newbie question, please bash me after I get my first explanation of how spinervals work.

I think i was misled on how spinervals work. I was under the impression that the video followed along with you on your trainer and you had to adjust your trainers resistance to simulate hills, mountains, etc.

How exactly do they work? do you need a specific model trainer so you can adjust to the spinerval videos?

Any input is appreciated, i've looked over their site and have yet to find an explanation on how they work. Their intro video was pointless...

It may be possible for the spinervals videos to control a trainer but I'm not sure. The way they work is you get on your bike and pedal your a$$ off while Coach Troy tells you what to do . Seriously though, he'll guide you through the workout by saying such things as "Change to big chain ring", "Shift down two gears", etc. On the screen you'll see a timer of accumulated workout time and a count down timer for the current exercise set. They are great!

Cool. I was just curious. I have a trainer on loaner from a friend and he wants it back. So i'm in the market for a new trainer.....luckily Nashbar has theirs on clearance..

What zack said. Most any trainer will work, but for Coach Troy, it definitely needs to be a setup that allows you to stand (not that I'm aware of any that don't).

An adjustable resistance trainer is nice for fine tuning resistance since you're trying to keep your effort in a certain effort zone. If you have it, he recommends setting it in the middle. But without the adjustment, you can just tweak the gear recommendations as necessary.

If you don't have an HRM, that's almost a must. Cadence is nice, but you can just duplicate the riders in the video, or count revs for 10 secs and multiply by 6.

I set my cyclops trainer about the mid-resistance and hammer away to Coach Troy. My fav DVD is Suffer-O-rama. I also enjoy the CTS system as well. CTS is designed not to trash and grind you into the ground... LOL OK, I could not resist repeating their intro, since I have heard it what seems like a million times. It is a much different workout, and a nice change of pace.

dfchatten: Which of the CTS DVD's do you have? I just picked up the TT one and was watching it before I tried it and had to mute it after the first 10 minutes or so. It was such a Lance lovefest that it was making me sick. Don't get me wrong, I'm a huge Lance fan but sheesh they were tossing out his name every other sentence it seemed.

I know. I'm not dfchatten....

I've got one CTS DVD (climbing). The only thing that Chris Carmichael does better than training is promoting. Himself, Lance, Powerbars, whatever makes a buck. On the climbing DVD, there's, like, the 5 minute CTS promo before the start menu. Then, mind you it's a 55 workout, after 40-45 minutes he tells everyone to eat their powerbars and powergels, don't want to bonk, yada yada. I'm sorry, if you're bonking after 45 minutes, maybe there's another problem. And regardless of how good the PowerWhatsit products are, they're probably going to take more than 10 minutes to really start doing you any good. But, yeah, he talks a lot about Lance on this one, too. Then, there's that cheesy music... did I hear it before on some porn flick??

If you can follow the action without the sound, you really aren't missing much. Play some good workout music, and do the intervals.

i have sprinting and the crit workout, and there is only one mention of lance and it is in reference to race footage that it shows. i use spinervals and CTS, and they are both great workouts.

roadbuzz: Thanks for your comments. The TT DVD was my first, and last DVD from CTS. I'll stick with the Spinervals.