Spin Unlimited #1

Spin Unlimited #1 is 45 minutes and features Darryl Preston solo. The tape was intended for spin instructors, but it is not instructional - it’s a real workout. The background is plain white wall and floor with two big red Choreography 2 Go logos on the wall. The music is Dynamix and features songs I recognized from CIA and other tapes (“Everybody”, “Do you wanna get up”, “Hot Stuff”, “Oops I did it again”). The sound quality of the tape is really bad. When I turn the volume way up, I can hear Darryl and the music reasonably well, but he sounds like he’s in a tunnel. It’s almost as bad as the one Marcus Irwin tape I have - Quick Fix Hi/Lo, but a little better. The picture quality is ok.

This is a fun intense tape. It features 9 tracks of music, a full warm-up, cool down, and stretch. It includes seated flats, sprints, interval training, climbs and lots of rhythm changes. There are some, but not a lot, of recovery time between intensity drills, so my heart rate was pretty high the entire time. Darryl provides lots of form pointers and body alignment checks throughout the tape. There is some mental imagery for motivation. He refers to teaching your students a lot since it’s geared towards instructors.

During the 5 minute warm-up, he introduces you to what’s ahead in the workout. He spins really fast in this section. The second track features lots of jumps with varying rhythms. Track 3 is fast standing climbs where you push forward and back in the saddle, and up/down on the handle bars, again varying the rhythms. Track 4 is interval pyramid work:
- 1 minute seated speed work
- 1 minute climb
- 45 second seated speed
- 45 second climb
- 30 sec seated
- 30 second climb
- then back up the pyramid. There is no recovery time here!

After a short recovery, Track 5 has seated climbs with visual imagery, track 6 is speed jumps with varying tempos, track 7 more climbs pushing forward/back in seat, and wide/narrow push-ups on handle bars. There are a few seconds where the camera focuses on Darryl’s legs as he’s doing an upperbody move and you miss what he’s doing, but it’s not a big issue. Track 8 is seated speed work - 20 seconds on; 40 seconds off. There is a 1 minute recovery and finally track 9 is a 4 minute cool down and stretch.

If the sound were better this would be one of my favorite spin tapes. For comparison, I love Precision Cycling; Sport Cycle is a very distant second. I found it as tough as many of the 45 minute Spinervals. Since he does not have as many recovery breaks, my heart rate stayed higher for a longer time than some Spinervals. I like Spinervals because they are tough, but they really are not "fun" to me. This one was tough AND fun. And of course unlike Coach Troy, Darryl was on his bike the entire time. But he said in the video that if he were teaching a real class, he'd be off his bike a lot to check his students form.

This tape is produced by Marcus Irwin tapes as part of his the Choreography 2 Go series and is sold at www.Jumpybumpy.com (a UK company). The copyright on the cover is 1997.