Rollers vs Turbos

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Discussion

GnuBee

Original Poster:

1,272 posts

214 months

Thursday 11th October 2012
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okgo said:
Thanks for that.

I looked up trainer road, seems like it a good bit of kit, don't think I will need it with an actual powermeter though.

I look forward to the suffering.
The "value" in TrainerRoad is more in the workouts and plans they offer. It's all training based around power and they don't care if that's virtual power or a real power meter.

Having said that given you're posting history I suspect you have access to proper training plans etc already so it may well be of less value to you.

okgo

37,858 posts

197 months

Thursday 11th October 2012
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Well not really, just been researching myself, not come up with anything definite yet, but there are certainly so many out there its hard to know which will yield best results!

IroningMan

10,154 posts

245 months

Thursday 11th October 2012
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GnuBee said:
So the Kurt Kinetic Road Machine arrived yesterday, along with the riser block and a Garmin ANT+ USB stick. I didn't get a chance to get everthing setup until this afternoon so here we go:

The Kurt Kinetic seems to be well made, some assembly is required and it came with a replacement skewer for the real wheel. Total setup time was probably 5 minutes at most.

Mounting the bike is trivial although I'm trying to think of a good solution to ensuring you get a repeatable amount of pressure between the resistance unit and the rear time (even at my risible power levels it needed more than the 2 turns they suggest to prevent slipping).

Setting up TrainerRoad is trivial. The Garmin ANT+ USB stick made the cadence/speed and heart rate sensor available to TrainerRoad. Once the devices were paired and I selected the Kurt as the power source I was able to see my "virtual power" in the TrainerRoad software.

I then subjected myself to the 8 minute test which on the face of it sounds easy but turned out to be an "experience" - 28 minutes of warm up followed by 2 x 8 minute blocks at threshold. At the end of the test it calculates new FTP and LTHR for you - which is good since it defaulted to 200 for me and thankfully downgraded that somewhat optimistic figure.

One thing I can say is that at no time was I bored, I was shattered, mentally scarred, alarmed to see a HR I've not seen since I was 10 years younger and I was hot, very hot.

For those concerned about noise - I didn't think it was particularly noisy - not enough to drown out the sound of my own heart beat or the dodgy Bond film on in the background.
Mine sits on a stone floor and the noise is easily kept at bay by a closed door.

The only effective way to get consistent resistance is to keep the pressure in the tyre the same and do a coastdown test each time you use the turbo: spin up to 20mph and then stop pedaling and time how long it takes the back wheel to come to a stop. As long as that time is pretty much always the same then the resistance will be too.