If you want to be a better athlete, you need to be able to push yourself to keep working out even when you're suffering... and that's where Spinervals Competition 5.0: Mental Toughness comes in. This program in the Spinervals series focuses on improving both your mental focus and your aerobic fitness, through a series of long steady-state interval workouts. Mental Toughness is designed for use on a stationary bike trainer or exercise bike, and with a 9.5/10 rating on the Spinervals intensity rating, it's for people who are serious about getting fit.

Spinervals Competition 5.0: Mental Toughness is the longest Spinervals program to date, running 85 minutes (or a bit more if you start warming up during the opening credits). That's where the "mental toughness" part comes in: the sets themselves require constant steady effort rather than all-out, anaerobic effort, but the cumulative effect of the long tempo sets makes for a very demanding program that definitely requires you to work on keeping focused. The key to making this a quality workout is to keep a steady pace and not overdo it in the early sets, and Coach Troy Jacobson does a good job of encouraging you to keep the right pace and tempo.

The program is as follows:

As you can see, Mental Toughness focuses on long sets of steady-state intervals. They're high-quality sets, but because of the length of the sets and the similarity between them, this program isn't as interesting as some of the others. That's really an inevitable result of a program that focuses on long, steady effort, and Coach Troy actually does quite a bit to introduce variation into the exercises. For instance, during the 10-minute interval session, you'll be shifting gears every 30 seconds, which means that you'll constantly be changing your effort to maintain a steady pace. The 5x2 minute tempo set gets gradually harder, and the 10x1 minute tempo set has you changing gears in each minute.

The isometric squats, which first appeared in Muscle Breakdown, give you a chance to actually get off the bike for a few minutes (although after you finish the squats you'll be glad to get back on for that 2-minute easy spin!), and the final sprint session also adds a little variety to the program.

Since it's longer than the typical Spinervals program, this isn't the kind of program that you can easily pop in for a quick session when you get home from work. Mental Toughness is a great choice for those weekend days when you intended to go out for a ride, but the weather got in the way.

The DVD

Video

As with the other Spinervals DVDs, Mental Toughness is presented in its original 1.33:1 aspect ratio and looks satisfactory; not film-quality but perfectly fine for an exercise video. The image is bright and pleasant to look at, with natural colors. The overall image is fairly soft, but the graphics for perceived effort, suggested gear, and the all-important countdown to the end of the program appear in clear, easy-to-read lettering.

Audio

Coach Troy is clear and easy to understand in the soundtrack here, and the music is correctly balanced with his voice. There's some background hissing while the description of the program is displayed, but this disappears as soon as the "real thing" starts up.

Extras

Mental Toughness is easy to navigate, with a useful menu and well-placed chapter stops allowing you to skip around or repeat segments as desired. There are no special features.

Final thoughts

Spinervals Competition 5.0: Mental Toughness offers a demanding indoor bicycling workout full of steady-state intervals. Because it's focusing on long, steady efforts, I didn't find it quite as interesting as some of the other Spinervals programs, but it's a very high quality program that provides a workout that's different from the others. Mental Toughness may not get used quite as often as the shorter Suffer-O-Rama, No Slackers Allowed, Muscle Breakdown, or Time Trial Special, but it certainly has its place among these DVDs on your exercise shelf. Recommended.