The weather sure has gotten cold. Cold enough for many that it is time to move inside and onto the trainer. Lots of cyclists dread the trainer, but you don’t have to, in fact you can come to love it! A couple of my friends used to come in and tell me about the hours they spent the night before on their trainers. There are many ways to make trainer riding fun. There are videos that have workouts, you can listen to your MP3 player, or perform a structured workout.
If a trainer is not for you, the money you would have invested in a trainer could be invested on some winter clothing which would allow you to ride in the harshest of conditions.
Trainers are great tools to get a very structured and solid workout. One advantage of a trainer is that it removes a lot of the outside variables such as wind and weather and varying terrain. This fact makes them perfect to use when you need to run a test to see how your performance has changed no matter the time of year. Most coaches and books have different forms of these tests to help you establish your fitness level prior to starting a new workout program.
One of my favorite books with a workout program is the Lance Armstrong Performance Program book with Chris Carmichael, Peter Nye and Lance as the authors. When I needed to get back in shape several years ago I used this book a heart rate monitor and a trainer to start my road back into shape. I did many of the workouts but I also used one of my own workouts with the aid of my HRM.
One of my favorite types of workouts is to use the commercials of the shows that I watch when I ride. What is neat about this is you never know when the commercials will come and how many of them there will be. Using the commercials one of the workouts I do is sprint for the first commercial, rest the second and sprint the next. So on and so on until the commercial break is over. Then for the show I return to a steady state. If you want to add a twist you can have the steady state you return to for the show to be harder or easier then what you rode for the last segment of the shoe. My next version of the same workout is to sprint two commercials and recover for one and then sprint for the next two. Another “commercial workout” is to take it up and do a long interval at an increased heart rate for the duration of all the commercials.
I will be posting a review of my trainer of choice the Cycle Ops Fluid 2 built right here in the great state of Wisconsin shortly. That was my original idea when I started this post but then I got sidetracked.
For more information on using your indoor trainer here are some links to more articles:
Indoor Training, The Basics – Indoor Training, The Workouts – Indoor training: Motivation and Success!
