Smart Turbo help

Cliveyp

I've just borrowed a Tacx Vortex smart from a friend as a starting point for getting my legs moving again following a knee injury. The physio has advised starting gently, so my initial thoughts are just turning he pedals over under minimal resistance until I can gauge how much pain it'll leave me in after.

Once I know I can start adding a bit of pressure I need to get myself back to match fit ready for Ride London, so I'm looking for a fairly quick ramp up. To help motivate me I was looking to sign up to a program which will integrate with the smart. Question is, what's my best bet? I've read a bit about both TrainerRoad and Zwift, but which is the best bet and for what reason?

As I mentioned, the main reason for this is to get me match fit again asap, so something that can offer a good combination of gently rolling hills and long steady gradients (I believe the Vortex can simulate up to about 7%).

maryka

Your post is a bit worrying...

"The physio has advised starting gently, so my initial thoughts are just turning he pedals over under minimal resistance until I can gauge how much pain it'll leave me in after" doesn't really go with "I need to get myself back to match fit ready for Ride London, so I'm looking for a fairly quick ramp up".

With Ride London only 3 weeks away you are asking a lot from yourself if you are going from completely off the bike for months to being fit enough to get round a 100 mile ride. What's your base fitness, how long were you off etc.? Any reason why you can't ride the road?

TrainerRoad, Zwift, BeKool etc. are generally designed to make shortish turbo sessions quite challenging, i.e., quite a bit of intensity and hard pedalling. Not sure that's what you want to do here, I think you risk reinjury if you do too much too quickly. Unless you have a great base fitness or haven't been off the bike very long, you just don't have the time to get fit enough to make a 100 mile ride particularly enjoyable unless you just ride quite easy and slow the whole way around.

Can you not defer Ride London til next year when you'll have more time to get fit and probably enjoy it more as a result? Or swap to the shorter one?

Cliveyp

That's a fair point well made....I hadn't out any background in my initial post as I was tapping it out in quite a rush, and looking back it probably makes it sound worse than it is!

Base fitness is not bad....I've been back to decent length rides for about 2-3 years. I had been keeping steady over winter and spring with 30-40 mile rides at weekends which breeze through without too much hassle. My plan was to start ramping this up around a month ago when, out of the blue, I started getting twinges in my right knee. These didn't stop the rides at first, but did stop me pushing on any further than I had been doing. Around 2 weeks ago one of these rides went ok (ish) but the twinge turned to pain that afternoon when it was actually difficult to walk, and bought tears to my eyes when I tried getting in the car.

A couple of days later the doc advised keeping off the bike altogether until it had calmed down, suggesting possible arthritis with a referral to physio. On checking me again, the physio has advised this is quite likely wrong and believes it's a cartilage inflammation and prescribed some exercises and saying that bike riding is fine as long as I can grade back up to the level I want to be at without triggering the same pain. Basically 'suck it and see'. Without trying it I don't know, so hence trying it I am!

As I say, base level is there, I'm probably just a couple of weeks behind where I planned to be. The thought of 100 miles doesn't concern me on the mileage I've currently done, as long as I don't find myself crippled after the first attempt at getting back on.

As for reasons why I can't be out on the roads, at the min that's fairly easy to answer. When I can, I will.....but tomorrow is the wife's birthday (tonight I'm taking her out), weather forecast for the first few evenings of next week doesn't look too fantastic, and the wife is also out a couple of evenings towards the end of the week, leaving me in charge of the daughter, so I can only go as far as the garage! If all goes to plan over this week then I'll be back out on the road next weekend hopefully back up to where I left off!