Great post Zeek! So true, so many ways to mix it up.

Violette, Zeek hit upon all the main positions on the bike for endless combos in profiles. Sprints is another technique. You can also do a special profile dedicated to one kind of ride or goal. Sounds like your teacher does mainly what is called "interval".

Some spin energy zones are called: interval, endurance, recovery, resistance, race day (would have to dig my manual out if I missed any ).

An endurance ride for example would focus on keeping your heart rate in the low end of the aerobic zone, or fat burning zone.

When I first became a spinner, and a teacher would annouce this type of ride, I would groan with some of the others at what a bore. One teacher would just have us get our cadence and resistence to a point where our heat rate would be in this zone, then just sit there in the saddle that way for the whole hour. I thought I might scream any minute...could stayed home and did that one in my cycleops--ugh.

Now that I have been thru the teacher's course, I have a whole other appreciation for this. It does NOT have to be taught boring. Recently, a diff teacher used all diff bike positions Zeek talked about during this one ride, and varying resistence and cadence, in a ladder pyramid style, all still with the heart rate being maintained consistent.

Now, mentally that is a real challenge in my opinion, and also really works some finer skills of breathing etc. when you get to the end and are getting tired, particularly on the climbs...still staying lower heart rate. It is aerobic base building.

We have computers on our spin bikes that show cadence, miles, time, picks up heart rate monitors in bpms, and I usually have my Polar set to % for heart rate, so I can get a read both ways. Keeping control throughout, is tougher than you'd think.

A couple other things she suggested was using an outdoor local race profile, or a stage of the Tour De France, and mimiac that into a spin profile. Pretty cool for outdoor cyclists that are spinners too.

Just a class interactive exercise was an example using jumps. Like telling the class you were gonna do a 100 jumps. However... each rider in the class was going to take a turn teaching 5 of the jumps and go down the line of bikes. One person might do single jumps, one per second.... the next might do one jump 10 seconds up, and 10 seconds down etc.

A fun thing with music was suggested that you could do a spinners listener appreciation ride... people sign up on a sheet of a song or artist that they would like to hear, and you create class around that for something fun and different.

Just the surface of what I learned... my brain still hurts!