Gym & Studio Advice

Whether you’ve been teaching for one month, one year, or fifteen years, keeping your classes innovative and fresh can be exhausting. 

Let our Master Educator team take the guesswork out of planning your next class with Stages Signature Rides!

Stages Signature Rides are carefully designed templates for indoor cycling instructors to use in their classes. Every class is created by a Stages' Master Educator and aligns with Stages Cycling University's  best practice guidelines. Each template comes with everything you need to deliver an amazing class experience, including:

• Class plan
• Timing for each segment
• Cueing & instructions
• Music suggestions

The best part is that they are entirely free!

Our Naughty & Nice Signature Ride perfectly blends fat-burning efforts with heart-pumping intervals to provide a challenging, yet effective workout for your body and mind. 

Rides that alternate between light steady work and anaerobic intervals provide several benefits, including:

1. Improved cardiovascular fitness: Alternating intervals challenge your heart and lungs to work harder.
2. Increased endurance: Steady-state work and high-intensity intervals increase your endurance and ability to sustain effort over longer periods.
3. Improved muscle strength and endurance: Anaerobic intervals tap into your leg muscles and produce big strength and endurance gains. 
4. Enhanced fat burning: Light, steady work increases your metabolism and promotes fat burning, both of which help you to achieve your weight loss goals.
5. Better mental focus and stress relief: The anaerobic portions of this workout are purposeful, not just for the body, but also for the mind. Distractions and stress become a thing of the past as you focus on pushing through the intervals, all the while knowing that a nice recovery block is on the other side. 

The High & Low Signature Ride is one of our favorites because it allows your riders to economize their effort while maximizing the benefits of high-intensity threshold training.

This rich rate of perceived exertion (RPE) template empowers riders to hit a 7 or 8 on a scale of 1-10 and then dials things back the intensity to a 3-5. This straightforward format holds no secrets. Riders can trust that lighter work is just beyond the harder effort, enabling them to train hard and reap the benefits of the higher RPE segments. The ebb and flow nature of this ride gives riders a feeling of accomplishment, without having to go home to take a nap to recover. 

Give it a try and let us know what you think. 

Here are five reasons we love our 30-Second Interval ride:

1. Increases cardiovascular fitness: Intervals improve your heart and lung function, leading to a stronger cardiovascular system.
2. Improves endurance: Intervals help you train at higher intensities for longer periods of time, improving your endurance.
3. Time-Efficient: Interval training provides a high-intensity workout in a shorter period of time compared to longer, steady-state workouts.
4. Burns a ton of calories during and after the ride is over 
5. Variety: Intervals add variety to your indoor cycling workout, and keep your riders engaged and motivated.

What are Descending Intervals? 

Descending Intervals can produce big-time gains in your student’s speed and power. Like most High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) workouts, Descending Intervals alternate between high intensity and lower intensity segments of work, but what makes them unique is that the high intensity intervals get shorter as the workout progresses. The efforts are short, and both the effort and recovery durations change throughout the class, which requires your riders to stay focused on what they’re doing. Active and engaged riders are happy riders, so give this ride a try and let us know what you think. 

If you are looking for an efficient way to expand your student’s aerobic ceiling, look no further than this month’s signature ride! 

Stages’ Ladder ride synthesizes three effort segments: 

• Comfortable effort: fully aerobic, fat burning, sustainable 
• Moderate effort: mostly aerobic, calorie burning, decreasing sustainability
• Hard effort: aerobic/anaerobic mix, glucose burning, not sustainable 

It might sound intense, but this class is more bark than it is bite. The structure is not only fun and motivating, but it also produces true cardiovascular gains. 

Trust us; you and your students will love it!

There’s a reason why everyone’s talking about High-Intensity Interval Training (HIIT): it works! 

The simple combination of short bursts of fierce effort, followed by periods of rest gives the entire body, especially the heart, a great workout. Stages’ HIIT & Steady Ride crushes calories by combining the perfect amount of intervals with strength-building steady-state efforts. 

Give it a try and let us know what you think.

Self-care. 

It’s a popular buzzword, and for good reason! Self-care is a crucial aspect of our overall health and well-being, and this is especially true for fitness instructors. As a fitness professional, you spend your day helping others improve their physical and mental health, but it is just as important for you to prioritize your own self-care. By taking better care of yourself, you can reduce stress and burnout, improve your performance and ability to inspire others, and model healthy behaviors for your clients.

The key to creating a flourishing group exercise program and a successful career in fitness is an ongoing commitment to growth and training. The fitness industry is constantly evolving, and it’s crucial to align with new knowledge in order to deliver safe, effective, and unforgettable classes. A passion for people and a love for cycling are great motivators, but they aren’t enough to set you apart from everyone else. 

Here are five reasons why SCU certifications and workshops are worth the investment.

With 126 locations (100 in the UK and 26 across Ireland and Europe), David Lloyd Clubs is a prominent leader in the health and fitness industry. They pride themselves in being a fitness destination for families and community members to connect and be active. To accomplish this goal, David Lloyd Clubs uses a comprehensive wellness approach for programming, especially in the area of group fitness. We sat down with Marie Graham, Lloyd’s Product Head Cycling Director, to gain some insight on how they are taking their indoor cycling classes to the next level with Stages Indoor Bikes and Stages Studio.

Whether you’re training to win a world championship, training for your first race, or just riding for fun, a power meter can be the single best tool to increase your fitness and cycling performance. This guide will tell you all you need to know about power meters and why you need to ride with one.

It's no secret that when we find the perfect balance between work and rest, our fitness gains skyrocket.  But it can be hard to trust the truth that the magic happens when we allow ourselves to rest and recover. We are told to work harder and go farther, but doing that all of the time only sets us up to fail, or get hurt.  It's time to stop the glorification of workouts that almost kill people, and start training smarter. 

From a few elite pro cyclists in the late ‘80s to indoor cycling studios all over the world, cycling with a power meter has become a standard both indoors and out. Here are the top reasons why teaching indoor cycling with a power meter can bring your classes and your members’ experiences to the next level!

Hands up if you like to see how far you’ve ridden, or how many calories you’ve crushed after a hard indoor cycling class. Data is rewarding and motivating, and data-backed workouts can make even the toughest ride feel purposeful and fun!

With the rise of power meters being used indoors, our indoor cycling world seems to have become hyper-divided between power-purist studios and rhythm-based studios. If you love cycling and find yourself putting together playlists for imaginary classes, then consider becoming a certified indoor cycling instructor. Here's what you need to know about becoming an indoor cycling instructor.

Most fitness centers experience an influx of new members around the start of the new year. Here are tips for keeping those new members engaged with your facility, while balancing the comfort and needs of your longtime, loyal members as well.