The Oracle of Apollo Snippets from the life of Apollo Lee

Trying Out the Trainer

Today, I wanted to try something a little different. I went to the movies with a friend and didn’t get back to my house until 7:30. That left about 45 minutes for me to get into my workout clothes, walk the ¾ mile to the track, stretch out, and walk home. I didn’t think I had enough time. So, I opted to try out a nice spin on the CycleOps Mag Trainer I bought almost a year ago and haven’t used.

I really wanted to see what would happen if I stayed within my target heart rate zone. So, I got into my cycling clothes, set up the trainer on the back porch, filled up my water bottle, found my iPod, and got ready to go. First, I noticed that it was quite difficult to get the non-gear side of my Trek 520 into the trainer. Either it doesn’t fit or I just need more practice getting it in there tight and secure.

I started to spin, remembered to try to keep my intensity down (you know, under 100% HR max), and listening to Zero 7‘s first album. Nine songs came and went. Occasionally, I pushed through the ceiling of my heart rate zone, but a larger-than-usual percentage was in the zone.

Maybe I should finally go down to the shop and pick up an Astrale 8 or pop the extra coin for a double wireless CC-CD300DW so I can get more metrics, like cadence and distance, from my sessions on the mag trainer. My current Mity 8 doesn’t have a cadence feature, but has a resettable odometer. The Astrale 8 has cadence with a rear wheel mount, but no resettable odometer (which is okay for non-road trainer rides). The CC-CD300DW has both and a bunch of other features to boot, but costs about $120 (much less than I’d anticipated).

Let’s look at the numbers for today:

• Time: 45:00
• Time in Zone: 21:58
• Heart Rate Max: 180 bpm (98%)
• Heart Rate Avg: 164 bpm (89%)
• Energy burned: 716 kCal (25% fat)

Lessons:

1. At high intensity (averaging 80 – 90% of HR max), fat provides half the calories burned during the workout. Since half my workout today was at that intensity (and the other half over that), 25% of the calories I burned today were fat. Lowering the intensity to 60% will burn more fat (80% of calories, if I can stay in that zone).
2. Burning greater calories as fat is key to losing weight. Lower weight means improved athletic performance, so varying between long low-intensity workouts and short high-intensity workouts seems the most efficient use of my efforts.
3. Trying to maintain a fully circular pedal stroke with equal intensity all the way around minimizes jerky work and stress on the knees, probably (I need to fully test this) lowering the heart rate and increasing the performance.
4. Waving my arms does not get the outside motion sensing light to come on.
5. Singing is a good way to measure aerobic performance. If you can sing along without panting, you’re probably going too easy. If you can only sing every other line between gulping for air, ease back.

Weigh-in time!

Apollo’s Statistics

Height: 70 inches (1.778 m)

Weight: 191.0 lb (86.64 kg) [-5.0 lb]

BMI: 27.41 (-0.72) [Overweight]

Goal Weight: 165 lb (74.84 kg) [23.67 BMI]

[…] Yesterday, as I was wandering around in my car, which I drive about once a week, I decided I should swing by Bicycle Outfitter for the first time in about 8 months, and buy a cyclometer that works with my back wheel and counts cadence. I picked up the feature-rich Cateye Astrale 8, so that I can keep track of some metrics for my work on the mag trainer I own. I’ve ridden on the trainer only twice before (Aug 13 and Aug 14), but as winter sets in and there are more rainy cold days, I imagine it will be far too tempting to drive my car to the train station (instead of doing my normal marching commute) and spin a session in my bike room on the trainer to make up the calories. […]