After almost a year riding the pre programmed courses on the Computrainer (alot), I have just discovered the benefits of using it in stand-alone mode. Setting the watts at 150 or whatever and just keeping it there for an hour or so.
That required a lot more focus than normal where I can watch IM videos, chat with the dog, think about how much I hate Scott Tinley’s article on the back page of Triathlete Magazine, etc.
How does everyone else use their CT?
I have used the stand alone mode a few times, mostly for testing, slowly increasing wattage. I usually use the 2D Challenge PC1 software, not the 3D. I like the full screen SpinScan for interval workouts. I don’t ride too many courses. One thing I have been doing lately is motorpacing. I ride a flat course drafting off the pacer. I set the pacer to 350 watts and stay on his wheel. We truck along at 25.4 mph and it takes a lot of concentration to stay in the sweet spot of the draft. I work on using the LEAST amount of energy, keeping my cadence high and pedal stroke smooth.
Over time, I’ve stopped riding courses. It’s just too much of a pain in the butt. I find myself using stand-alone mode 90% of the time, and use the coaching software the other 10%.
Dan
my desktop died, I haven’t ridden a course in years. One of my favorite stand alone workouts is ramping up the watts by 10 every 5 min for an hour.
Like the other posters, I got sick of Spinscan and the metal man. I also lost my spare PC to Harry Potter games, but quickly realized I didn’t want to watch the PC anymore.
My workouts are built around punching up the wattage number to what I’m needing that day and staring at the timer and my HR trying to guess which one is going to give up first.
Warning – if you let the Computrainer force you to hold a given wattage for the whole winter, you’ll go outside in the spring and forget how to hold pace on the flats. It’s a weird mental shift that happens. I have a Powertap and I was a little surprised at how quickly I backed off on wattage when I finally went back outside. My brain was used to the Computrainer cranking up the resistance on me if I backed off on pedal force (rpms). On real roads, you just slow right on down.
When the weather is good I only ride the c-trainer once a week, but will do so more during the off season. I used to ride standalone all the time, especially for recovery rides. However, during the season I needed a good hill workout and I always struggled to find a suitable course. Finally I figured out that you can write your own specifications for a file to run in the coaching software. This is essentially running in standalone mode, but the coaching software is responsible for changing the watts. You can specify when to change to what number of watts and if the change should be sudden or gradual. You also get spinscan numbers, avg watts, etc.
Tom -
Can you share with us how you wrote your own programs to up the wattage? I was thinking a while back this would be a great took to have, but I haven’t played with the CS enough to figure this out.
Mike
I’m going off of memory b/c I don’t have a file in front of me but this will get you started.
Look in the folder containing the coaching software. There will be several files with the extension .erg Copy one of these files to a new name. Open the new file with a standard text editor (like notepad).
Keep the standard file header, you can modify it if you like but the program will run just fine if you leave it alone.
Below is a sample hill workout that I do most weeks, note the syntax is not exactly correct you will need to copy the syntax used in your example file. The first column is the number of minutes since the start, the second column is the number of watts.
There is a 10 minute warmup period in which the watts gradually increase from 140 to 180. At 10 minutes the watts instantly change to 180 to finish the warmup. At 20 minutes, the watts instantly change to 220 for the “hill” part of the workout. The hill lasts exactly 7 minutes and is followed by a 3 minute rest period at 140 watts. This repeats several times, each hill begins and ends instantly as opposed to the warmup that is a gradual increase.
0 140
10 180
20 180
20 220
27 220
27 140
30 140
30 220
37 220
37 140
40 140
40 220
…
The manual for the coaching software gives all the details about how to write these workouts, but for the engineers and computer types out there you can do just fine by using the existing files as examples.
Feel free to send me an email and I can send you back a copy of my hill workout or answer specific questions (just promise not to laugh at my low watt numbers)
Thanks Tom, I’m sure I’ll have more questions as I dive into it.
Can you make this a flat course? I would like to create intervals -like say 8x3 minutes with 3 minutes recovery: For example:
3 minutes at 200 watts, then recovery of 150 watts, then 3 minutes at 200 watts etc.
Don’t worry I won’t be laughing at anyone’s lo watt numbers. I have been there!
Mike
The other option is to build a flat long straight course and hold your own watts. If you want to ride at 200 for an hour then you ride. It is much harder to hold your own watts than to ride in stand alone and have the unit provide the resistance. My guess is that it is more effective to try to hold your own but I am certainly not positive about this.
JLV - this is the way I do it now actually - holding x watts for x duration. Were you looking over my shoulder? Two weeks ago I did ride one hour for 200 watt average!
Anyway - the reason I like the forced watts is that the CT dictates the power and holds it steady, you have to focus on the RPMS and then on recovery even though you are recovering, you may still be pushing some quality wattage. Almost like running an interval workout with your recovery only being a few seconds a mile slower then your ‘race effort’ on the interval. Make sense? This forces you to continually ride/run fast when you are tired. Eventually your body will adapt and the pace gets easier and easier.
Mike
Thanks, that makes a lot of sense to me. Probably doing intervals like you describe above and riding some straight would be a good way to break up winter workouts. Is it right to think that if you are planning on having the CT dictate the watts in intervals, you would use this to challenge yourself? This might be considered a mod-hard workout in HR terms.
JLV -
This will be a tough workout for sure! You can do it two ways:
1 - once per week I would advise working on what I call ‘weight training on the bike’ where you might be pushing only 50-60 RPMS but the wattage is high (er) then what what you might normally push. The key to this is to not hurt your knees and you don’t need your HR to get too high. You are really teaching your body to push the wattage - almost like riding steep hills with low cadence.
2 - the other option would be to pick a set wattage - I do this from my 30 minute test - if I average 240 watts for 10 miles (~30 minutes) then I might set the stand alone mode to say 230 watts and hit that for say 3x10 minutes or maybe more or maybe less. You can do any variaiton you want 8x5 minutes, or 10x5, or whetever. The difference in this one would be to keep the cadence higher like in a race ~90 RPMS.
Typically I don’t ride the trainer for more then 90 minutes every few weeks. I do use the CT for all my hard workouts year round however. I hope this helps!
Thanks Mike!