Question
tacx
hi graeme! i am triathlete and i want to know about bike trainer. i have at home tacx trainer on which i ride my road bike in my room when i cant do it outside. my question is this: what is the (main) difference between open road biking and bike trainer biking!? i mean, what is more useful, so to say? or maybe there is no difference at all! thanks a lot, all the best! goran
AnswerGoran,
The main difference between trainer riding and outdoor riding is the variability of the terrain and resistance.
Outside, wind, uphills and downhills vary the difficulty of your workout many times through a workout. On the negative side, that variance keeps you from developing a steady, smooth pedal stroke and the downhills allow you to rest (sometimes when you don't want to).
On a trainer, the workout will stay exactly the same until you make a conscious decision to vary it. Thus, you can work on a smooth pedal stroke and get very strong pushing high indoor trainer resistance, but you won't develop the ability to adapt to variance in effort level unless you change the resistance level on the indoor training frequently. Indoor training is not easier, however, than outside. In truth, some of the hardest workouts I have done have been two-hour efforts indoors on my Kurt Kinetic.
I think both types of workouts have their place in your training regimen. Outdoors you get more handling practice and a varied effort level. Outdoors is more fun, too, but you don't necessarily get the steady, hard effort required to build strength fast. Indoors, the resistance is always on (no downhills) so you can really work on gaining strength in a predetermined workout. However, I find indoor workouts are impossibly boring staring at the walls the whole time (I watch videos, such as old Ironman coverage).
Try this: Do one trainer workout a week as a substitute for one of your outdoor rides. Go into the once-a-week trainer ride with a plan (such as 10 min warmup, 5 X 5 min efforts at 90% with 2 min between, 15 min smooth effort at 50% effort concentrating on pulling the pedal smoothly all the way around). Over time, you should start to feel a bit stronger on your longer efforts outdoors and smoother in your pedaling.
Let me know how it goes!
Graeme
