Indoor training is a great way to maintain your fitness over the winter months, enabling you to spin the pedals whatever the weather.
For the longest time, indoor training was the reserve of dedicated racers with ambitions of carrying their hard-earned fitness through the off-season.
Thanks to modern training tech, the days of staring at your garage door listening to Eye of the Tiger through your headphones are long gone.
While indoor training will never live up to the feeling of getting outside and riding your bike, it’s a lot less monotonous than it used to be.
Apps and smart trainers have gone a long way to killing off boredom, and have added more metrics to train with.
In this article, we’ll share our tips for making indoor training more realistic.
Download a training app
While the roots of indoor training are steeped in punishing ritual, with the early days seeing riders focus on the pain to overcome it on race day, it’s now a much more approachable affair.
Apps, such as Zwift, Rouvy and MyWhoosh bring a virtual world to your training, enabling you to escape the confines of your suffer cave.
While Zwift and MyWhoosh are fully virtual worlds, with animated avatars and scenery, Rouvy uses augmented reality, showing your avatar on screen riding real roads.
These apps benefit from a smart trainer or power meter, adding serious metrics to your workouts, enabling you to complete FTP tests and other training programmes while feeling immersed in the experience.
The social interaction offered by these apps also reduces some of the mind-numbing boredom of indoor training, with group rides, races and events bringing riders together and building community.
MyWhoosh is completely free, while the other apps have a try-before-you-buy period.
Set a goal
While retaining fitness may be motivation enough for some riders, having a goal to aim for in the next season will help focus your training for the real world.
Once you’ve set that goal, whether that be a race, an etape or a multi-day gravel expedition, you can work backwards and do the most effective training.
It can be easy to fall in and out of love with indoor training over the winter months, but having a goal should keep you consistently motivated to stay at it – even if that is only due to moral obligation.
Train with your friends
Just like when you're outside, keeping your indoor training social will make it much easier and help you push yourself harder.
With virtual group rides and Discord chats, it’s easy to synchronise indoor training with your friends and keep the laughs going on the turbo trainer.
As on your local loop, you can still pull each other up mountains to breaking point and battle it out for sprint sections.
Not only does training with your friends help combat any boredom, but it can also help you become a faster rider.
If your friends seem faster online than in real life, then be sure to call them out on their W/Kg in the springtime.
Get comfortable
Making sure you have a good setup for indoor training will make jumping on for a session easier, removing some of the mental battle.
Direct-drive smart trainers are popular with those taking training seriously, with plenty of models available starting from as little as £259.99 / €299.99 for Van Rysel’s D100.
While you can use a power meter and a wheel-on trainer or rollers with most apps, the feedback and gradient adjustment of smart trainers add to the immersive experience.
Another key piece of equipment for indoor training is a strong fan.
Even light sessions on the trainer can result in puddles on the floor, so make sure you have a good fan to keep you cool.
When getting on your bike for indoor training, you should treat it as though you're heading out on the road, so being prepared with enough drinks and food nearby will keep you from waddling to your kitchen to fill up a bottle while midway through your effort.
