Does Turbo training translate in better results on the road?

zest28

It seems that my FTP on my race bike is significantly higher than on my cheap winter bike + turbo trainer.

So all of my indoor workouts are done at a lower power than what I can achieve outdoors on my race bike.

Does it make sense to train like this during the winter at lower power outputs or will it 1:1 translate to outdoor performance regardless of the lower power outputs?

fenix

What's your perceived effort on both ? Similar ?

Sometimes it's harder to push yourself indoors as it's warmer and nobody to chase.

Also how are you measuring FTP inside and out ?

N0bodyOfTheGoat

From my own experiences, it takes ~3 weeks of doing 3+ turbo sessions a week where you include some significant intervals in your z3+ power zone during sessions of 30mins+ to get your body to adapt to the extra heat of turbo sessions compared to outdoors... While running a decent fan or two and drinking far more water indoors (I typically go through ~1.5 litres with ~75mins).

I then get very similar power and heart figures compared to outdoors.

If I don't do any z4+ turbo training for ~2 weeks, which rarely happens at all during the "winter season," I lose a lot of the adaption and my heart rate for z3+ power will raise again.

bobmcstuff

zest28 said:

It seems that my FTP on my race bike is significantly higher than on my cheap winter bike + turbo trainer.

So all of my indoor workouts are done at a lower power than what I can achieve outdoors on my race bike.

Does it make sense to train like this during the winter at lower power outputs or will it 1:1 translate to outdoor performance regardless of the lower power outputs?

If the alternative is doing nothing then absolutely it makes sense.

Are you measuring both the same way?

People will have different effective threshold power in different positions as well (i.e., most people lose quite a few watts on a TT bike compared to a road bike - which is made up for by aero benefit).

dannbodge

Might be a discrepancy in your equipment (could be as simple as position) or the fact you can go harder indoors as you don't have to worry about where you're going.

I can't match my indoor FTP on the road, but on a closed circuit (Goodwood) they are the same.

zest28

I am using the power meter of my trainer.

It seems that I need to adapt to indoor training as I should not be sweating like this with these efforts.

I bought a new blower and it has improved things already.

My sprinting power is still a joke though.