Unloved Wattbike in the council gym - worth signing up?

[numtumfutunch]

For a variety of reasons, but mainly snow and ice, I am having a terrible winter.
Ive ridden through most of them up to now but have admitted defeat and am now paying the price.

Indoor training has never really appealed however whilst taking the kids swimming have noticed our local council leisure centre has a Wattbike which is pretty much never used.

In short would it be worth joining up to have access to it 1-3 times per week?
Im regularly there for an hour on Wednesday nights with the kids hence that would be a minimum weather depending.

I have absolutely no idea about training with power other than once skimming the Time Crunched Cyclist and realising his definition of TC'd was a lot different to mine. And he also had a lot more discipline.

I cant see anywhere to safely put a laptop or tablet and so would be relying on the inbuilt training programmes.
The thing is Ive been looking at the Wattbike website and everything is biased towards a structured and rigid plan over several weeks.

I'd plan on only using it when its too dangerous to go outside and consequently Im wondering if:
a) There are any inbuilt programs or workouts worth following
b) There is actually any point to this

My naive rookie plan would be to measure my FTP on it and then find somewhere to wedge a tablet so I can watch a sufferfest, the major flaw with this is that the Wattbike doesnt seem to have anything to put a tablet on and exercising full gas with headphones doesnt appeal in the slightest.

Comments welcome

Cheers

[CoolC]

Can't picture Wattbike bars off the top of my head, but could you use a tablet holder with some sort of grip clamp?

[BMWBen]

If there's nowhere to put the tablet you should try with just music - if you're into the right kind of music and crank it up it creates its own kind of all consuming experience

If you can't tolerate EDM with a solid beat then it might not work, but I find the works of the great composer "Tiesto" to go quite well with an indoor workout.

[budgie smuggler]

You can easily rest a phone on the 'TT' bars of a wattbike, not sure a tablet would be a good idea. Using a phone for the wattbike app is fine though, and it has some usable routines for various things, HIIT, etc.
It will also link to your bluetooth HR monitor and upload the data to strava so you can keep track of how well you're doing.

I've made reasonable fitness gains while doing whichever workout I can fit into my morning gym visit. Most often "overs and unders" and "descending pyramid". Then once a month or so I redo the 3 min test, which tells you your "MMP" (maximum minute power). You enter this in the app, and it then recalculates how many watts you should be kicking out at a given point in the routine.

[NorthDave]

I love the structure of a Watt bike or turbo. If you are there for an hour anyway why not sit on it and spin? Even high cadence for an hour will give you benefits and that is without using the pedal stroke analysis etc on the bike itself.

You basically have all that time which is being wasted. Why not use it?