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Indoor bicycle trainer primer
Published: January 28, 2019
If you’re an avid cyclist here in northeast Ohio this can be a trying time, because the next few months will force you to make some costly winter cycling decisions.
Do you buck up for the appropriate gear to ride outdoors, do you buy into a winter’s worth of spinning classes, or do you cha-ching your credit card with the purchase of a shiny new indoor trainer?
Whatever your choice, it’s definitely going to cost some coin.
So with that being said, let’s drill down on this financial certainty more closely by exploring the indoor trainer option. And though this might seem like a rather uninteresting topic, it’s actually pretty fascinating considering all the products and technology that are currently available.
Yet for the sake of column space, I’m going to have to pare this discussion down to trainer options - not products.
Okay first and foremost, there’s two distinctly different types of indoor trainers, the smart and the basic.
Smart trainers are a step above the basic trainer in that they’re able to connect to your favorite virtual training application - Zwift, TrainerRoad, The Sufferfest. Rouvy, and FulGaz - via Bluetooth and ANT+.
With a smart trainer your workouts become visually interactive, where speeds, cadences, distances and even power can be tracked, logged, shared and compared.
But hold, there’s two varieties of smart trainers, one that accepts the bike’s rear wheel (wheel-on), and one that doesn’t use the rear wheel at all (direct drive).
The pros and cons shake out like this.
Wheel-on negatives center on the rapid wear of rear tires, and that they’re less a part of the bike’s drivetrain. The big positives include easier coupling of bike to trainer and lower price point.
Direct drive trainers are more advanced than wheel-on trainers, but they also require rear wheel removal so the bike can mount directly onto the trainer’s cassette.
As such, you place the trainer between the bike’s dropouts and lock the two together with a quick release or thru-axle. You certainly don’t have to be a technical whiz, but the rub here is that you must be proficient in wheel removal, cassette mounting/removal and attaching the bicycle to the trainer.
Smart trainer advocates rave about how easy it is to stay engaged in the workouts, how training plan accountability is strengthened, and how having access to a variety of workouts, resistances, ranges and gradients etc. makes indoor training that much more enjoyable.
Now let’s look at the basic trainer, which like the smart trainer is available in a couple different varieties - each with its own pros and cons.
1) Wind trainers have always been my basic trainer of choice. The bike’s rear wheel rests on a roller, and the roller usually has one or two fans attached. To increase resistance you simply switch to bigger gears. It’s really quite easy.
Pros here include lower price point, light weight, and what I really like, the fact that higher cadences do not affect resistance. Biggest con is the noise, which can mimic a leaf blower when big gears are used.
2) Magnetic trainers have magnets built into flywheels that create the resistance, which unlike the wind trainer, means the resistance can sometimes increase as cadence increases. This resistance increase can feel somewhat unusual - an effect I’d call “unroadlike” - and in my opinion it’s the biggest knock on these trainers.
Mag pluses include a moderate price point, far less noise, and remote resistance adjustability (some models).
3) Fluid trainers occupy the higher end of the basic trainer price spectrum. That’s because they incorporate a rotor/propellor immersed in a viscous fluid (usually silicon) with which to create the resistance. The harder and/or the faster you pedal, the more difficult it is for the rotating device to spin within the fluid.
Fluid trainers are popular because they yield more of a road-like feel with respect power output. They’re also very quiet, and require little to no adjusting other than with the rear wheel against the roller. But again, my pet peeve is the fact that the fluid trainer produces more resistance as cadence increases. They can also get pretty hot with lengthy sessions, which will eventually shorten their lifespan.
Well, that’s the skinny on indoor trainers. I’m going to leave the really fascinating stuff, scrutinizing all those hundreds of product reviews, to you.
Good luck.