THE SPIN CYCLE

The Spin Cycle

Bottom line: Spinning is not the optimal exercise for body fat loss.

Given: Some exercise is better than no exercise. Spinning is better than sitting on the couch. And fat loss is not the only benefit of exercise.

But, spinning is not the best exercise for the 2-5X/week cardio crowd who are trying to improve their body composition.

Now, before you get your spandex in a wad, please note that I am not saying that spinning cannot lead to weight loss or that exercise itself is the best way to lose weight.

I am just saying that there are much better ways to lose body fat if you have a limited amount of time to exercise.

The American College of Sports Medicine (my certifying body and the most prestigious fitness and sports medicine organization in the world) reports from their Energy Expenditure in Different Modes of Exercise summary paper:

Cycling and recumbent cycling are two very popular non-weight-bearing exercise modes, whereas walking and jogging are popular exercises in the weight-bearing category. At the same level of intensity, most persons will expend more calories performing a weight-bearing activity. An additional benefit of weight-bearing exercise is maintaining bone mass and preventing osteoporosis.

With that being said, I do not typically recommend that my clients run long distance for any reason unless they are endurance athletes.

In fact, my overall position is that unless you are a serious athlete who trains an hour to three hours daily, expecting any exercise routine to lead to an appreciable amount of weight loss is pretty unrealistic for most people.

Yes, I know there are exceptions and you’ll probably bombard me with all sorts of anecdotal evidence, but the science really doesn’t support it, especially for women.

If you want to optimize your body composition through fat loss, then dietary manipulation is the key. Exercise is necessary for building and maintaining muscle mass.

High volume, moderate-intensity (4-6 METs, for about 300-360 minutes/week) does play an important role in preventing weight regain, once weight has been lost.

If you are a recreational exerciser who just wants to look good and be healthy, then 2-3 resistance training sessions plus a moderate amount of cardio is the way to go.

 Now, back to spinning. Spending X minutes on a cardiovascular exercise class primarily focused on building lower-limb strength-endurance isn’t exactly an optimal use of your time

One thing the field of exercise physiology has established is that with training, the human body learns how to be more efficient/economical in fueling > 60 minutes of work (be it running, cycling, swimming, resistance training).

In other words, as performance (or exercise tolerance) improves for 60 minute of continuous physical activity (e.g. spinning class), much of that improvement in performance comes from an improvement in movement economy.

What does this mean?

It means that performance improves when our bodies learn how to expend less energy to accomplish the same amount of work. This phenomena is essential to becoming a superior endurance athlete, however, becoming more efficient is not ideal if what you are seeking is fat loss.

Instead of training your body to tolerate longer periods of exercise you will produce fat loss more effectively by getting stronger and/or faster

So, a better use of limited exercise time is to focus on covering a fixed distance faster (say 1-5 km for running ) as opposed to trying to fill up an hour’s time with more work (be it running or cycling).

Of course, cardiorespiratory training has many other health benefits other than fat loss. But, in terms of optimizing body composition, long periods (> 30 minutes) of cardiovascular exercise aren’t the best use of any recreational exerciser’s time.

And, as I stated earlier, this lack of benefit is more pronounced in females than males.

We also must account for the S.A.I.D. principle when it comes to exercise.

S.A.I.D. stands for:

a.S: Specific

b.A: Adaptations

c.        I: Imposed

d.D: Demands

The specific term in this principle also accounts for why we don’t get better at swimming just because we can run for 2 hours.

Small, Strong or Skilled

In general, there are three ways to make movement easier: gain more muscle, carry less weight (generally in the form of body fat, but occasionally also in the form of less muscle as in the case of long-distance athletes) or become more efficient with our movement patterns (become more skilled).

Let’s call this the “small, strong or skilled” response to training. In other words, whenever you subject your body to a novel exercise stimulus, your body has to decide what’s the fastest route to improvement.

For most of us, improving our movement pattern happens first.

During the initial several weeks, spinning expends quite a large number of calories. However, once you master the correct sequence of muscle firing, you become incredibly efficient and are able to skate for hours, as you learn how to conserve energy during the glide phase of each stride.

Unfortunately, as you become a more efficient, you are no longer doing much for body re-composition.

The Sins of the Spin

Spinning follows a very similar pattern of “improvement”. Initially, spinning presents a challenge so you expend a reasonable number of calories while doing it. However, you rapidly become better at biking and learn how to effectively move your legs in a fashion that conserves the most energy possible.

While conserving energy is awesome if you are a competitive cyclist trying to win a race… this is an absolutely garbage phenomenon for individuals using exercise as a weight loss tool.

Compounding the negative aspects of spinning are the following factors:

▪   no wind resistance to overcome

▪   no side-to-side sway, little upper body activation

▪   it is weight supported!

▪   Reinforces kyphotic position

▪   Tightens hip flexors

The first two factors are simple difference between spin bikes and cycling outdoors (which still suffers in comparison to many other forms of cardio training), but the presence of bodyweight support is critical.

Whenever you remove having to support your body weight from the cardio equation (i.e. spinning, elliptical, arc trainer), then suddenly cardio becomes a whole lot more ineffective for weight loss.

In fact, when you support your weight with a bike frame, movement typically becomes more efficient by:

1.your legs storing more fuel

2.your legs building more muscle tissue

Do either of these outcomes sounds like they are going to make people any thinner? Actually, the far more likely outcome from spinning is that it will make your legs bigger and more muscular. And it will do absolutely nothing for your upper body, resulting in a bottom-heavy appearance like a Tour de France cyclist.

Obviously, if you were to start spinning for 3-5 hours a day, then you might actually see some mass loss.

So when time to exercise is <5 hours per week and you want to use cardio as a weight loss tool, opt for running –especially sprinting and HIIT- or the StairMaster. Since both of these activities require you to carry your entire body mass with each step (unlike the bike or elliptical), the logical adaptation your body will undergo is: drop mass.

 
 But I love the adrenaline rush of my spinning class! I love the music and the screeching instructor!

That addictive adrenaline boost might be the very reason spinning exercise damages your metabolism, creates more oxidative stress, and actually makes you fat.

Endurance Exercise Stresses You Out

Let’s define endurance exercise as anything over 20 minutes you do at a steady, moderate to moderately high intensity.

Endurance exercise is bad because:

e.            Endurance training raises stress hormones that break down lean muscle tissue. Muscle helps boost your metabolism all day long.

f.        You burn more fat during exercise. However, a lower intensity doesn’t require any metabolic post-exercise repair. In other words, fat burning and metabolism are not enhanced post-workout, so you get limited overall metabolic benefits.

g.            Lower-intensity exercise means you burn fewer calories during exercise. Yes, you burn more fat, but that fat burning doesn’t account for many overall calories.

True, HIIT also raises stress hormones. But you’re also raising anabolic (building) hormones that counteract the stress hormones’ negative effects. Better yet, short bursts train your body to handle stress and recover. Repeated, intense bursts also raise lactic acid, which spikes growth hormone and supports fat burning.

Studies show the more intense your exercise, the bigger metabolic cost you create when you’re done. In other words, metabolic recovery burns more calories, particularly fat calories, post-exercise.

And now, for another opinion:

What Charles Poliquin Has To Say About Spinning To Lose Fat From Your Legs…

Charles Poliquin is a fitness god.

This is an article by Charles Poliquin from Oxygen magazine when interviewed about how he transformed fitness model Chrissy May.

What is your take on spinning?

A complete waste of time. Counter productive at best. Want fat legs keep spinning!

When fitness model Chrissy May hired me to get ready for her Oxygen magazine photo shoots, I first asked what her current exercise was. She told me that spinning was part of training program and yet complained that getting lean legs was her biggest challenge.

I told her to drop the spinning immediately, and that she would see results in a matter of a few days. She was quite reluctant, claiming that spinning “made her legs feel tighter”. In my usual diplomatic style, somewhat to the right of the Attilla the Hun, I countered that insanity is defined as doing the same things over and over again and expecting different results.

Yes spinning is very tiring, is it productive? NO. Where I live in Scottsdale AZ where spinning is more por than tanning for skin cancer. It is attended by women who are as fat in the lower extremities as when I saw them exit their class two years ago when I moved here.

Why is spinning so useless if I am getting a great workout from it? Because the high velocities fatigue a particular point in the neuro-muscular junction which is responsible for the rapid firing rate of the motor units, you perceive great fatigue even though little work has been done.

When you think about it, you could reproduced the same type of fatigue in your triceps if I asked you to hold a pair of fly swatters and swat an imaginary 100 flys in 30 seconds. Would you triceps get tired, sure.

Would they improve significantly in terms of conditioning. NO. Why? Because the resistance is not high enough to elicit the hormonal response needed to create adaptive response that would bring about positive body composition changes.

In spinning exercise, the body adapts by storing both intra-muscular and subcutaneous fat in the thigh and hip areas to provide a more readily available source of fuel for the aerobic recovery periods.

The body figures out, if I store fat there it reduces the time to get to the muscles to provide the energy source. Result: Kobe beef thighs and butt, all plump and marbled with fat inside.

Going back to Chrissy May, she dropped from 15% bodyfat to 9% in three weeks after she switched from the useless spinning to high resistance interval training. Point in case.

The bottom line in my opinion is this….spinning classes do NOT provide the most effective means for getting toned, lean, and muscular legs.

That will be best accomplished with resistance training doing things like squats and lunges. Of course a broad mix of training variables is always going to produce the best results. A little bit of interval training, some heavier resistance, HIIT training, changes in volume, rest periods, etc.

The point is you use resistance training to build lean muscle and cardio for well…cardio. Trying to interchange components of a fitness program doesn’t work very well.

The problem with spinning and other extended cardio sessions like Zumba classes is that after about 30 minutes your body releases the hormone Cortisol. This itself isn’t a problem but there is an absence of Growth Hormone and Testosterone in cardio sessions to combat the cortisol. These hormones are released when you weight train. Cortisol is our fight or flight hormone and will remain in your blood for a long period of time, extending its adverse effects on body composition and muscle growth.

What does this mean to you? Well, it means greater fat storage in the very areas most of you that spin are trying to lose fat from: Legs, hips, bums and tums. Yes, that’s right, it will make you store fat in the areas you are trying to lose it from. Thirdly, and if I remember correctly, the spin mentality is to go as fast and as hard as possible, really working hard and sweating buckets. Well extended cardio sessions like spin have been SCIENTIFICALLY proven to decrease muscle mass, strength and power, and will make your fast twitch muscle fibers perform like slow twitch fibers. This means it will make your muscles slower and weaker and we have already established previously that it is the opposite of what every guy and girl needs to maintain a healthy balance of muscle and to lose body fat.

If you die-hard spinners have to spin, do it no more than once a week, and better still, walk out after 30 minutes, before that dreaded cortisol kicks in and starts to store fat in your buttocks!

Better yet, get off your ass and start doing some real work!