can get a free 30-day trial and then pay £9.99 a month, or £99.99 for 12 months upfront, which also gives them access to club passes: monthly Online+ membership gives you one club pass, an annual package gives you four, and you can buy more to suit your lifestyle.

We’re trying to provide complete flexibility in how people work out with us.

What does your typical day look like?

It’s totally different every day. I design programmes, instruct live classes, film on-demand content, run masterclasses, upskill instructors, develop the core team and nurture members who want to become instructors. I support clubs in achieving good levels of occupancy, retention and experience. And, of course, I constantly have an eye on how I want to evolve the product – where we can take it, what trends we can explore, what trends we can create. It’s a busy role!

“Music should be a driving force across all products, not just rhythm cycling but power-based classes too”

What’s your secret for a great class?

When you’re cycling outdoors, you have the scenery to inspire you. In the studio, it’s all down to the instructor and the music.

Music should be a driving force across all products, not just rhythm cycling but power-based classes too. Get it right and it enhances performance as well as the experience: your body naturally matches itself to the beat.

Music is an energising force and it sits at the heart of every great class.

The post Activism at Virgin Active appeared first on Ride High Magazine.

In 2005 – aged 35 and not having exercised since my teens – a friend got me into group exercise at a big box gym. I loved it. By 2007, I’d qualified as a Body Pump instructor, and by 2009 I was instructing RPM too.

By 2010, I was looking for more of a creative outlet and got into freestyle classes, then in 2012 I decided to break away from the big box gym environment. I wanted more of a connection with the people in my classes: to know names and stories, not just faces.

I joined forces with a few friends – in fact, there were 15 of us when we started! – to create Integrity. The name is inspired by the word ‘integer’, which means a whole number, undivided, a thing that’s complete in itself. That’s how we see group exercise: a strong community where you all come together as one. A real club.

We launched in 2012 with some pre-choreographed classes – we were the first in the state of Victoria to offer Les Mills GRIT and SPRINT – and then, in 2017, started getting more creative, adding in things like TRX, yoga and MMA.

By 2018 – although we do still offer barbell and conditioning classes to meet member demand – we’d reined it back in to focus on cycling as our bread and butter, including another first: we were the first club in Australia to launch Intelligent Cycling.

We’d also begun to offer more experiences, including rooftop rides and member road trips where we check out other studios and classes further afield. It’s all about building that sense of involvement, belonging and community.

What programmes do you offer now?

We run around 20 classes a week; if they sell out, we add more. Of these 20-ish classes, around 80 per cent are cycling, which I’ve recently categorised into four groups.

The first is Rhythm, which spans all our ‘intervals choreographed to music’ formats. We’re all qualified Spinning instructors, so that shapes some of these classes. But we’ve also signed up to A STATE OF RIDE (ASOR) which, although pre-choreographed, offers a reasonable level of flexibility.

The second category is Immersive, which includes Intelligent Cycling’s The Journey – where you cycle through a virtual world on the big screen – and our LIT! class, which I’ll tell you more about in a minute.

Thirdly, we have HIIT, which at the moment tends to be either intervals or time trials. We often use Intelligent Cycling here, too, putting the timer or performance stats on-screen. People love knowing what’s coming up next so they know how hard to push, plus we’ve found younger members in particular really engage with anything that involves a screen.

“Our members are hugely loyal. If you think about watching the soccer, with the home fans going mad behind the goal, that’s our members”

And finally, there’s a category I’m calling Competitive, which we’re still developing. We’ll definitely be bringing Zwift into the studio, though, creating an experience that uses our big screen as well as members’ phones. It could be power profile training – something we might even charge a premium for – or it could be more about social Zwift races. I don’t know yet. I don’t tend to design something and then build exactly that. My creative process is more like painting, where you start putting things down and then keep experimenting and building on what you’ve done until it’s finished.

Which are your most popular classes?

Around 80 per cent of our cycling classes fall into the Rhythm category. We offer the other stuff too – scattered throughout the week to hit different day parts and different members – because if you do group exercise for long enough, you will get bored and you’ll want some variety. But I think Rhythm formats – and, for that matter, cardio in general – have had a bad rap over recent years. It’s actually a really nice, low-tech disconnect – away from measurement and numbers and visual overload – and it’s still our main focus.

Our rooftop rides are especially popular, selling out every time. We only do them once a year though, at the beginning of spring, because taking bikes to the top of the tallest building in town is no small task!

Why aren’t all your classes freestyle?

You need experience to deliver a great freestyle class, and there are only three of us original founders left. For any new instructor coming in to the business, it’s great to have pre-choreographed content – ASOR – to learn the ropes. You can then move on to Intelligent Cycling, where you get to choreograph but don’t have to remember it all as the system prompts you, before progressing to freestyle.

Intelligent Cycling, to me, is almost perfect, not least because you choose your own music. I carefully match music to the virtual world we’re cycling through. For the aerial world with the dragons, for example, I choose very cinematic music mixed with rap for contrast. For space, I pick space-themed songs mixed with futuristic techno music. For the dinosaur-filled jungles, I choose world music, bongos, digeridoos.

I’d like a bit more scope to dictate the content of the virtual worlds themselves, but the Intelligent Cycling team tells me I’m more creative than the average customer! Some of my ideas have landed, though – the road now sets on fire when you’re in the highest zone, for example, which was my suggestion – so I’m going to keep chipping away!

Your members also influence your music choice. How?

I’ve created something I call ‘Algorhythm’, which allows members to influence the music in class without directly asking me to play a specific track, which likely wouldn’t be right for a cycling workout.

Any member who uses Spotify gives me the playlists it suggests for them based on what they’ve listened to – Discover Weekly, for example. Algorhythm then puts all these tracks through an algorithm I’ve set up – a ‘what I think works for indoor cycling’ filter – which uses information Spotify can tell us about each track: its energy, dance-ability, how acoustic it is, how instrumental, how happy…

Off the back of this, Algorhythm automatically gives me a weekly shortlist of 100 songs in Spotify – songs that will appeal to members and that will work for indoor cycling. I listen to them and hit ‘like’ on the ones I want to use; I normally keep around 10 per cent. In this way, our members contribute to the music at the club just by listening to Spotify.

Over time, the AI behind Algorhythm also builds up libraries of my ‘liked’ songs that match specific criteria: high-energy, instrumental, 80 RPM intervals and so on. It means I can easily find exactly what I need, knowing the members have also recommended it and I like it.

It’s transformed our approach to music and our younger members in particular love it – good news, as attracting younger members was a key driver. Older members are 50/50, but only because they miss tunes that have become familiar. They’ll get new favourites soon though – we only launched Algorhythm this year – because older tracks still get through. It’s purely about how a song feels. It’s nothing to do with genre, era or artist.

I can see us commercialising this system in the future. The filter would probably just need to be set up differently for each club, as everyone will have a different view on what makes for perfect indoor cycling music.

You’ve created your own AV system too. Tell us more.

I’ve always found lighting systems to be a backdrop or even a distraction in-class, but felt they could be so much more. I then had a dream about a class with fantastic lighting and I started looking into what I’d need to do to make it happen.

Most lights cost around A$600 each, but I found some for A$30 each on one of those bargain websites and bought 60 of them! I had them all on my kitchen table, trying to figure out how to use them, and found some equipment that allowed me to synchronise the lights to music.

I also found a guy in the US – a lighting director in a church where they regularly had Christian rockbands with thousands attending – and he’d written his own software for the lighting. I bought it, and it allows me to send specific instructions to each individual light for every split-second of every song: when to pulse, strobe, what colour to turn and so on. We have around 5,000 data points flying around the studio for every split-second of music.

We created the whole system for A$3,000, plus A$2,000 for a new computer, with members funding it entirely with donations just because they knew it would be great. The tradespeople among our membership then helped me build it into the studio.

“It takes around 15 hours per song to choreograph the lights to the music, so we only do this for our LIT! class, which we treat more like an event than a normal class”

It takes around 15 hours per song to choreograph the lights to the music, by the time you’ve worked out what you want the lights to do, then programmed them to do that. So we only do this for our LIT! class, which we treat more like an event than a normal class, running it about once a month. We use the same soundtrack and lighting choreography for about six months, putting LIT! in different places on the timetable so different members get to experience it.

I deliberately pick songs with lots of interesting elements I can attach lighting to – drops, fade and explode, cool sound effects, strong snare drum and so on – so the lighting becomes almost as important as the music. It’s a really immersive experience.

Tell us more about your community.

We’re tiny. We have 150–200 members visiting our 200sq m studio in the basement of a building, with classes typically catering for 15–20 people. But our members are hugely loyal. The way I talk about them: if you think about watching the soccer, with the home fans going mad behind the goal, that’s our members!

Most sign up to an unlimited class package, which at A$40 a week places us in the mid-market. And they get really into it. Some people come a couple of times a week, some six or seven, but our average is around four weekly visits per member.

Ballarat is hugely competitive for fitness, so it’s hard to get new people in, but we fill lower performing classes using a pay as you go model. Many of these customers ultimately convert to membership.

If people are new to cycling, I’ll spend some time one-to-one with them, getting them to sit on the bike and pedal while they chat to me. We’ll then talk about riding to a rhythm, standing in the pedals and so on, and I’ll tell them when they’re ready for class. Ours isn’t a huge club, so I don’t spend too many hours a week doing this, but if you throw someone straight into a class and they have a bad experience, they’ll never come back. You have to look at the potential lifetime value of each member. You have to invest in their future membership.

In the process, I get to know all about them, their families, their dogs! It builds community and is a good model for a small club like ours.

And when we’re in class together, it really is a community. Old or young, we’re in it together. Actually, I think our older members enjoy the energy the younger ones bring.

And we have managed to get younger people in. This generation is so swayed by Instagram, they feel they have to look perfect. We focus on providing a ‘pressure off’ experience – we’re clear you don’t have to be superhuman at Integrity – and we’ve gained a few what I call ‘refugees’ escaping that pressure they felt at other clubs.

How have you fared during COVID?

We’ve had five lockdowns now: one big one and then a series of shorter ones. The fifth ended today [interview conducted 27 July 2021] so we’re back to class tomorrow.

So far, though, we’ve been OK financially. All our members have carried on paying throughout – they’ve wanted to do whatever they could to support us – and we’ve had some assistance too.

On day one, we sent equipment out to everyone who wanted it, from bikes to barbells. Others were happy doing yoga, so only needed mats. And some wanted to buy their own bikes; I got them a good deal with BODY BIKE and put the bikes together for them, delivering them to their houses.

Days two to four, we set ourselves up to live-stream using a platform called dacast.com, where you can live-stream to a schedule in a password-protected area behind your website. That allowed us to take advantage of a six-month music streaming licence from OneMusic Australia, so we didn’t fall foul of any music rights – one of the biggest headaches with online provision. We’ve live-streamed our way through every lockdown.

“We’re clear you don’t have to be superhuman at Integrity and we’ve gained a few what I call ‘refugees’ escaping that pressure they felt at other clubs”

Then each time we’ve re-opened, members have come straight back, even when all we could offer were classes in the car park. Honestly, I think they’d come back even if we were just doing runs up and down the street! And when we were able to move back indoors, we were pretty much back to normal: our classes have always been small, so our capacity has been unaffected by COVID restrictions.

What are your plans for Integrity moving forward?

Everything we do works, but it’s bootstrapped. I’d love to streamline our AV so the systems are easy for everyone to use, not just me.

I’m looking into video mapping, potentially putting 3D objects – big spheres and things – into the studio to project video onto.

And I’d love to get a bigger, high definition screen. We have a 4m projection system at the moment – the projector we got for free from a local school that was closing down – but I’d love to upgrade that system to make it even more immersive.

I also want to see how far we can take the immersive side of things. Each bike has a spotlight above it, so what if we could link our lighting to individual cyclists’ wattage or cadence? If we can, it paves the way for games during class where performance data controls the lights in a fun, competitive way.

We could have red versus green teams in a sprint, for example, where you have to sprint when the light above you turns white; your turn ends when your wattage drops too low and your light turns back to red or green. Or we could do ‘tug of war’, where if you aren’t pedalling hard enough you’re lost to the other side and your light changes colour to bring you into their team.

There’s so much I want to explore. I just have to find the time! And I’d love to see the rest of the indoor cycling sector follow suit. Why should everything be controlled by a few big global organisations? Let’s get creative as a community, trying new things out and seeing what flowers.

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