*UPDATE* Psychological Effects of Heart Rate Monitor Use Study

12/21/2010: Preliminary results were reported at Indoor Cycle Instructor in October 2010. Manuscript in preparation. Once published, results will be made available on this site and at ICI.

Tuesday, October 28, 2008

Breathing, revisited.

Has it seriously been 5 weeks since I've last updated this blog that I used to keep up with every few days?! How time flies when you're having fun... or when you're being a first-year medical student, at least.

I'm days away from debuting what I hope to be a life-altering ride. I call it "The Fear Ride"- I'm doing it for a 75 minute endurance class I teach here in Burlington, this one on Halloween. (I've been toying with it since last April -- fo' real -- and was going to do it as part of my Summer 2008 Theme Scheme, but never finished perfecting it. It's about tapping into your greatest fear/weakness that holds you back, working through and conquering it, and then celebrating your freedom achieved by having shed that fear.) I'll write all about it and how to re-create it -- or a shorter version of it -- for yourself. And, for any of you New Yorkers who will be in town over Thanksgiving when I come back: at the request of some of your fellow riders who got word of this monstrosity of a ride, I'll be doing a 45-minute version of it.

So, that profile will be up at some point in the "Coach Yourself" DIY training corner, as well as a few simple, easily replicable/modifiable cardio profiles.

For now, I'm going to do something that I've never done before on "Spintastic." I'm going to re-post something old. When I wrote this over the summer, as some of you may recall, I slaved over it for hooooooours and then made 3 rides out of it -- parts of which are now key elements of pretty much every ride I ever teach. But now, I've actually dissected all of these things I wrote about (crazy...), and seen them work and break down. When I went back and re-read what I had written, the world made so much sense -- and not just because I now live in a place with air 50000x cleaner than NYC. My first thought, upon leaving the lab at midnight (yes, instead of living on a bike, I live elbow-deep in... use your imagination) was that I wanted to rush home and remind Spintastic readers to BREATHE!

And, so, click here for one of my favorite-ever postings about improving your breathing techniques -- for life both on the bike, and in every realm of your life.