10 Reasons to Ride Your Trainer

Hi, now that Winter is on the way, many of us now need to embrace training indoors to really be ready to hit the roads strong. Training indoors can be a huge help to reaching your fitness goals – here are some great reasons to do it now – and all year round.
1. Convenience - You can put all your hydration, nutrition and towels right next to you. Your bathroom right around the corner.
2. Safety - You do not need to pay attention to traffic, what time of day, pests, animals, etc. You can watch whatever you want on TV or listen to whatever you want as loud as you want without endangering yourself or others, unless it is 6 a.m. and your spouse is still asleep. You might want to consider headphones in that case.
3. Form - Even without a computerized trainer such as the Computrainer (with the SpinScan capabilities) or Tacx system, you can really focus on your form. Do those Isolated Leg Exercises. If you have them, ride those rollers. Check out the new e-Motion rollers for the best of both worlds in one (albeit expensive package). www.insideride.com
4. Focus - Having to divide your attention among less things means you can pay more attention to just riding. Singular focus. You can focus on keeping that cadence at 90 instead of AROUND 90.
5. Mindless - On the flip side, you can completely zone out. You must pay attention when you ride outside. On the trainer, if you just need a mindless ride, plug in that music and pedal away. No other thought required. Put in a ride DVD and just do what it tells you to do.
6. Efficiency - If you are crunched on time, a trainer is a very time efficient way to train and with high intensity. Put your trainer in front of the TV - watch your favorite show and not be relegated to some isolated room in the house.
7. Consistency - Even if the weather is bad outside due to heat, rain, cold or simply because your schedule at work didn’t allow you to come home as planned or whatever else in life happens, you can still ride.
8. Flexibility - You can ride inside at 10:00 p.m. or 4:00 a.m. So especially if you have more than one bike, it is very helpful to leave one bike set up on the trainer. This removes a lot of the prep work of getting the bike on the trainer that can cut into valuable training time. At the very least, have a place set up in your house with the trainer set up. When a free 45 minutes presents itself, you can take advantage of it.
9. Learn - You learn all sorts of things about yourself when on the trainer. Keep a tape recorder next to you to empty all of those brilliant ideas into as you ride. Practice your nutrition. Try out a new pair of shorts.
10. Repeatability - Because you have so many factors in your control when inside, you can replicate the same conditions. Same temperature, same bike shorts, same time of day, same nutrition. This allows you to do that Threshold test every 6-8 weeks under very similar conditions. If anything changes in your power or energy output, it is easier to identify the causes for these changes. It allows you to isolate one thing you are working on without having many other things change as well.
A couple of things to remember: your saddle will not feel as comfortable because you do not change position as much. This is normal. If you want to change position, come out of the saddle, just add some gear/resistance to help you stand.
Abient temperature must be low - ideally around 60 degrees. A fan is a must. If you do not do either or both of these things, your core temperature will heat up beyond what is comfortable and you will just need to stop. You will start out feeling cold but this won’t last. Turn on the fan from the start, every time. Garage, basement or room to open a window in the winter or can set the room temperature in independently of the rest of the house is ideal.
And lastly, sometimes an effort inside at the same power can ‘feel’ harder than outside. Do not get hung up on this. It is not know exactly why this is, whether it is mental or physiological or a combination of all of the above, but unless the majority of your workouts are inside and are consistently falling below where you should be, it is rarely a significant problem. Just enjoy the trainer, enjoy the simplicity of it and the fact that you can ride inside at any time, any time you want and not worry about the numbers.
So set yourself up in a corner of your house with a small table next to you, sync up those iPods, plug in your DVD player, grab a towel and some water, and go spin!