Indoor Bike Trainer | the Good & the Bad
To many cyclists, winter means one thing -- cold, wet weather that keeps us from riding outdoors as much as we want. If the weather closes out, then there are two choices: Don't Ride. Or Ride Indoors. (I find the indoor bike trainer to be mind-numbingly boring, but that's my problem.)https://youtu.be/R5sVKu9P8JAIf you're one of those cyclists that really likes to spend time on their indoor bike trainer, and, yes, they're out there, then lucky you, you're in your wheelhouse. But most (normal) cyclists dread trainer time. Regardless of how you come out on this issue there's some things to understand about stationary trainers that can help you plan your workouts better and help you enter the spring healthy. Because there are some aspects of a trainer that can create some pretty nasty injuries if you're not careful.First, it's important to understand that the indoor bike trainer is at once harder and easier. Why the dichotomy?It's easier muscularly/metabolically: research bears out that all things being equal we can't sustain quite as high an intensity on the trainer as we can outdoors. Whether this is a function of the mechanical shortcomings of the trainer as a machine or the greater challenge for the rider to consistently dissipate heat, is unclear. But the results are clear that even when shooting for the same perceived effort, it's harder to push as many watts indoors as out.
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It's harder biomechanically on our joints and connective tissue: Riding indoors, there are no stop signs or cars to cause us to stop briefly. There are no slight uphills or downhills that cause us to change cadence or coast momentarily. Most of the time, we can't even stand up on the trainer. (I know it is possible to stand up while on a trainer, but many don't realize this is really bad for your bike -- it was never meant to take these types of forces and I've seen more than a couple bikes get broken or ruined this way. Even on trainers that are "designed" to rock back and forth.) Yes, there are programs and trainers that simulate outdoor riding conditions, but they're never quite like the real thing, and we don't get quite the same highs and lows of power output and we never really coast or stop. So we tend to pedal with a narrower range of power, in a narrower range of cadence with few if any pauses or breaks. This is nearly perfect conditions to create a repetitive stress injury. I've said for years that cycling, especially on the road, is a repetitive stress injury waiting to happen; cycling indoors on the trainer is the same scenario but magnified ten-fold.
What cyclists need to realize and be cautious of is that the trainer has these metabolic and biomechanical costs described above, but the biomechanics end has another wrinkle added to it:The bike doesn't move under the rider in a normal way when it's attached to a trainer. This can be a significant interruption in the mechanical chain because if the movement isn't happening through the bike, it going to come from somewhere -- our body. This has effects from the feet up to the hands but the area of our body that bears the most weight -- our hips and butt -- are the most prominently affected. This will take any mild deviation you have on the bike and magnify it. If your sit bones are slightly off-kilter on the saddle normally; they'll skew even more while on the trainer. If one knee straightens more at the bottom of the pedal stroke than the other, this difference can be even greater on the trainer. I've had many clients note that they feel like they're sitting in a different place on the seat while they're on the trainer.We don't turn into a biomechanical wreck on the trainer (at least not most of the time), but these increasing deviations will add up in many cases - especially given the fact we discussed earlier about the increased repetitive stress on the trainer. We're increasing deviations and then asking our body to repeat this with more consistency and less variation than when we normally ride. Put another way: we're taking your worst 'you' (most asymmetric) and increasing the repetitive stress. This is just one of the causes for the run of knee tendinitis checkups I get in the later part of the winter ever year.As a quick side note: it's for all these reasons that from a bike fit standpoint, the trainer can be a useful tool because it allows us to see and measure even more clearly all the issues with a given rider.So this begs the question of what to do about all this?
- make sure your fit is up to date
- listen to your body on the trainer - useful bike fit tool, it'll tell you when things aren't right and address it early when you get these signals
- keep it short
- mix it up -- a lot. Change cadence and power often. This is why the trainer is a perfect match for interval work: wildly changing cadence and power, and the workouts can be short since you can get a lot done in an hour on the trainer with intervals
Keep it short, keep it variable and hopefully you can get through the winter physically in good shape and mentally without feeling like you've been lobotomized