So I decided to go to the gym on Tuesday. I hadn’t gone in weeks, so I wanted to see if it helped. The answer? Not sure.
I have noticed a lot of muscle development in my quads, which makes the sides of my legs look hollow. I’ve been thinking about mixing weights into my workouts, so this was the first day of that. Warmed up on the treadmill, then went downstairs to get some resistance training. Did three sets of abductor/adductor work, lat pulldowns and leg raises to start building core strength. Then I did 30 minutes on the elliptical trainer to cool down. I thought I kept everything pretty mellow because I knew I’d have spin class the following day, which always kicks my ass.
Fast-forward to tonight. Patrick has selected interval training as our method of torture for the night. After we warm up, the first drill is to alternate between 60 RPM and 120 RPM, 30 seconds at each pace, without backing off the resistance. 120 is a lot faster than I normally pedal (at the gym, I top out at 110) and did I mention that Patrick wanted us to increase the resistance every couple of sets? Yeah, that sucked. I couldn’t do it. My legs felt dead after a dozen sets of that. I think I saw 220 Watts on the readout, which is higher than I push when I’m doing standing climbs.
Speaking of standing climbs, the next kind of interval was more my style. We kept the RPM at about 65-70, but alternated between 1 minute of high-resistance standing climbs and 30 seconds of recovery time at a much lower resistance. I got through it, but it was a killer. Not only was my water bottle almost empty at the end, but I’d gone through two towels and my shirt was completely soaked.
One other thing that didn’t exactly help: I didn’t eat dinner before spin class. I’ll not make that mistake again.
Now I’m all spun up (no pun intended) and don’t feel the least bit sleepy. I’d wanted to ride my bike to work tomorrow in case our long Saturday ride gets canceled (big storm in the forecast), but I don’t know if I can get up in time to do that. We’ll have to see how I feel in about 8 hours.