Review: TrainerRoad; indoor cycling software

It’s raining outside and you had planned to venture out for a long bike ride, one’s first instinct (rather mine) would be scrap the workout and try tomorrow.  My first answer to combat this dilemma was to purchase a bike trainer.  I did just that - foraging  through Ebay, Craiglist, and multiple local online classifieds to obtain the perfect indoor trainer in my price range.  The CycleOps Super Magneto Pro became my new way of combatting my missed workouts since living in Canada comes with such haphazard weather patterns.

After about 4 weeks of using my indoor bike trainer on rainy days, it became a chore.  I dreaded spending even 30 minutes starring into the abyss or watching a movie for the 3^rd time while I pedaled aimlessly.  After reading up on ways to battle this indoor hypnosis, I stumbled across TrainerRoad, a piece of software that has made indoor bike training my main routine!

TrainerRoad, designed and created by Nate Pearson and Reid Weber, has much to offer to the cycling and triathlon community on a budget (pretty much all of us!).  Upon opening their website, they demonstrate how easy it is to setup and use with a 3 step process.  Provided you have a laptop, an ANT+ USB stick, and an ANT+ product such as a heart rate monitor, speed/cadence sensor, or power meter, you are ready to rock and roll.  Additionally, there are three ways to workout with their assortment of over 300 pre-designed workouts which are categorized on their website based on duration, intensity, interval duration, training zones and type.  The three ways TrainerRoad’s workouts can be customized to your physical ability is through heart rate, a power meter, or their patented Virtual Power.  Since the workouts are designed based on percentage of Functional Training Power (FTP), each workout is unique to the user and will cause sufficient physiological stress to meet the goals of the workout.  Your FTP will be measured whenever your conduct the 8 minute or 20 minute FTP test workout in conjunction to your lactate threshold heart rate.  This is such an impressive feature alone – but wait – there’s more!

If you do not have the money to dish out for power meter, which can cost upwards of $3000 for top of the line, you can invest in a $35 Garmin speed/cadence sensor to compliment your ANT+ USB stick and use their patented Virtual Power.  They have designed power curves specific to the trainer you use that calculates power based off of data obtained from the speed/cadence sensor.  Although I do not own a power meter and cannot say how accurate it is, I can however say that it will serve as a means of monitoring progression during the winter months even if it can’t dish out your actual power.  All this for such an affordable price...

So now I have a measurement of power to work off of during the winter months and rainy days – AWESOME!  But what about the boredom associated with riding inside?  Well, if you are not busy watching what the workout has you doing (IE: intervals, hill repeats, low cadence, sprints, etc), you can load up a video in the background and have the software overlay a small portion at the bottom of the screen.  If you are watching a widescreen movie, you do not miss a piece of the action at all!

After you finish your workout, all your data is nicely organized on their website for future review. Additionally, you get awarded badges as your progress in your riding potential.  Not only can you track your progress, whenever your workout pushes you past previous bests, you get rewarded with a virtual badge!  Below is a screenshot of your Career page and how it monitors your workouts.

The Career page of your TrainerRoad account

Not impressed yet?  You can also review a workout right after and look at all the data recorded or uploaded it to a 3^rd party software such as TrainingPeaks.  The post workout data is a graphical representation of your workout including power and heart rates.  Additionally, tabs at the bottom open up different tables outlining your various training zones based on heart rate, power, and your bests performances during the workout. Also, if you mouse over an interval, it is highlighted in the graph as demonstrated in the screen shot below.

Workout report for my most recent ride - Gemeni.

This review is not even close to encapsulating the feature rich TrainerRoad and where it plans on going.  There are workout plans ranging from novice to advance riders which will leave the guesswork out of choosing what workout to do (which is a problem I have run into many times).  You can check out other users and previous rides they have done on the website.  They have worked hard with TheSufferfest.com and have implemented video workouts, a feature I have yet to try but wish to in the near future.  Just pop in the video and prepare to enter the Pain Cave. There is an active Support and Feedback section on the website where people can propose new ideas and others vote whether they would like it or not. 

Future features include a Workout Creator which should be released soon.  This would allow users to create their own workouts or edit previously existing workouts to their liking.  Furthermore, there have been talks of multiplayer support in the Feedback section and that would be such an amazing feature that would set this software in line with Tacx Virtual Reality Trainer but at a fraction of the price, a very small fraction.

The reason I have neglected to say the price of this software is because it almost feels like highway robbery.  For $10 a month, you get all the features I briefly outlined and so much more.  If you do the math, it would take 5 years of using TrainerRoad to buy the cheapest power meter on the market, but you wouldn’t have such amazing software to combine with indoor riding. Did I mention it is $10 a month?

TrainerRoad is the best cycling software by far and will continue to raise the bar for any software that wishes to take it on.  It may have been an idea just a few years ago, but it has grown into a stable and powerful software that will make any cyclist improve in no time.  Thank you Nate and Reid for creating this strong training tool that has become a vital asset to my training.  No more missed workouts!

For more information on TrainerRoad, please visit their website by clicking here.  Trust me, for $10 a month, you cannot go wrong.