Weaponize Your Riding Performance with the Indoor Trainer
While a bike trainer is not a replacement for outside riding, it can be a valuable tool for both convenience and riding performance for cyclists and triathletes. While I typically avoid comparing time on a trainer to training time out on the road, carefully designed indoor riding sessions can massively improve your outside riding performance. In this piece, I will outline essential strategies to amplify the results from your indoor training and weaponize your bike riding in general.
What to know about the indoor bike trainer:
Limitations Of The Bike Trainer
Rather than building a list of all the benefits of indoor riding, let's first acknowledge aspects of riding you can't effectively develop while bolted to the floor:
Outside Core Handling Skills: You just can’t replicate certain interactions with the bicycle while on a trainer, no matter the marketing spin from the smart trainer companies. You cannot develop a sense of balance, braking, cornering, and descending while you are stationary. These interactions are often lacking among riders and triathletes, so we must realize that plenty of outside riding, focusing on these fundamental skills, will benefit you.
Stabilizing Muscles: When riding outside, the bike constantly moves, and the rider develops critical stability and balance, utilizing many of the more minor muscle groups. This is tough to replicate realistically indoors, even on the newer “moving” trainers or trainer bases.
Old Truths - New Realities: It used to be the fact that it was impossible to truly improve terrain management and feel for the road on a bike trainer, but with an intentional training prescription and a new software platform, this is now not only possible – it’s integral to your riding improvements.
Benefits Of Riding Indoors
So you cannot work on outside standing or cornering. That does not mean a trainer is a limited tool. Far from it: one of the biggest mistakes I see is riders thinking a bike trainer is just a tool for efficiency and a good place to ‘do intervals’ and build your physiology. The truth is that, when used appropriately, it is the optimal place to upgrade your posture, pedaling, and riding skills.
I’ll go further: a bike trainer is the ideal setup to help you maximize your speed return on your current fitness level. By using a bike trainer correctly, you will go faster. Unfortunately, most riders miss this opportunity, so let’s ensure this doesn’t occur for you.
Every rider can benefit from utilizing the trainer, and here are some of the opportunities created by riding the trainer:
Build Skills: The most important benefit of indoor riding is to get better at outside riding. Our training sessions are built from the ground up to teach riders how to maximize wheel speed relative to input. Teaching riders how to navigate rolling terrain, manage hills, mix system loads (muscular vs. cardiovascular strain), and develop effective standing will yield faster riding for your fitness. Each rider develops tools to manage terrain, effort, and speed. These include:
Gears: Most riders don’t leverage their gears nearly enough in variable terrain, creating undue physiological stress and limiting speed returns for effort. When riding terrain through software (like we do at Purple Patch), we teach riders how to thoroughly and strategically leverage gears on a bike.
Cadence and Standing: Another underutilized tool is physiological system management via changes in leg speed (or cadence). Many riders rigidly stick to a single narrow cadence range and don’t understand when or how to use the higher and lower RPM ranges. If you learn these principles, you’re not only able to better manage your effort – you also optimize speed and momentum.
Don’t just work hard: Work right. This is the very backbone of why Purple Patch has a rich history of creating great riders. We build the skills inside, then apply them outside. Remember that in racing, you aren’t measured by the power you generate crossing the finish line – you’re measured by the time it takes you to get there. That time is determined by a combination of factors, of which power is only one part. Strong riding skills and technique have a massive impact.
Pedal Stroke & Posture: Without the requirement of managing your bike in traffic or variable terrain, the trainer provides the optimal environment to work on your pedal stroke and proper posture. Including a mirror in your setup for self-guided feedback can reinforce you to do things well. Your mission: form over force. This is critical, as performance in triathlon cycling is all about retaining form under fatigue and establishing a great habit of riding well, even when tired. You cannot execute any element of outside riding (standing, cornering, terrain management, etc.) without great posture. It is your baseline. Focusing on establishing great posture and pedaling as a habit -- inside -- is the perfect gateway to improve outside. Don’t fall into binary thinking: realize that skill acquisition on the trainer can apply to outside riding if you focus on the right things.
Specificity of Intervals: We prescribe training as a combination of effort (power) with a wide range of specific RPM. A backbone of our training is what we label 'end of range.' Many intervals are either very low cadence and high torque (strength-endurance as we call it), or very high RPM work at the top end of the range and lower effort. While it can be a challenge to ride on specific terrain outside, the trainer offers immediate and controllable intervals in which you can mimic sustained efforts to train physiology without being limited by the geography of your local riding environment.
Training in a Controlled Environment: Specific interval training becomes highly effective when you eliminate the variability of outdoor terrain. There is no coasting on a trainer, which is why many claim that 60 minutes of trainer time is worth more than 60 minutes outside. Instead, you have a controlled environment to generate razor-sharp specificity with those intervals.
Time-Efficient Training: We work with plenty of time-crunched athletes with limited opportunities to get outside and ride during the week. An indoor bike trainer facilitates time-efficient quality riding: you don’t have to pause your session for streetlights or intersections or spend 20 minutes just getting to a suitable road. Plus, you can avoid nasty weather days.
Your bike training sessions should sit side-by-side with the all-important outside riding. Both types of riding play an essential role, and when you get the recipe right, you are almost guaranteed to improve your performance.
Strategies To Optimize Your Bike Training - The Golden Rules
When adopting the use of a cycling trainer, we have a few golden rules for all riders to follow.
Always Ride with Great Posture: There is no excuse for riding with locked elbows, tense shoulders, or hips rotated back on your seat. Ride like the rider you want to be. If you ingrain the correct postural habits in training, they will be there on the race course. While the trainer is a great place to produce training data that is consistent and repeatable, it's also a perfect environment to practice the Purple Patch three P's of cycling -- position, posture, and pedaling.
Make Your Pedal Stroke Fluid: When riding inside, you can understand, appreciate, and apply fluid and smooth pedaling. For example, you can feel and see the chain bouncing if you are a quad-heavy rider. Certain platforms, including the one we use here at Purple Patch, also provide real-time feedback on the smoothness of your stroke so you can eliminate inefficiency.
Execute the Intent: Don’t fall into the trap of just riding to an output (power). Instead, join the dots and consistently aim to synchronize what you are doing inside to how it applies to outside. The indoor training environment eliminates external variables so that you can focus on effort. It’s critical to understand what the feeling of a given output is in terms of perceived effort and sensations. Too many athletes ride to a fixed power, and ignore how it feels. This is never optimal (and will bite you if your power meter or bike computer fail in the middle of a race!).
Get Obsessed with Upgrading Skills: If you keep your mind focused on how your inside riding is helping you become a better outside rider, you will maintain improved focus, which will help you develop better technique habits. We always say ride your bike! Just because it is fixed to a trainer doesn’t give you an excuse to ride with awful posture or get distracted with work emails or Netflix. Habits last and translate outside, so lean in and become a better rider.
Your races and events are outside, so connect the dots on how your effort applies to becoming a better outside rider. In short, embrace the trainer. It is a powerful tool in your performance arsenal, but remember that your ultimate mission is to become a better rider outside. Utilizing the benefits of the trainer and then applying those habits, lessons, and intervals to the outside world is your optimal performance lens to frame the trainer’s role in your overall development.
The Final Word
Becoming a better cyclist is about so much more than increasing power.
If you want true breakthroughs, you can absolutely increase your fitness, muscular endurance, and power profile, and you can expect nice gains with a trainer. But the only way to get outsized, exponential performance gains is by upgrading skills and mastering the craft of cycling – including effectively managing terrain.
If you dial in the process of becoming a better bike rider, you won’t believe how much faster you can get.
And all it takes is focus and effort. Bike and equipment manufacturers do not discuss it because they cannot sell it to you. Coaches don’t discuss it as it isn’t typically easy to coach from afar, and in truth, many don’t understand how to coach it effectively. But there are massive results to be had. We’ve seen it in our Purple Patch athletes. Train smarter, upgrade your skills, and you’ll get faster.
You want to increase fitness and your power ranges across intensities, but you also need to make the best use of that power. No wonder so many folks are confused when their friend has out-split them on the bike despite averaging the same power relative to their weight. It is never just about fit or aerodynamics. It is much more likely that their friend strategically applied their power over the terrain. It begins with posture, then awareness and skill acquisition, and finally, application to outside riding.
You only truly optimize this when you combine the power of inside riding with outside application. The gold stars come when your inside riding is executed without a myopic focus around chasing power and intervals. The magic happens when you learn to become a better bike rider.
If you want to master the craft of cycling and weaponize your indoor riding with strategic coaching on your technique, check out our Tri Squad or Live & On-Demand Bike Sessions. Both of these memberships include access to our game-changing video coached rides: