Trainer versus Road
 

Had a question about the amount of effort on the trainer and how it translates to the street.

This is my first winter using a trainer (kurt kinetic road machine.) I have the box thingy in front to
adjust wheel height, which is set so the bike is at a slightly uphill pitch. I've finally been able to get up to a steady 90 rpm cadence over the course of an hour or more which I feel is great progress, as last year was my first season and had no measuring tools, or computers.. I just road as hard and fast as I could.

Riding on the trainer though, it seems like quite a bit of effort just to maintain a 17mph avg. Assuming I put this same amount of effort on the road, would I be any faster, slower, or roughly about the same as the trainer? Just curious what everyone else has observed.

I generally train for about 50-55 minutes with a few harder 'intervals' of work thrown in to make break up the monotony. (eg. spin at 120rpm for 1-2 minutes, or drop to a lower gear and try to maintain 90 rpm for as long as I can)

Speed has nothing to do with a trainer workout. It's all about intensity. Train by doing intervals and teaching your body to recovery after hard efforts. 30x30's, 5x5's, 2x20's.

What's a 'trainer'?

Trainer workouts are all about intensity, I agree. To me, the problem with trainer workouts is that you tend to push yourself into intervals/hard effort only when you feel totally ready for it, which makes it easier overall. If you're actually outside and you come up to a hill, you have to climb that hill (essentially doing an interval) whether you are ready or not.

That said, you can compensate for this either by having iron will and making yourself do, say, 7 intervals in 25 minutes.. or by getting a trainer exercise DVD. I recommend Spinnervals, they are extremely tough workouts and probably better than you get outside (if you do the exercise faithfully.)

It is tempting to think of the trainer in terms of speed/distance, but I'd resist the urge to do so. These things are so incredibly variable - I'd focus more on heart rate and effort. You'll see the improvement when you get outside.

Depends on what your goals are. Going for a ride is a lot differemt than going out and drilling on your bike. Same with a stationary trainer. You can just do some time on it or you can do specific drills designed to achieve goals. Recreational riding isn't about aveage speed, miles, time, or intensity, it's about fun. Training on the bike whether on the road or stationary isn't about miles and average speed. It's about time and intensity. You can train without regard to time and intensity but you will not be training effectively and efficiently.
If you don't care about that then it doesn't matter. Do what ever you want to and enjoy. You will likely see some gradual improvement.

No matter how hard you work on a trainer, you will never go anywhere.

Trainers have + and -

+
Can't coast. If you ever get a chance to see a power meter graph/file of a ride outside, you'll see that there is a LOT of coasting. Therefore there's some saying that an hour on the trainer is like an hour and a half on the road. Something like that. I don't think that's quite accurate, but you'll find yourself pedaling more consistently on the road. I wouldn't say you get "extra training" benefits as far as endurance etc. You can just not coast outside.

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Can't rock bike. It's hard to stand on the trainer - you'll end up tilting left-right backwards relative to pedal stroke. So you get out there and suddenly you're using muscles you haven't worked. So you get sore etc.

Basically using an indoor trainer gets me to about 70-80% of my overall fitness. On trainer rides alone, over the course of 6 months or so, I can train for a week to three weeks of 4-6 hour rides outside, on terrain that's much more challenging than anything around where I live.

However, I use those outside rides to hone my form. The bike rocking, etc.

cdr

Here in Minnesota the snow is almost gone, so only a few weeks more. My first season last year, I remember using lower gears with a lower cadence. I think thats where the fixation to cadence is coming from now. Assuming the same cadence - if my computer shows that my MPH goes up when switching gears, Im obviously working harder at the same cadence. Im working on intervals now, but they aren't very structured yet - more along the lines of - push harder for 2 minutes so my heart rate gets to about 178, rest for 5 unitl heart rate comes back down to 165 ... repeat 3-4 times.

There is a 100 mile ride coming up at the end of April I want to do well on - but I think under 5 hours is pushing it for only my second century ride.

It doesn't.

Depends on what kind of trainer you have and how you have it set up. Also on what the terrain and weather are like when you're actually on the road.

I'm kind of wondering how someone could spend so much time on a trainer and not want to go on the road more.

Did I read correctly that if you hammer for 2 min, you can get your HR to 178 and then it takes 5 minutes for it to drop to 165? Then you can boost it back to 178 really quickly?

I don't know much about training, but that doesn't sound right. If that were going on with me, I'd be trying to build my aerobic capacity.

BTW, under 5 hrs is pretty fast for a second century unless you're drafting, tailwind assisted, or you're a total animal. How'd your first one go?

Let's see... looking at my intervals today, I started each around 120 and quickly ramped to about 170 over a little less than a minute, then drifted up to just over 180 during the rest of the 8 minute interval. It took about a minute coasting downhill to drop back to the 120 range, at which point I had to pedal and it steadily drifted down to around 100 by the bottom of the hill, about 5 minutes from the end of the interval. It would have dropped faster I'm sure, but for the pedaling (there were some uphill sections coming "down").

So that's me, but my aerobic capacity is obviously pretty good. One of the indicators of fitness is how rapidly your HR can recover after a hard effort. It doesn't really sound right to me either that it would take 5 minutes to recover from 178 to 165, but it also depends on what he means by "rest". He could still be working pretty hard in which case it may take much longer for the HR to normalize at the new effort level.