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Road Cycling “It is by riding a bicycle that you learn the contours of a country best, since you have to sweat up the hills and coast down them. Thus you remember them as they actually are, while in a motor car only a high hill impresses you, and you have no such accurate remembrance of country you have driven through as you gain by riding a bicycle.” -- Ernest Hemingway

Standing up to pedal on a trainer

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Old 12-26-12 | 12:41 PM
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Standing up to pedal on a trainer

Yes or no? Just curious what you guys are doing and if you worry about the frame stress on a fixed trainer.
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Old 12-26-12 | 12:42 PM
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Ride the trainer the same way you'd ride the bike on the road. Except maybe harder since you don't have to hold anything back just in case something goes wrong. You won't hurt your bike.
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Old 12-26-12 | 12:50 PM
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I wouldn't do it on anything else than KK's Rock & Roll. I tend to believe that since the trainer move and take some of the stress out, it takes less likely to break my frame...
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Old 12-26-12 | 12:50 PM
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It feels unnatural to not be able to rock when standing tho...
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Old 12-26-12 | 12:54 PM
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So, standing up on a trainer will break your frame, but no problem for guys to ride Paris-Roubaix and beat the crap out of bikes over thousands of miles of potholes and bad roads during the year.
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Old 12-26-12 | 01:02 PM
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No issue. Nada. Zero. Zilch.
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Old 12-26-12 | 01:05 PM
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Originally Posted by Homebrew01
So, standing up on a trainer will break your frame, but no problem for guys to ride Paris-Roubaix and beat the crap out of bikes over thousands of miles of potholes and bad roads during the year.
but my bike is CF and might esplode!
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Old 12-26-12 | 01:07 PM
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I normally do intervals on the trainer around 90 RPM. Every 5 min I shift up, stand and pedal around 70RPM at the same power level. It helps break up the ride and keeps my butt from getting sore.

There are no issues with the trainer putting stress on the carbon frame. When I'm standing I'm not rocking the bike back and forth or leaning to one side or the other so I don't understand where any additional stress would come from.
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Old 12-26-12 | 01:21 PM
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kill it on the trainer. you don't have to worry about cars, cross winds, nothing but how hard you can go. Seated, standing, sprinting, soft pedaling, doesn't matter. just kill it!
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Old 12-26-12 | 04:04 PM
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No risk of exploding your bike.

However, be aware that unlike steep hills outdoors, standing on the pedals and mashing your way to big wattage won't work on the trainer. To get the 700+ watts of resistance on a KK or Cycleops2, you have to be max geared AND have a brisk enough cadence to get the wattage up. For 400+ watts, I think you'll be over 85 rpm, which makes it pretty hard to stand. On my 30 sec all-out trainer sprints, I definitely cannot stand up while the speedo is over 30mph.
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Old 12-26-12 | 04:16 PM
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you cant stand and go over 85 rpms? i do sprints all the time on the trainer, at high wattage, and high cadence (110+). Even starting in a huge gear at low speed it easy to "out run" fluid trainers resistance curve.
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Old 12-26-12 | 04:37 PM
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Originally Posted by jsutkeepspining
you cant stand and go over 85 rpms? i do sprints all the time on the trainer, at high wattage, and high cadence (110+). Even starting in a huge gear at low speed it easy to "out run" fluid trainers resistance curve.
It's easy to overaccelerate suddenly to cause tire slippage on a trainer, but it's hard to hold megawattage at rpms standing or sitting if you're doing it right. 500+ watts of effort is going to hurt no matter what. Just because you can make the tire slip by doing stomp-type accelerations doesn't mean you're overpowering your trainer - you're just not using it optimally. It works best for smoother accelerations, which can still get you to 400+ watts in seconds, as I do all the time with 10-15 seconds on all-out, 10-15 seconds off as per some of the training DVDs I own.

EDIT - Just saw on the other thread that you do 200rpm standing. Woud LOVE to see a video of that - I didnt' even know that was physically possible!
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Old 12-26-12 | 04:39 PM
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i was even talking about tire slippage, fluid trainers just take a couple of seconds to creat resistance. But idk what to say, standing at high rpms shouldn'y be an issue.

also this is with an acuatal power meter, not a speed to power conversion, so if i sprint to 30 mph, and it only takes me a peak of 1100, and an average of 1000 for 20 secvonds lets say, i dont think i just caused the tire to slip for 20 seconds...
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Old 12-26-12 | 04:50 PM
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Originally Posted by hhnngg1
No risk of exploding your bike.

However, be aware that unlike steep hills outdoors, standing on the pedals and mashing your way to big wattage won't work on the trainer. To get the 700+ watts of resistance on a KK or Cycleops2, you have to be max geared AND have a brisk enough cadence to get the wattage up. For 400+ watts, I think you'll be over 85 rpm, which makes it pretty hard to stand. On my 30 sec all-out trainer sprints, I definitely cannot stand up while the speedo is over 30mph.
On a KK trainer you need about 56kph for 1000W which is 110RPM in a 53-13. Most people can sprint standing up to around 120RPM without too much difficulty.

It's easier to get up to speed (like 56kph) on a trainer than outdoors due to significantly lower inertia of the trainer.
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Old 12-26-12 | 04:52 PM
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Ok, sounds about right. I guess I just don't like standing at 110rpm! I've tried standing on my sprints on the trainer, and I go significantly slower than I do seated, but that just may be my preference.

Still, when most people think of standing on a trainer, they're not thinking of standing sprints - they're thinking of low cadence/hi-wattage simluated high-percentage hill climbs (like a 15+% gradient), which you really can't get on the trainer since you need a matching cadence to get the watts up. I actually thought my trainer was broken for awhile before I realized the importance of keeping the cadence up to get those high wattage numbers.

Last edited by hhnngg1; 12-26-12 at 05:00 PM.
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