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Music is the heartbeat of an indoor cycling class. The right playlist can motivate riders, enhance performance, and create an unforgettable experience. A well-structured playlist keeps your class flowing, matching the energy of each phase of the workout while maintaining smooth transitions. In this guide, we’ll explore how to choose the best songs, structure your playlist effectively, and ensure you comply with music licensing rules.
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Keeping your indoor cycling classes fun, engaging, and exciting is key to retaining riders and building a strong community. A great workout is important, but how you deliver it can make all the difference. If your classes feel repetitive or uninspiring, riders may lose motivation or stop attending altogether.
So, how do you keep your classes fresh and exciting while still delivering a solid workout? Here are some tried-and-tested strategies to ensure your riders leave every session feeling energised and eager to come back.  Reuter M, Rosenberger F, Barz A, Venhorst A, Blanz L, Roecker K and Meyer T (2024) Effects on cardiorespiratory fitness of moderate-intensity training vs. energy-matched training with increasing intensity. Front. Sports Act. Living 5:1298877. doi: 10.3389/fspor.2023.1298877 The study examines the impact of moderate-intensity versus progressively increased intensity training on cardiorespiratory fitness (CRF) over 26 weeks. Participants, who were healthy but untrained adults, showed significantly greater improvements in CRF, including VO2max with increased intensity training compared to moderate-intensity training, without additional energy expenditure. This suggests the crucial role of training intensity in enhancing fitness levels.
Implications for Indoor Cycling and Instructors:  - ICI staff While the focus of indoor cycling is often on the intensity and duration of the session itself, one crucial element that should never be overlooked is the warmup. This is the easiest way to spot the difference between an expert instructor and an ordinary one. Spending the first 10 minutes of your session warming up riders can significantly enhance their performance, reduce the risk of injury, and maximise the benefits of their workout. And why wouldn't any instructor want that?
Warm ups should be properly planned - just 'allowing riders to move their legs' for a few minutes when they arrive prior to the session isn't enough. How do you know how much resistance they have on? How do you know the cadence is effective? You don't. You're also sending a message about your own expertise if you're abdicating responsibility for the warm up to your riders. If they don't know what it's for, they'll assume you don't either.
 by Angela Reed-Fox Cadence, muscle fibre, and getting results with indoor cyclingEvery part of the indoor cycling session you design should have a rationale behind it, and cadence is one of the components which will help determine whether a challenge is safe, effective and efficient – or not. You'll have come across that one rider who, no matter what you have planned for the class, ends up pedalling at around 40-50rpm at such a high resistance that they're having to recruit their upper body to help power every. single. pedal stroke. Doing this puts too much strain on the joints and the back – and the risk is exacerbated if they haven't warmed up adequately to start with. This is a problem that you'll most often encounter in newer riders who think that they need to make the session as hard for themselves as possible if they're to get any benefit. So what's happening in the muscle? Muscle fibres are fast or slow twitch. Slow twitch fibres (type I fibres) have more mitochondria which means they're able to create more energy through the aerobic system, using oxygen and burning fat. Fast twitch muscle fibres (type IIa and IIb) are a little different. Type IIb fibres create energy anaerobically (fuelled by glucose stored in the muscles) – these are the powerful short-burst fibres. Type IIa can use both aerobic and anaerobic metabolism and so share features of both type I and type II fibres. Hill-climbing at 70-80rpm uses more of the aerobic fibres which enables greater aerobic endurance (and therefore great fat burn). Thinking about the different muscle fibres then with regard to class challenges, you'll be using more fast-twitch (type II) fibres during short, intense challenges such as sprints (up to 1100rpm) and heavy climbs (around 60-70rpm), and conversely, using more slow-twitch, aerobic-friendly muscle fibres during endurance sets such as timetrials and flats at 80-90rpm, and working climbs around 70-80rpm. Keeping an idea on what muscle fibres you're wanting to use, or what energy system you want to concentrate on will determine how you design your session. You'll be targeting fast-twitch muscles for short periods of intense power (whether slow or faster cadence), and slow-twitch muscles which take longer to fatigue for extended challenges and longer intervals at a moderate cadence. So the cadence, and the power that you'll be coaching along with it will determine the result you'll expect your riders to get. If you're coaching short intervals with high power and a cadence above 100rpm or below 70rpm, you'll be training for strength and using more of your fast-twitch muscles; if you're coaching longer intervals at a moderate cadence (70-90rpm) you'll be coaching endurance, improved aerobic capacity, and fat burn. Sign up for preferential treatment! (We promise not to flog your personal data or play fast and loose with it.)
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