The official TrainerRoad thread
Comments
-
colinsmith123 wrote:I did a 20 min FTP test today repeating 8DC stage 6 to gauge whether there has been any gains. I was aspiring for a 15% improvement, but happy to settle for an increase of 10%.
Has anyone else who did the 8DC re-tested their FTP this weekend and had similar gains?
I re-tested on Tuesday and got just over a 10% gain which I'm happy with. I use the 8 min test but I may switch to the 20 min for future tests given that I almost enjoyed Stage 6 but always hate the 8 min test.0 -
Took the plunge and signed up. Got to be better than staring out of the window at the rain and not going out on the bike. Just did the 20 minute test and ended up with an ftp of 138, but I'm only a beginner so I can live with that for the time being.0
-
On the SF website for download.
I don't know how you can do a SF without TrainerRoad , so thats why I put it here.0 -
Yup love Sf and Tr (but not while im doing them)!0
-
Second workout just completed. Gayley by name...Didn't think I was going to finish it but just about managed. This is going to be hard :shock:0
-
Anyone using Elite Arion mag rollers with resistance unit with Trainer Road?
Positive?
Thinking it would be nice just to plonk bike straight onto rollers and work away without having to swap rear wheel.0 -
Hi JGSI,
I am using Elite Arion mag rollers with resistance on Trainer Road. I use it on resistance level 2 and I changed the wheel circumference setting to 1500 to compensate, as suggested on the trainer road forum (I am 82kg on a 8kg bike). I pump my tyres up to 100PSI or as near as possible everytime. I reckon it is fairly consistent, obviously you would need to do a FTP test first but then it seems great. I have the same username on Trainer road if you want to check it out.0 -
Thanks for that! The cnc roller version is looking very tempting!0
-
NUFCrichard wrote:Hi JGSI,
I am using Elite Arion mag rollers with resistance on Trainer Road. I use it on resistance level 2 and I changed the wheel circumference setting to 1500 to compensate, as suggested on the trainer road forum (I am 82kg on a 8kg bike). I pump my tyres up to 100PSI or as near as possible everytime. I reckon it is fairly consistent, obviously you would need to do a FTP test first but then it seems great. I have the same username on Trainer road if you want to check it out.
Hi,
I use the Elite Arion mag rollers too. From Trainer Road a 72Kg user has confirmed that setting the wheel circumference in TrainerRoad to 1416mm gives them power within about 10% of their powertap. Did you find 1500mm more accurate for you?
http://support.trainerroad.com/entries/21483310-Elite-Arion-Mag-Rollers
I think (hope) the 1416mm setting underestimates power for me although it's much closer than the standard TR beta profile. I'm 64Kg on an 8Kg bike, but not sure if weight is a factor.
BTW, I have the plastic rollers and find them a bit bumpy, I'd expect the Aluminium rollers to be a lot smoother.0 -
JGSI wrote:Anyone using Elite Arion mag rollers with resistance unit with Trainer Road?
Positive?
Thinking it would be nice just to plonk bike straight onto rollers and work away without having to swap rear wheel.
I am and much prefer them to riding a turbo trainer, much more engaging/realistic. They have 3 resistance settings and the highest setting gives me more than enough resistance to work with more. Yes you can just plonk your bike on, but you need to make sure your tyres are clean and you will wear out the rear tyre with lots of riding.
I'd go for the aluminium rollers if possible as my plastic rollers aren't quite round and make the ride a bit bumpy.0 -
SRC1 wrote:JGSI wrote:Anyone using Elite Arion mag rollers with resistance unit with Trainer Road?
Positive?
Thinking it would be nice just to plonk bike straight onto rollers and work away without having to swap rear wheel.
I am and much prefer them to riding a turbo trainer, much more engaging/realistic.
They're very appealing but i've always been a bit leery about the power curves on rollers in general. Looking at the Arions curves, seems like they start basically linear (level 0) and even the highest level is rather flat - c.f. something like the KK fluid units
http://www.kurtkinetic.com/powercurve.php
I know the KK unit feels pretty much spot on to me compared to riding on the road, apart from spin down (only have the standard flywheel alas) so i'm curious as to whether the apparent difference between the KK and Arion curves actually translates into anything meaningful - or whether they're much of a muchness in reality. I want to use rollers in future, for a number of a reasons, but don't want to feel like i'm just spinning up towards the top end of effort - I know I can just go outside, but if i'm inside i'd like to get as close as I can to the Real Thing. Plus.. those Al13s do look sooo tempting.
Interested in any info folk may have on this.0 -
SRC1 wrote:NUFCrichard wrote:Hi JGSI,
I use the Elite Arion mag rollers too. From Trainer Road a 72Kg user has confirmed that setting the wheel circumference in TrainerRoad to 1416mm gives them power within about 10% of their powertap. Did you find 1500mm more accurate for you?
Well I wasn't very scientific about it to be honest! I don't have a power meter, but I read that being heavier will increase the resistance somewhat. As you say, it was recommended to use 1416mm for a 72kg rider, so I used 1500mm for an 82kg rider. At the end of the day as long as it is consistent and allows me to do the intervals properly it's good enough for me.
FWIW I use a FTP of 275w at the moment, I have no idea if that is realistic low or high (I hope not!). The only comparison I can give is with Strava "power" where I managed 314w up Sa Colabra in 39 mins, which would suggest an FTP over 300w. But that is comparing something that is massively inaccurate with something else that is massively inaccurate!0 -
NUFCrichard wrote:The only comparison I can give is with Strava "power" where I managed 314w up Sa Colabra in 39 mins, which would suggest an FTP over 300w. But that is comparing something that is massively inaccurate with something else that is massively inaccurate!
Idle curiosity suggests that just the change in potential energy of you (82kg) + bike (8kg) over the 680m elevation change of Sa Colabra is over 255W for 39 minutes... so adding on rolling resistance, wind etc would more than likely make the real effort head to the high 200s. Nice going - route looks fabulous too, quite jealous
0 -
I've been getting out a bit more and using TR a bit less recently - unsurprising seeing as it is supposed to be summer! So, I've been using Strava a lot more.
Last night I was back on TR and had a go at Fight Club. I only did it at 95% and I found it really tough. Anyway, my point was, seeing as I'm using Strava a lot more, I thought I'd try and export my Fight Club file into Strava to keep my ride log up to date in one place.
I'm probably way behind the times here, but I was very impressed how straight forward it was - just download the .tcx file to my PC, then upload it from within Strava. And there it was, all the pretty graphs, including actually the speed, which obviously you don't normally see within TrainerRoad.
Having now seen the distance covered and average speed recorded by TR, compared to a similar time and distance outside, I reckon my turbo is a more difficult ride than outside. It doesn't matter to me, as I really just look for relative improvements on the turbo over time.
Anyway, I'm rambling now. The main reason for my post was just to say how easily impressed by technology an old bloke like me is, having transferred a ride log from TR into Strava. Amazing. (And yes, I know, I need to get with the programme, but I'm trying!)
Cheers,
MarkPBoardman Road Comp - OK, I went to Halfords
Tibia plateau fracture - the rehab continues!0 -
MarkP80 wrote:I've been getting out a bit more and using TR a bit less recently - unsurprising seeing as it is supposed to be summer! So, I've been using Strava a lot more.
Last night I was back on TR and had a go at Fight Club. I only did it at 95% and I found it really tough.
If it's any consolation my first TR ride, after re-doing my FTP with Rubber Glove, was Fight Club and it damn near killed me. I'd let a gap of two weeks develop between the test and FC, during which i'd only done a few outside rides - and not exactly testing ones at that... could not hit the sprints fully at the end to save my life (nearly had the opposite effect). Bit of sweat since then has improved things, but i'll not completely stop TR again without getting some decent, hard rides in.
Nice to get out more though, long may that continue.0 -
Yes, it is a consolation - glad to hear it's not just me!fukawitribe wrote:MarkP80 wrote:Last night I was back on TR and had a go at Fight Club. I only did it at 95% and I found it really tough.
If it's any consolation my first TR ride, after re-doing my FTP with Rubber Glove, was Fight Club and it damn near killed me. ... could not hit the sprints fully at the end to save my life (nearly had the opposite effect).
- indeed! 8)fukawitribe wrote:Nice to get out more though, long may that continue.
Cheers,
MarkP
(I see the froum name has changed from Training to Fitness & Health)Boardman Road Comp - OK, I went to Halfords
Tibia plateau fracture - the rehab continues!0 -
I couldn't find the forum due to the name change.
Still haven't done my FTP test post 8DC. Did manage a new 20 minute power record last night at a 10mile TT though.
Have been riding outside everyday for about a week. Had a training funk caused by not being able to run then had to MTFU and get out there. Happy days!0 -
Back on it after a forced lay off. Started with a custom sweet spot session yesty, today I'll be doing a custom workout I made based on the Beacon Little Mountain Time Trial, I made it using power data from my races there and looked at %ftp on wko+.
Today I'll try it at 80% then aim to build up over the months Insta: ATEnduranceCoaching
ABCC Cycling Coach0 -
Blender is my favourite at the moment.. it raineth.. so it awaiteth
Quite happy with my RHR after 2 espressos
0 -
I bought some Sufferfests in a deal they were offering a couple of weeks ago - I got A Very Dark Place, The Long Scream and Extra Shot. They've all been revised since their original release though, so no matching TrainerRoad workout yet, although the guys have said they'll be available soon. Looking forward to it :twisted:JGSI wrote:Blender is my favourite at the moment.. it raineth.. so it awaiteth
Cheers,
MarkPBoardman Road Comp - OK, I went to Halfords
Tibia plateau fracture - the rehab continues!0 -
Well, my FTP seems to have dropped through the floor.
I have been training for the Marmotte, and so have been doing a lot of riding outdoors, and longer rides. On strava, I have been improving my times by quite a lot, including beating my PB by 2 min on a difficult climb I have been using for training.
Last night it was raining here, so I decided to do some indoor training and tried out Angels. My FTP is still set where it was at my last test (end of last year) and I failed badly. I battled to maintain anything close to the settings during the early part of the ride, and eventually had to drop the % down to 90.
I find it really hard to include these really hard efforts into my normal training week.0 -
I've been using TR since Feb this year, was making solid progress at first but FTP seemed to plateau about May. Have also been doing lots of riding on the road over the summer. Last week I did a one hour session on the road at full gas to see what my FTP was "for real". First surprise was I blew away my TR test results by about 15-20%. Second surprise was when I dialled up the FTP on TR and tried to do Ruskin last night, I could get nowhere near it (horrible blowup). I'm using the same PowerTap in both cases, and a massive industrial fan on the turbo, so I'm at a loss to explain it. Why would there be such a big difference indoors vs outdoors?0
-
you don't feel the pain as much when you are seeing the beautiful countryside?regards,
dbb0 -
I know it's summer and all that .. but some of us are still trying to ready ourselves for some important races coming up in September... nice little blog post from Trainer Road which might help in re focussing efforts:TrainerRoad
Consistency: Only Part of the Solution
Posted by chad on July 16, 2013 Leave a comment (1) Go to comments
ConsistencyConsistency is the mother of mastery, and if I knew who was responsible for this nugget of wisdom, I’d give due credit. Or maybe it’s simply an observation put forth in its simplest terms. In any case, it’s as germane to the technical aspects of cycling as the non-technical, comparatively straightforward fitness gains we strive for when we train day after day, week after week, season after season.
But it’s often our consistency to blame for fitness plateaus, injuries, and temporary or even long-term declines in power output (which depend on just how far, and how obstinately, we push our ourselves) in the quest for improved capabilities & peak fitness. This is something easily avoided when we listen to our bodies’ signals, and it’s also something addressed in greater detail in an earlier post on training responsively. In this post, however, I’d rather focus on the benefits of proper consistency – being on the mark, as often as possible – as well as some of the pitfalls we encounter even though our intentions are sound. As I see it, consistency can be good, it can be bad, and in some cases it becomes downright ugly.
Nutshell:
Consistent practice yields improvement regardless of the skill or sought-after adaptation.
But there’s a significant difference between consistency and proper consistency.
Practising proper consistency during your efforts – in racing and training - can be the difference between fair results and your best results.
Really make your interval workouts count by treating each interval as though it were the only interval in the workout – strive for near perfection.
Form work for the sake of form work is pointless – perform form drills exceptionally well or modify them such that you can.
GIGO – Garbage In/Garbage Out dictates that improper training yields less than optimal results and can lead to poor habits & even injury.
Muscle memory can just as easily acquire bad ‘memories’ as good ones – memorize proper movement patterns & work ethics.
You don’t need me to tell you that practice yields improvement. Do 100 pushups every day and you’re bound to not only get a little stronger, but you’ll get better at performing pushups. If you practice playing guitar every day, your fingers will become more adept at fretting chords and picking strings. Even typing improves relative to the amount of time you spend tapping away at your keyboard on a consistent basis.
So it’s not exactly a miracle to see a rider who ‘rides lots‘ become a better rider due to little more than rote repetition (italics are used to acknowledge that the type of improvement that comes with high mileage is limited & closely dependent on the intensity of this mileage, so ‘better’ is a pretty subjective word). But repetition alone won’t optimize improvement – not in your level of efficiency, not in your level of fitness, and not in your all-important performance. Reaping measurable, significant performance gains is not merely a matter of consistency but more a matter of the quality of consistency.
Take the pushups for example. If every half hour you were to bang out 5 sloppy pushups where you snaked your body off the floor, head jutting forward, elbows coming nowhere near locking out at the end of their full range of motion while your friend maintained a plank straight body, elbows in tight, lightly grazing the ground with his chest and quickly pressing upward, fully extending his arms in steady sets of 20 pushups every 5 minutes, would you expect the same level of improvement as him? Even if you both did an equal number of pushups, it’s still pretty clear who’s going to get fitter and who’s wasting time & effort.
In much the same way, simply surviving intervals will not make you as fit as if you sought to perfect how well you performed each of your intervals. How did Vince Lombardi put it? Practice does not make perfect. Only perfect practice makes perfect. And while perfection isn’t the objective here, the idea is the same. We can’t expect optimal results from less than optimal performance, and that goes for training as much as it goes for racing.
In the case of intervals, our goals ought to center around performing the best possible version of each interval, every single time – intervals that closely hug our target watts, intervals that don’t fade at 1min 50sec even though we’re shooting for 2-minute repeats, intervals where our bodies mimic the hard-working yet relaxed posture we want to emulate on the road. When any of these qualities or abilities degrade, we know it’s time to either make some minor workout modifications or wrap things up for the day. But regardless, when we strive to maximize the quality of our workouts, we all but guarantee ourselves better performances when it really matters.
In the same vein, consider efficiency drills. It’s not realistic to expect optimal technique improvements by repeating 5-minute intervals at 120rpm if you spend the latter 3 minutes of each interval bouncing around on the saddle. Rather, you’d derive far greater benefit and would have spent your time inarguably more productively by slowing things down to 115 or 110rpm or perhaps reducing the interval duration to 2 minutes and performing more of them. In both cases, there’s nothing to keep you from eventually reaching 5 minutes at 120, smooth revolutions per minute if you go about it the right way, i.e. consistently applying high quality, proper form.
This all comes back to the idea of GIGO (Garbage In-Garbage Out) which gives us a pithy little term to describe the process of building poor habits, ones that can haunt us for years, maybe even the rest of our lives. Building proper habits isn’t just good idea, it’s a necessity that can not only further your capabilities but also prevent injury. And you’ve undoubtedly heard the term ‘muscle memory’. Well it’s this ingrained memory that’s responsible for the difference between the elegance and grace of a grand tour rider and the convulsive spin-bike wrestling you can witness in any indoor cycling class taking place at this very moment.
What’s even more interesting about muscle memory is that, to some extent, it can be learned through observation. Simply watching a grand tour rider sail up Alpe d’Huez can make us better climbers! But I’m getting away from the point I’m trying to convey which is how very important the quality of our consistency truly is. It’s not enough to do something often. What really makes our (limited, in most cases) training time all the more effective is the standards to which we hold ourselves when training consistently. Don’t just “ride lots”; instead, if you’re fortunate enough to be able to dedicate hours upon hours to riding, ride lots really well. And if time is in short supply, pursue near-perfection in riding form & workout quality, do it consistently, and you’ll soon gain an understanding of how this simple combination can bring surprisingly high levels of improvement.
So from this point forward, try to stop seeing consistency as a key to improvement all on its own and start recognizing that it’s only part of the equation that brings us closer to optimal fitness and dramatically improved performance. Consistency is vital, no doubt about that, but without proper habits, ever-improving techniques, and high quality, our consistency can only take our performance so far.0 -
With this being such a long thread - to avoid me reading through it all, can someone tell me if the figures they are getting on TR are pretty much the same as what they are getting on the road ie: FTP figure etc?
A guy in my cycle club only uses his power meter on his turbo using TR as he said the figures from his road performance and on the trainer differed so much, it was only worth using one set of figures.
Having only recently bought a Powertap hub, i'm in the process of testing it on the road now to achieve my FTP but could I achieve the same results using TR testing?
Thank you.0 -
In short, no. TR gave me an FTP somewhere around 140W. I climbed Alpe d'Huez in just under 66 mins with room to spare which puts me closer to 260W based on my weight. I'm unable to figure out why there is such a huge discrepancy.0
-
Just to clarify, did you ride the ALpe with a PM?onemoresolo wrote:In short, no. TR gave me an FTP somewhere around 140W. I climbed Alpe d'Huez in just under 66 mins with room to spare which puts me closer to 260W based on my weight. I'm unable to figure out why there is such a huge discrepancy.
You mention weight, thats all.
Late last year a forum member synched up a Powertap with the Satori turbo. He did a lot of work and the results of the revised (revised from TACX offical curve, that is) power curve were given over to the guys at TR and they added an amended profile on the TR software. The Satori with resistance at 6 gave the closest as dammit power equivalents for arguments sake to the Powertap.0 -
I was basing my power on the graph presented here: http://alex-cycle.blogspot.co.uk/2011/0 ... rtals.html
It's completely unscientific but I'd put my FTP far closer to what's suggested by the chart than what's suggested by TR. Baffled as I have a Satori and use the updated profile. I'm not massively concerned as relative improvement is still perceptible but I'm disappointed I don't get the accuracy others appear to.0 -
onemoresolo wrote:I was basing my power on the graph presented here: http://alex-cycle.blogspot.co.uk/2011/0 ... rtals.html
It's completely unscientific but I'd put my FTP far closer to what's suggested by the chart than what's suggested by TR. Baffled as I have a Satori and use the updated profile. I'm not massively concerned as relative improvement is still perceptible but I'm disappointed I don't get the accuracy others appear to.
Well, seems to me that your TR setup might need a looksee as your Alpe ride does indicate a lot higher power output.
I use the Satori on resistance level 6 and use the gears to either spin it up or push harder.
I looked at your TR ride list and well. re test again... it's been a while since you used it
Keep it at 5.
If you can use a garmin HRM as well, always useful to gauge 'effort' after the test...
maybe do the 2 x 8 minute version..?. where you can better attempt full chat.0
