How does one go about tracking miles on the bike trainer. I use GPS outside. Does anyone use a head unit for power and another head unit to track miles indoors?
Distance/speed is mostly irrelevant on the trainer. It’s not an accurate measure of the distance you would have gone on the road for the same ride. More than anything watching speed and distance on the trainer will just frustrate you. Focus on duration and effort, or even better - use a power meter if it’s in your budget.
I recommend you just focus on the workout and log duration if you need a number. Depending on gearing and wheel size you can manipulate the number until it’s meaningless. I.e. Easiest resistance 53x11 120w 48kmhr session - how does logging that really help - you can’t really compare that to anything you would do outdoors.
Yep use either heart rate zones or power zones. Speed dose not mean much. You are not going anywhere =)
Some trainers have a known power curve and can calculate speed into power for this you need a speed sensor on your rear wheel and something that can do the calculation for you cyclops makes a product like this so does kurt I believe. There are a fair amount of them. Trainer Road is another.
How does one go about tracking miles on the bike trainer. I use GPS outside. Does anyone use a head unit for power and another head unit to track miles indoors?
You need a speed/cadence sensor and turn OFF the GPS on your head unit to get a speed and track miles.
I’m consistent in tightening the trainer, so I do log my miles on the trainer. However, I realize it isn’t as accurate as outside. My rides are always based on time/wattage, not distance regardless of being inside or outside.
Mostly agree - except you seem to indicate having a power meter and that is completely comparable to riding outside with a caveat about many people being 3-5% down on power on the trainer.
I recommend you just focus on the workout and log duration if you need a number. Depending on gearing and wheel size you can manipulate the number until it’s meaningless. I.e. Easiest resistance 53x11 120w 48kmhr session - how does logging that really help - you can’t really compare that to anything you would do outdoors.
Just guesstimate based on equivalent time/effort outside. Shatter yourself for an hour? What would that bring outdoors? 20mph, 22mph, 24mph? You should have an idea of what the rough equivalent outside is.
There are no miles, only watts and time.
Tracking miles on the trainer is rather pointless in my opinion.
I can provide two workouts I did on my Kickr just recently as examples. Same workout, same gearing, same cadence for the intervals. The only difference was that at some point between doing the two workouts, I performed the routine calibration on the Kickr. If you look at the speed TrainerRoad recorded for the two workouts, the intervals were 2mph lower on the second workout for the same gear and same cadence.
As others said, mileage is the least useful metric both inside and out. Time plus heart rate is better, power is the best. That said, you should be able to set your GPS or head unit to ‘indoor’ mode. With a speed/cadence sensor you can track your distance. A little testing and you should be able to get your resistance to be roughly equivalent to riding outdoors.
It’s meaningless in the context of the workout but if you like to look at aggregate mileage for the year you’ll need to estimate it. I always use 20mph for logging trainer sessions. This is generally my pace on outdoor rides so I figure it would average out for my indoor rides over the course of the year.
I write down:
25kmh for easier efforts (Recovery Rides @ 160-180 Watts)
30kmh for harder efforts (any interval training which is the majority of my indoor riding and any LSD training, average usually being 180 Watts or higher for the total (Recovery + Intervals))
I never change this two values. They are definitely not “correct”, but when tracking total milage, 10 hours on the trainer will correspond to 250-300 kms on the road, which is at least realistic.
Outdoor Riding has the same problem, I ride on a track (technically indoor) where riding 40kmh is not too hard and defintely easier than 20kmh mountain biking over harder trails. But the training effect is not “higher” given the same amount of minutes at similar watts.
Get a power meter, start using Training Stress Scores for your workouts. Anything else in the turbo is a complete guess.
Get a power meter, start using Training Stress Scores for your workouts. Anything else in the turbo is a complete guess.
There are many that would argue that Training Stress Scores are a guess as well.
jaretj
TSS is what I would describe as less of a guess - with so many variables its about the the best I can figure for turbo training. Personally I trust a power meter on a turbo for an athlete more than I do something like a watt bike as the device is used by the athlete all the time, inside and outside. Power also adds another dimension to turbo training and can help alleviate the bordem if you are working to numbers you have some faith in, rather than just trying to rack up mileage which can be mind numbing even for the best of athletes.
Don’t disagree with you general comment, but can you think of a better way to benchmark your turbo sessions?
Personally I like the TSS model, I wanted to put that out there to see if you were polarized into that way of thinking. I’d also like to say that I work with several people that do not have power meters.
While I agree that miles don’t mean as much as effort and time I see a need to track time and distance as well as TSS on the trainer. I certainly feel that 400 TSS points made one way can be different than another, which one is better is a matter of opinion and personal needs.
A person putting in 400 TSS points over 10 hours is different than 8 hours just like it would be different than 100 miles or 150 miles. While using the same trainer, Time and Distance can be used as additional indicators of intensity that can tell more of the story than just TSS alone.
When I see that someone is riding 70 miles in 3 hours on a trainer that tells me that the resistance of the trainer is fairly low but it doesn’t mean that they weren’t working. Yes they may appear to be padding miles but comparing 70 miles done in 3.5 hours to 3 hours using the same trainer tells me that they were most likely riding harder during the 3 hour session.
So yes, TSS would be less of a guess in my opinion as long as a person has a PM. In addition, distance is just a “feel good” number that may represent their overall effort on their trainer compared to other efforts they have done.
jaretj
Distance/speed is mostly irrelevant on the trainer. It’s not an accurate measure of the distance you would have gone on the road for the same ride. More than anything watching speed and distance on the trainer will just frustrate you. Focus on duration and effort, or even better - use a power meter if it’s in your budget.
While I agree, it’s not that different from the variability of measuring distance on outdoor rides given the changes in elevation.
In fact, I’d argue that riding a fixed distance at similar speed on an indoor trainer will be give a more reproducible overall time (for same fitness) that riding a fixed distance on various outdoor courses of different elevation.
As long as your trainer setup is consistent, nothing wrong with using mileage to track your trainer volume. The powermeter data (TSS) is better, but certainly nothing wrong with trainer distance. You ride harder, you cover more distance in a fixed time.
The way people say to throw out the data make it sound like you’ll get 10miles in an hour one day and 25mph in an hour the next day for a similar effort- in practice, with a KK or Fluid2 trainer, in my experience it’s like dead on reproducible in terms of distance at same power (I have a powermeter + speed/cadence sensor so I can see how reproducible my fixed wattage intervals are in terms of distance, and it’s dead on for reproducibility.) Note that I’m not saying trainer miles equal outdoor miles - depending on the resistance of your trainer, could be more could be less. But it should be very reproducible, which is the key for tracking indoor mileage/effort.
You will need a powermeter if you want to combine your indoor efforts with outdoor (by TSS) but even with a powermeter, the conditions are sufficiently different that you might want to not do that. I can FTP test 20watts higher on avg outdoors than indoors with the same bike and same powermeter for the variosu reasons (wind, more time in aero position indoors, etc.)
If you are careful about your tire pressure and resistance wheel tension being consistent then sure - one trainer ride will be consistent with the next. But most people typically have their outside riding as a reference and the trainer will not be consistent with their expectations. I’ll average ~20mph for a threshold interval ride outside door to door. On the trainer that same ride will easily be 16-17mph and I know for a fact I worked just as hard because I have the power meter data to compare. To be clear, I don’t think distance and speed are good metrics indoors or out. HR and volume (duration) are typically better, and power is the ultimate in objectivity. So circiling back to the original question - if you want to track distance on the trainer you’ll need a wheel magnet and speed sensor for your bike that interfaces with whatever you use for a cycling computer. For Garmin it would be GSC-10 and be sure to disable the GPS for trainer rides. Just keep in mind that you don’t want to compare with your outside rides.
Distance/speed is mostly irrelevant on the trainer. It’s not an accurate measure of the distance you would have gone on the road for the same ride. More than anything watching speed and distance on the trainer will just frustrate you. Focus on duration and effort, or even better - use a power meter if it’s in your budget.
While I agree, it’s not that different from the variability of measuring distance on outdoor rides given the changes in elevation.
In fact, I’d argue that riding a fixed distance at similar speed on an indoor trainer will be give a more reproducible overall time (for same fitness) that riding a fixed distance on various outdoor courses of different elevation.
As long as your trainer setup is consistent, nothing wrong with using mileage to track your trainer volume. The powermeter data (TSS) is better, but certainly nothing wrong with trainer distance. You ride harder, you cover more distance in a fixed time.
The way people say to throw out the data make it sound like you’ll get 10miles in an hour one day and 25mph in an hour the next day for a similar effort- in practice, with a KK or Fluid2 trainer, in my experience it’s like dead on reproducible in terms of distance at same power (I have a powermeter + speed/cadence sensor so I can see how reproducible my fixed wattage intervals are in terms of distance, and it’s dead on for reproducibility.) Note that I’m not saying trainer miles equal outdoor miles - depending on the resistance of your trainer, could be more could be less. But it should be very reproducible, which is the key for tracking indoor mileage/effort.
You will need a powermeter if you want to combine your indoor efforts with outdoor (by TSS) but even with a powermeter, the conditions are sufficiently different that you might want to not do that. I can FTP test 20watts higher on avg outdoors than indoors with the same bike and same powermeter for the variosu reasons (wind, more time in aero position indoors, etc.)
If you are careful about your tire pressure and resistance wheel tension being consistent then sure - one trainer ride will be consistent with the next. But most people typically have their outside riding as a reference and the trainer will not be consistent with their expectations. I’ll average ~20mph for a threshold interval ride outside door to door. On the trainer that same ride will easily be 16-17mph and I know for a fact I worked just as hard because I have the power meter data to compare. To be clear, I don’t think distance and speed are good metrics indoors or out. HR and volume (duration) are typically better, and power is the ultimate in objectivity. So circiling back to the original question - if you want to track distance on the trainer you’ll need a wheel magnet and speed sensor for your bike that interfaces with whatever you use for a cycling computer. For Garmin it would be GSC-10 and be sure to disable the GPS for trainer rides. Just keep in mind that you don’t want to compare with your outside rides.
Distance/speed is mostly irrelevant on the trainer. It’s not an accurate measure of the distance you would have gone on the road for the same ride. More than anything watching speed and distance on the trainer will just frustrate you. Focus on duration and effort, or even better - use a power meter if it’s in your budget.
While I agree, it’s not that different from the variability of measuring distance on outdoor rides given the changes in elevation.
In fact, I’d argue that riding a fixed distance at similar speed on an indoor trainer will be give a more reproducible overall time (for same fitness) that riding a fixed distance on various outdoor courses of different elevation.
As long as your trainer setup is consistent, nothing wrong with using mileage to track your trainer volume. The powermeter data (TSS) is better, but certainly nothing wrong with trainer distance. You ride harder, you cover more distance in a fixed time.
The way people say to throw out the data make it sound like you’ll get 10miles in an hour one day and 25mph in an hour the next day for a similar effort- in practice, with a KK or Fluid2 trainer, in my experience it’s like dead on reproducible in terms of distance at same power (I have a powermeter + speed/cadence sensor so I can see how reproducible my fixed wattage intervals are in terms of distance, and it’s dead on for reproducibility.) Note that I’m not saying trainer miles equal outdoor miles - depending on the resistance of your trainer, could be more could be less. But it should be very reproducible, which is the key for tracking indoor mileage/effort.
You will need a powermeter if you want to combine your indoor efforts with outdoor (by TSS) but even with a powermeter, the conditions are sufficiently different that you might want to not do that. I can FTP test 20watts higher on avg outdoors than indoors with the same bike and same powermeter for the variosu reasons (wind, more time in aero position indoors, etc.)
Well, if you have a setup like yours that varies tremendously then sure, distance on trainer isn’t good a metric.
What the heck kind of trainer are you using anyway - 16mph vs 20mph is a 20% difference in speed - I find it hard to believe that you’re getting that monstrous a difference with the same trainer setup.
I’m not even exaggerating when I say that when I do my power intervals (powermeter wattage), the mph on my Fluid2 is reproducible down to the 0.1mph, and that’s anywhere between 18 and 24mph where all my training occurs per the speed sensor. And I’m not doing anything fancy on the setup (no need to with a powermeter to verify the power) - the tire is near 100psi (I don’t check it even every week), and I just ride. I have the data so in retrospect I can see the speed - it’s EXTREMELY precise - to the point that while I love my powermeter, I’m pretty sure if I was just doing indoor training, virtualpower would be literally as good as the powermeter in terms of precision on my Fluid2.