
Nutrition and Cycling – a layman’s view

Sustainable Health and Wellbeing
When it comes to Cycle Training Apps, there are two types of App:
Let’s look at using these in turn.
Strava is the default App to have. There is a saying in the running and cycling community, which some people take seriously, that “if it isn’t on Strava, it didn’t happen”. It is one of those Apps where you will quickly become hooked!
Once you have a Strava account (the basic account is free), download the Strava App to your phone and start/record rides (indoor and road). If you have a cycling computer, connect your Strava account to your Garmin Connect account or Wahoo Elemnt account so that you can upload your rides from your cycling computer directly into Strava.
Strava is primarily for the road, but can also be useful to capture your indoor workouts. It comes with training plans, but is not really designed to be used for structured workouts per se, it is designed to record your ride or other activity.
Once you start to use Strava, you can review your workout data, compare with previous workouts, or connect with one of the tens of millions of people using Strava, including Strava friends, and compare your performances for fun, or as friendly rivalry.
TrainingPeaks is a App for people who want to train seriously either by themselves or in collaboration with a coach (which is why I use it for my coaching business https://www.cycleforfitness.com). Once a training plan is created or “loaded” into your profile, the workout is sync’d to your cycle computer for you to follow ether on the road or on the indoor trainer. After your workout the data is uploaded for you to review (by yourself or with a coach).
Plans can be based on your rate of perceived effort (RPE) or according to heart rate, cadence and/or power zones. A premium version exists for £11 per month if you want to get access to more data statistics.
If you use Trainingpeaks, I recommend that you connect it to your Strava account, and your Garmin or Wahoo accounts to enable syncing.
Notes:
Zwift is one of the fastest growing indoor training Apps that allows you to enter immersive virtual worlds and “ride” with thousands of people in real-time from all over the world. You can join team rides, ride for fun, or follow structured workouts.
An advantage that Zwift provides when working with basic trainers is that it can calculate ‘vPower’ (virtual power), basing its calculation on your age, weight, cadence and heart rate. This calculation results in a measurement called Watts/Kg, which it uses to calculate your moving speed in the virtual world. Trust me, it works really well.
When starting out, you may only have say 1 or 2 Watt/Kg over a 5 minute interval a so you’ll be going slow, but as you build fitness and strength, or lose weight this will increase to 3 or more Watts/Kg over the same period. To give you an indication (but not to dishearten you, a professional usually cranks out 6 to 7 Watts/Kg !).
I like Zwift purely for the entertainment it provides, it is truly immersive and the time seems to go faster than watching a blank wall or TV programme. Pricing has jumped to £12 a month for new accounts, which some people might consider steep if you are also subscribing to other indoor training services.
It may seem a little daunting on how to setup and use Zwift, so please refer to the below videos on setting up Zwift, selecting structured workouts (from TrainingPeaks), riding in its virtual world and using ERG to train to target power levels.
Selecting workouts, or make you own !
Trainerroad is an indoor training App for whose who want to train using coach developed workouts (in a similar fashion to TrainingPeaks but without the bespoke coach support). It is a competitor to Zwift. On the upside, it has better planned workouts, but does not have the same immersive feel as Zwift. Trainerroad can also calculate vPower using your basic trainer’s power curve characteristics,etc, so you will get a good workout with the basic trainer. You can connect sensors using Trainerroads setup screens. When I used Trainerroad it all worked well. In terms of pricing they do not offer a free account, it’s $12 a month.
Traineroad requires a little setting up,but is reasonably straightforward. The following videos show how to get your TrainingPeaks workout into Trainerroad and your user experience.
Loading Workouts and using with Video
Setting up and working out with Trainerroad
The Sufferfest indoor training App sits between Zwift and Trainerroad, offering training plans and real life videos that you can follow as if you are riding with the peloton. It’s style is that cycle training is all about the degree of suffering…you may love or hate the machoism in the names of rides such as “the hammer” , “hell hath no fury” ..for the novice it might be daunting, or fun, you take your choice.
I’ll refer you to my other article on indoor training for you to decide and as a taster, below is a decision tree intended to help you make your choice.
Let’s get to the point, training indoors rather than being out riding is boring but useful, and primarily for times when you cannot get out to ride. In term of budget, you can start with a low cost basic trainer and mount your bike onto it and off you go. If you want to go beyond training using your own perceived levels of effort, get a heart rate monitor (Bluetooth is easiest) and connect it with your phone or laptop. That way you can train using Apps such as Strava or Trainingpeaks to make your workouts effective.
If your budget allows, and what you want to measure as part of workout increases (see below pie chart), connect Speed/Cadence sensors and by upgrading your trainer to a smart (or connected) trainer that that either measures or simulates your power output, you will be able interact with Apps such as Trainrroad or Sufferfest or use immersive Apps such as Zwift.
In terms of budget, you can spend from £150 to £2,000. The biggest outlay will be the trainer itself, followed by sensors and then there is a wide choice of free and monthly subscription based Apps. The decision tree to the right is intended to help you make those choices. A larger image is on my Pinterest board here.
In the previous article I wrote and video’d how to set up Garmin and Wahoo cycle computers to talk to various sensors that you need if you are considering training, such as heart rate monitors, and cadence/speed sensors.
We will also talk here about measuring power using an indoor trainers as they more readily available and cheaper than the eye-wateringly expensive power meters that are used for road cycling.
So why would you want to measure these things in the first place ? When riding your bike on the road, I agree, these are nice to haves and you can train by using your own levels of fitness as indicators of how far and how hard to push yourself. You’ll recall this is called training to your perceived rate of effort (RPE) and is used to get us started and riding up to for example 20 miles in one go without having to stop.
However, if you plan to go that one step further and use cycling as your primary means to regain fitness to a level where you could easily ride one of the many sportives, charity rides, or cycle with club riders, then by measuring your heart rate, cadence (pedal speed) and possibly power, you can train much more effectively to a specific and measurable plan.
When it comes to indoor trainers, measuring your heart rate, together with speed and cadence becomes necessary if you want the best out of your training workout.
But you may ask, don’t we just swing a leg over the bike, and pedal for a while, looking at a blank wall in the garage, shouting at Jeremy Kyle, or watching our favourite boxset ? 🙂 Nice thought, but time and again I hear that indoor workouts are boring, and because you cannot manage what they cannot measure, or if you don’t feel that all that sweating is making a real difference, it is way too easy to become seriously demotivated.
Okay, if it is that boring, why bother with indoor training? The answer is that the vast majority of people who use indoor trainers, while considering this form of exercise a necessary evil, know that it helps them keep fit when the weather outside is not amenable, or just too dangerous due to ice, snow, floods, etc. Other reasons for indoor training is that you may consider the roads around you are dangerous, being full of cars, vans and lorry drivers who are “out to get you”. Or perhaps you simply haven’t yet gained the confidence to ride on the roads as you have been unwell, seriously unfit or injured and the roads just seem too daunting at this time of the year.
Either way, over the last few years a new arm of the cycling industry has popped up to help you with new Apps and advanced (or smart) indoor cycling trainers, aiming to give you immersive entertainment, and offering you the chance to have fun, realistic and effective workouts. By capturing certain data, this new industry help you understand how your performance is improving and help you avoid having to swear at Jeremy Kyle !
Having bit the bullet and decided that you want to exercise using an indoor cycle trainer, where do you start ? It very much depends on a couple of things. The first is your budget, the second what you want to achieve and how realistic you want the indoor trainer to be to road cycling. Cycling Weekly has a reasonable guide to turbo trainers, however my take is below.
If your budget is conservative, then you’ll probably be looking to get a basic trainer (from £150 to £450). This is the type where you mount your bike onto a frame, with the rear wheel pressed against a roller with either a fixed or varying resistance created either by magnets, a fan, or fluid-filled resistance unit. The good points about basic trainers are that they give you the ability to do and free workout or according to a structured plan. However there are two downsides;
(a) you cannot use them with Apps such as Trainerroad unless the trainer is vPower compatible, and you also have a speed/cadence sensor for Zwift.
(b) you cannot control the resistance, so you have to either increase the cadence or drop to a higher gears to increase power and vice versa.
Note that if you have a power meter for you bike, you can use them with the basic trainer as if you road riding, pairing the power meter to your cycle computer or via laptop/phone to one of the above cycle training Apps (we come to those later in this article).
Moving up the scale in terms of sophistication, features and hence cost, we come to smart trainers. There are two types:
The first type if similar in operation to the basic trainer, the difference being that the resistance can be controlled and varied from your cycle computer, or more likely nowadays, cycling training Apps.
The second type, and usually top of the range, are the ‘direct drive’ trainers. These work by removing the back wheel and mounting the bike directly on the trainer. The resistance can be set by cycle computers and cycle training Apps and can simulate the feel and an create an immersive riding experience….all at a price !
For completeness, we need to mention rollers. Rather than mounting your bike on a frame, the bike sits on a set of two rollers at the rear and a single (connected) roller on the front. As you pedal the rollers rotate, just like a rolling road that an MOT garage users to test your car, mimicking cycling on in real life and yes the acronym IRL (in real life) is used by the indoor trainer community. One last point, rollers are not for the faint hearted novice as they require you to have solid core strength and ability to concentrate.
We have mentioned that we can capture how much power you are putting through the pedals using trainers that support vPower, and this can be useful if you are training to power zones. More accurate measurements can be taken by using your existing cycle’s power meters or upgrading to a a smart trainer that measures power as part of its feature set.
This use of power becomes a core feature as you progress your fitness levels and has many athlete level training programmes concentrate on workouts that are based on your functional threshold power – or the maximum power that you can sustain over a 60 minute period, limited by strength, aerobic fitness and your body’s ability to manage the build up of lactic acid in your muscles that create the pain and cramps you feel when undertaking strenuous exercise.
When training using power thresholds on an indoor trainer it is important that you can match your power to the training plan you are following, whether that is a set resistance or the gradient of the road that you are following in one of the interactive/immersive Apps (e.g. Zwift). To help the industry developed a smart trainer mode called ‘ERG’. At first I wasn’t that excited about it, but it is now a cornerstone of my training. Here’s why.
This mode enables you to set a particular target power level for your workout and the trainer will set the resistance such that you pedal out this power level irrespective of your cadence. This allows you to do a workout with for example short intervals at high intensity, where all you need to is pedal at the same rate and the trainer will adjust the resistance automatically so that you achieve the required power output without having to mess about with your own gears. My Zwift user experience video shows this in action.
Once you have chosen your indoor trainer, we need to set up the various meters and sensors so that we can train to a plan, and afterwards make sense of our efforts.
Of course life wouldn’t be the same without technology complications. If you read my blog on connecting cycling computers to sensors you will remember that there are two technologies that allow stuff to talk to each other. One is ANT+ (owned by Garmin) and the other Bluetooth (mainstreamed by laptops, smartphones, etc). Most cycling computers will talk to cycle sensors using both technologies, but before you buy, check that they are compatible.
If you want your laptop to connect to the sensors, this is straightforward if the sensors are Bluetooth, however if they are ANT+, you’ll need a USB dongle that you plug into the computer so that you can talk to the sensors using ANT+.
If you want to connect ANT+ sensors to your phone or tablet, then this is also possible. For Android your phone may already be ANT+ enabled. If you are using iPhone/iPad, then you’ll need to buy an ANT+ accessory. See here for more information.
Once we are connected we not finished. To get an immersive experience, connect your laptop or phone/tablet to a TV placed infront of your bike. Use a high quality HDMI cable if possible. Another option is to use an Apple TV and stream from your phone, tablet or macbook to the TV via the Apple TV.
If in doubt, feel free to ask me – grant@cycleforfitness.com
Once we have worked out which indoor trainer to use, and connected them to sensors, if we want to follow a training plan, we need to consider if we’d like to use one or more of the various cycle training Apps.
As a starting point, create a Strava account and download the App to your smartphone. As long as you have as a minimum a heart rate monitor and speed/cadence sensor that you can do a workout on the indoor training pretty much the same as on the road.
From then on, the choices become a little complex, but let me try to simplify :
Now here’s a thing, if you want the best of all worlds, you can get free accounts with Strava and TrainingPeaks and then buy Zwift (£12 per month) and use your TrainingPeaks workouts in Zwift for a serious, but entertaining workout. If you wish to are a data freak, or want to use a coach, buy a premium TrainingPeaks account (£11 per month). Rather than discuss each training App in this article (let’s Face it, it’s long enough!), I have created a separate article with a series of videos that show you how to use a structured workout from an App (in this instance Trainingpeaks) and use your indoor trainer with two of the most common indoor training Apps, namely Trainerroad and Zwift.
The good news is that once you’ve sorted out the connections, you can use both the basic and smart trainers with your cycling computer or favourite training Apps. Let’s look at the options:
In conclusion:
Still confused, then get in touch and I’ll walk you through your options based on how you plan to regain fitness and wellbeing.