Training 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.

Get the most out of your Stages SB20 Smart Bike and Zwift with these helpful setup tips and recommendations. 

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.

Without data, it’s impossible to know how far you’ve come or if your workouts are effectively moving you toward your goals. But what's the best approach to analyzing your workouts, heart rate, or power?

When it comes to our health and athletic performance, the importance of fascia cannot be overstated. The majority of all injuries occur in the fascia or fascia-related tissues, so learning about how to keep these tissues healthy can be a real game-changer. Fascia training also boosts training programs by adding something essential that might be missing. Similar to how a multi-vitamin can bridge nutritional gaps, fascia training supplements every system of the body and keeps us moving like a well-oiled machine.

Cycling is fun and is one of the most effective ways to improve your health! I dare you to try to find another low-impact form of cardio that not only takes you from point A to point B, but also boosts the metabolism, builds muscles, burns body fat, and helps you lose weight! 

It’s a vehicle of adventure, matching the level of adrenaline, speed, and scenery preferences of every rider. And it’s a life-long sport that accommodates the slow and steady beach cruiser to the fast and fierce road bike racer, and everyone in between. 

With all of these benefits at hand, who wouldn’t want to become a cyclist?

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.

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!

GPS Cycling computers have been around for about 20 years, and have quickly become a cyclist’s best friend. But with so many options available, how do you know if you need a bike computer, and if so, which one might be right for you?