What is your take on spinning?
A complete waste of time. Counter productive at best. Want fat legs keep spinning.
When fitness Chrissy May hired me to get ready for her Oxygen magazine photo shoots, I first asked what her current exercise was. She told me that spinning was part of training program and yet complained that getting lean legs was her biggest challenge. I told her to drop the spinning immediately, and that she would see results in a matter of a few days. She was quite reluctant, claiming that spinning “made her legs feel tighter”. In my usual diplomatic style, somewhat to the right of the Attilla the Hun, I countered that insanity is defined as doing the same things over and over again and expecting different results.

Yes spinning is very tiring, is it productive? NO. Where I live in Scottsdale AZ where spinning is more popular than training for skin cancer. It is attended by women who are as fat in the lower extremities as when I saw them exit their class two years ago when I moved here.
Why is spinning so useless if I am getting a great workout from it? Because the high velocities fatigue a particular point in the neuro-muscular junction which is responsible for the rapid firing rate of the motor units, you perceive great fatigue even though little work has been done. When you think about it, you could reproduced the same type of fatigue in your triceps if I asked you to hold a pair of fly swatters and swat an imaginary 100 flys in 30 seconds. Would you triceps get tired, sure. Would they improve significantly in terms of conditioning. NO. Why? Because the resistance is not high enough to elicit the hormonal response needed to create adaptive response that would bring about positive body composition changes.
In spinning exercise, the body adapts by storing both intra-muscular and subcutaneous fat in the thigh and hip areas to provide a more readily available source of fuel for the aerobic recovery periods. The body figures out, if I store fat there it reduces the time to get to the muscles to provide the energy source. Result: Kobe beef thighs and butt, all plump and marbled with fat inside.
Going back to Chrissy May, she dropped from 15% bodyfat to 9 in three weeks after she switched from the useless spinning to high resistance interval training. Point in case.
–Charles Poliquin