If you don't get numbers, does that mean it's a poor workout? Can you pedal the bike properly? Can you adjust the resistance? If so, then you can get in a good workout. Just pedal the damned thing.

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Swimming Workout of the Day:

Favourite Swim Sets:

2020 National Masters Champion - M50-54 - 50m Butterfly

You do NOT need an 'awesome' gym bike to do some quality hammerfests on it.

As long as you put in decent enough time on your race bike outside of that, you can hammer away with good results on the upright or otherwise nonoptimally positioned gym bike. Especially if you go hard!

I've done this before - had my near best Oly bike and personal hillclimb PRs when I was actually really timecrunched, and aside from my wknd 2-3hr long bike, was only doing additional 2 sessions over lunch 40-60 mins in length on an upright Lifecycle bike that I couldn't get remotely into racelike position. I really hammered it though on those sessions though - horrified all the folks around me in the gym as I would leave 3+ ft puddles before I finally started bringing my own towels to stack around the bike floor.

Obviously this is more suited for shorter, harder workouts - I wouldn't recommend replacing your weekend 5 hour Ironman outdoor bike in racing position with a 5 hour upright gym session.

FWIW, for most of those bikes.......you can google the instruction manual.

I've often found buried in the menu options you CAN display power on the gym bikes. Then you can guess at the RPE for a power and get in an acceptable workout based on that.

Some spin classes can be pretty good, if that's an option.

Sufferfest videos with RPE instructions also work pretty well on a spin bike, especially relatively short interval sessions like Revolver (16 x 1 min hard/1min easy). You could also do similarly simple short interval sessions (30s on/30s off, etc.) without any app/video guidance.