Reviews from Around the World

From: Bike Rumor

BIKERUMOR.com REVIEW: We actually received Global Ride’s DVD’s in early Summer, but we procrastinated and kept riding outdoors. Now that it’s dark by the time the work is done, and in some parts there’s snow on the ground, we’ve put these things in the DVD player and put them to the test.

Global Ride’s Hawaii Rides DVD set is a collection of three cycling workouts followed by three different cross training routines that tie into the spin session on that disc. Each cycling workout follows different scenic roads through Hawaii, offering a visual distraction from the sometimes (usually) boring time spent on the trainer and, if you’re like me, they help keep you focused on riding hard enough. My mind tends to wander, resulting in slower, easier spinning until I snap to. With the Global Ride training DVDs, you have three different coach “tracks” to choose from on each DVD, so you’re reminded to pedal harder, faster or whatever the specific workout requires.

Three of us tried one DVD each. If you typically spend a lot of time on the trainer in the winter, check out what our three testers have to say about the DVD’s after the break…

The Hawaii Rides set includes StrenDurance, Oceanside Ride and Maui Rollers. The 3-pack retails for $75.00, or you can buy each one individually for $30. They also offer two videos shot in Italy: Speed & Power and Climbing Sufferage.

Prior to the coaching, there’s a warm-up period that scrolls through photos of the islands. The cycling workouts vary in length, and you’ll get either Pilates, Yoga or Strength Training sessions following the ride. Each of us reviewed one DVD in the set, click on the picture of the individual DVD’s below to enlarge and you can read the back panel in full.

Maui Rollers, reviewed by Tyler (road and mountain biker):

The Maui Rollers DVD follows some of the coast of Hawaii and is, as the title suggests, a series of rollers, but they seem to go mostly up. You have to shift gears to adjust the cadence and effort to match what you’re watching and what the coach is telling you to do, so how much you get out of it is directly tied to how much you put into it.

As mentioned, I tend to let my mind wander and in the past I’ve caught myself staring into space with a pedal cadence of about 20 RPM. With these, I was engaged enough with the scenery and trying to do what the coach was suggesting that I kept the workout intensity up pretty well. In fact, the 45 minute session felt like only 20…and anything that can make an indoor trainer workout go fast gets some kudos. As far as watching this versus DVD’s of Le Tour or something, it’s different, and it has multiple coaching options on each DVD to keep it fresh, so it’s a good alternative when you’re *gasp* bored with watching Lance dance his way up the Sestriere. Even though it was only 45 minutes (plus warmup and cool down), it was a pretty solid workout…the quads were burnin’.

The Yoga section on this DVD is good as a post-workout stretching routine, and it has cycling specific stretches to help open up the hips and stretch the hamstrings and lower back. It’s a fairly long Yoga routine, not just a little something tacked on to say it’s there, and it’s well coached. The only downside is it tends to move a little quickly, especially for those not used to the poses. Here’s a sample video from the Maui Rollers DVD:

Oceanside Rides – Reviewed by Rob (road and mountain biker)

The two best things I can say about the DVD is that the scenery of Hawaii is beautiful and the Pilates bonus feature at the end really works your body. The cycling video part, though, could use some improvement. The entire program feels like someone took a spin class and recorded the audio then combined it with some techno music (which I liked, but not everyone will appreciate). Then they took some jerky home video from a route that someone had ridden in a car, motorcycle, ect. and combined all three together. The result is a video with some cool music, scenery, and a spin class coach in the background that sort of misses the mark as a workout video, but it does provide some cool shots of Hawaii if you have nothing else to watch on the trainer. The video lacks any on screen metrics to tell you where you are like in spinervals or a CTS workout video. Basically you are just listening to a spin class with some cool scenery and music in the background. Finally, the music was louder than the coaches so even if you were trying to follow their advice you couldn’t hear them clearly.

However, I did like the fact you can turn the coaching on and off as well as the music. Also, the option to hear the coaching done in different languages was pretty cool. The Australian chick sounded really hot!!

Editor’s Note (Tyler): I agree about the on-screen metrics. An incline graphic or time-to-finish would help you adjust your effort level…visually it’s hard to tell how steep the incline is just from the video.

Strendurance – Reviewed by Mick (triathlete)

Typically trainer rides are endured in the cold/dark winter days and training DVDs are an attempt to fight the boredom of the indoor ride.

This DVD knocks off the cold of winter with its beautiful scenes of Hawaii and pumps out a workout that makes the most of your time on the trainer. The music gets your legs moving, and the training sets are well coordinated with the beautiful Hawaii scenery.

Riding indoors is more intense and challenging than riding outdoors and requires more motivation. This DVD sucks you into the scenery and takes you into the beautiful Hawaiian landscape and makes staying in the saddle much less of a mental challenge than staring at the wall or TV show. The coaches add to the motivation to keep with it. The workout is challenging and leaves you feeling like you’ve had a great ride and vacation from the dreary days of winter when you’re done.

BIKERUMOR RATING:

The Global Rides aren’t so exciting that you look forward to trainer rides (what is, really?), but once you’ve dragged yourself onto the bike, they certainly make it bearable, and they tend to push you to actually get a good workout in. For that, they’re commendable, and the various workout/yoga/pilates sessions and pretty good, too. However, the quality of the video could be slightly better (there are rain drops on the camera for the first section of the Maui Rollers vid), and it really needs some sort of timing and elevation or intensity graphic to help illustrate what the coaches are saying. Target heartrate goals (as a percentage) or power outputs would also be helpful for those who use such training tools. As is, they’re a good visual distraction with some OK coaching and decent post-ride workouts, but they’re not a very scientific training tool. For the price, we think they should offer a little more technical info and graphics, but if you’re bored with everything else you’ve got to watch, they’re worth checking out. We give them 3.5 Thumbs Up.