Indoor Trainer – Ric Stern points out some of the pitfalls.

Three Things You’re Doing Wrong On Zwift! (Or Any Other Indoor Trainer Platform)

Summer is over in the northern hemisphere, and the weather has turned. If you’re anything like me you’ll have dragged out your indoor trainer and started to do some indoor rides on it. Even with the option of a gravel bike or a MTB there are some filthy days you just wouldn’t want to go outside in, and the turbo can make perfect sense as a dry option!

However, while the turbo can be great to ride – it allows consistent training – and you’re uninterrupted by traffic or pot holes, it can be a little (and by a little I mean extremely) boring. Thankfully, rather than staring at a blank wall, riding on an indoor training platform is infinitely more engaging.

Of course, once you’ve ridden on Zwift, or RGT for a while you start to realise it’s not as interesting as outdoors and long endurance rides are significantly more mentally taxing than riding outdoors. Accordingly, many riders try to make things more mentally interesting by introducing one of these mistakes

Mistake 1 – Racing

For sure, racing indoors is also as much fun as racing outdoors (albeit you don’t need any skills) and it’s pretty hard to crash indoors (but not impossible). That said, if you fill up your off-season or winter with continual races, you’re going to seriously miss out on many training adaptations that you’ll need to perform well when you do ride outdoors.

Additionally, racing too frequently, will lead to burn out and being both mentally and physically exhausted. For starters the physics of outdoors aren’t completely transferred to the indoors. For example, if you know how to hold a wheel well in the real world, you can finish races with really low power outputs. This is great if you want to race, but don’t want to ride hard (a valuable skill).

Indoors however, requires you to make significantly greater efforts such that even bunch racing indoors feels more like a TT. If you’re going to race indoors, do it (very) sparingly, I’d strongly suggest no more often than once or twice a month.

Mistake 2 – Erg Mode

If you’ve ridden indoors and done a specific workout such as structured intervals, it seems almost like the correct option to complete the workout should be in erg mode. What is erg mode? Erg mode allows you to dial in a specific (set of) power outputs so that you do the session exactly.

For example, suppose you need to do 6 x 5-mins at 200 W, erg mode will allow you to do that (within a very small range). Surely, that’s the ideal thing to do? Well sort of, except, when we ride outdoors, whether it’s on a pan flat road, a long gradual climb, a rolling lumpy circuit, or a gravel road, we never ride at a constant power output. Our power is affected by the effort we put in, along with topographical conditions (e.g. riding downhill at a specific power is harder than riding on the flat at that same power) and environmental conditions (such as a strong headwind).

Accordingly, unlike erg mode – where our power is perfectly precise – in the real world our power varies due to external and internal issues that make our power vary. Maybe you’re supposed to be doing those 6 x 5 efforts uphill – but if you encounter a really steep pitch (within the uphill section) you may well have to ramp up your power momentarily to overcome the grade and then drop back to the correct effort. If you’ve never had to go harder than specified in your training you’ll really struggle in the outdoors.

Top tip is to not use erg mode and do (some of) your training in an environment that matches where you want to do well.

Mistake 3 – Not Having a Plan/Not Sticking to the Plan

We’ve all been guilty of this, right? Just getting on the turbo and riding aimlessly for a few minutes. Then getting bored and just randomly smashing out some random efforts before getting off the bike (they hurt so you must have done some good training?). While this isn’t specific to turbo (people do this outdoors as well), it does seem to me that more people do this more frequently indoors on the trainer.

If you have a training plan then, in general you need to stick to it carefully (most people go off-piste at some point). For certain, long endurance rides (which most people love outdoors) seem to be hated indoors (you can’t really replace them with intervals), but is there a way round this?

Long rides can, in general, be shortened a little bit indoors. This is because outdoors we tend to coast quite a bit and so this coasting (or much of it) could be cut out when you ride indoors. So get on and get the work done and then get off.

The other issue is not having a plan – if you don’t have some sort of plan (either that you’ve created or someone else has) then it’s possible you’re just riding randomly and not really training. This may be fine if that’s all you want.

That said if you do want to train effectively then there’s a stack of plans that are available on the internet (some of which are awful and some of which are pretty decent). There’s plenty available in cycling magazines as well (we had a nice winter training series available in Cyclist Magazine).

In Conclusion

The turbo is a great training tool, but you have to use it wisely else it can ruin you for next season. With considered planning you can get some excellent training and performance increases, so it’s worthwhile setting things up correctly to get the most from it.

Ric Stern is the head coach and founder of CycleCoach. Under his guidance riders have won the men’s elite World Championship, achieved numerous national championship wins and moved from amateur to professional ranks. You can read his previous article on nutrition here.