Indoor Cycling

THEY say THEY don’t ride indoors because it is agonizingly boring.  Don’t get me wrong, indoors is NOT my first choice of where to ride.  In fact, let me be completely honest here: indoors is my LAST choice of where to ride.  That being said, I do occasionally ride indoors.

“Why would one do that?” you might ask.  Two reasons:

1                 Sometimes the weather outside is so bleak that the indoors is the obvious choice

2                 A lot of training regimens are so involved that you wouldn’t even THINK of doing them outside, especially if there are ANY cars around

Let me again be clear, there is no way I could just sit on a bike, indoors, and crank the pedals, even for 15 minutes.  I need to be doing something, while on the bike.

Workouts

The perfect solution is this book with indoor cycling workouts:

“The Heart Rate Monitor Book for Cyclists: A Heart Zones Training Program” by Sally Edwards and Sally Reed.

These workouts vary in duration from 20 minutes to an hour, and in difficulty from beginner to advanced cyclist.

For me, a big reason they remove the boredom from indoor cycling is the authors never have you doing the same thing for more than three minutes (in fact, two minutes is much more likely).  At very short intervals, you will be changing heart rate or cadence, or standing up.

Trainer

You will need to set your bike on something, in order to ride indoors.  I’ve found that trainers which have some combination of fluid and weight resistance feel the most similar to riding outdoors.

If you want to have an experience that is even more like the great outdoors, use rollers.  They have a learning curve, but are not all that complicated.  They’re also much faster for putting your bike on and taking it off.

It’s about the bike

It is very important to protect your bike from sweat.  From about the middle of the top tube, forward, wrap pipe insulation (eg.) around the top tube and down tube.  Put a rag over the front brake.  Put another rag over the top of the headset.

If the floor under the bike needs protection from sweat, a sheet of plastic can do the job.

Display Device

One *could* prop up the workout book, say above the handlebars.  That’s a lot of work and you will get sweat on the book.  I like using a Garmin GPS bike computer.  You can recreate the workout in Garmin Connect (connect.garmin.com) and download it to the computer.  When you run the workout, the device will automatically display the current activity.  You can do the same thing with a Garmin watch, but there’s a lot less visual real estate (read: much smaller screen size), which makes it harder to see the current step in the workout.

With any of these Garmin bike computers (or other workout GPS devices), you can record your workout, to see how you did.  Note: since you're not really going anywhere, you can turn off the GPS on the device!  To show your cadence (if the workout you have chosen calls for that), you will need a cadence sensor that is compatible with your Garmin device.

Music

A big tool, in the fight against boredom, is music.  It is important to be able to adjust the volume because, as the cycling intensity increases, so does the ambient noise.  I use an iPod and clip it to brake cable, where it comes out of the brake lever.  There it is fairly safe from sweat, yet easily accessible enough to control the selection and volume.

Controlling the indoor environment

Unlike riding outdoors, there will be no convective heat loss … unless you use a fan.  Before talking about the fan, also consider riding in a room with a lower temperature (perhaps in the basement, or garage, or a room with its own temperature control (eg. where you can open a window)).

I use a fan with a remote control.  It is very helpful to be able to adjust fan speed while riding.

Parting thoughts

You won’t need to dress for the elements.  I generally only wear bike shorts, a cotton tee shirt and a head band.