I started 4 years ago, we had a winter with a lot of rain and at one point I was tired of washing my road bike again after every ride. 😀 That's when I started to look more about the indoor cycling possibilities. Spinning at the gym, I had done it once, but that was nothing for me. I just wanted to train when it suited me, and just on my own road bike. After some searching on the internet, I bought a 2nd hand TACX Satori for around 100 euros, including a training mat, and an extra rear wheel with a special training tire. This TACX can be manually set to 10 positions, via a lever that you could attach to your handlebars. So this is not a smart-trainer, just a basic trainer.
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| TACX Satori |
How does it work?
- You unpack the trainer
- Put your bike on
- It is advisable to use a special tyre for indoor training
- Attaches the resistance lever to your steering wheel
- Drive....
I started indoor biking, put my laptop in front of my bike and watched episodes of 'Game of Thrones'...so each session was about 50 minutes. I did a 10 minutes warm-up, then 2 positions higher, in the middle of the session 10 minutes position 5 (out of 10) and then cut back again. This way I cycled 2 winters a bit indoors.
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| My road bike on the trainer |
On Strava I saw my cycling friends placing some rides from Zwift and Rouvy in the winter. And my interest was piqued. So in my 3rd indoor winter I paid for a one month Rouvy license. To be able to use Rouvy with the TACX Satori trainer you need to connect your speedometer and cadence meter to your laptop via an ANT dongle (and in my case also my hearth meter). Difficult? No, I just bought a dongle on ALI express to give it a try. Such a dongle is just like a USB memory stick, but a little smaller.
Plug it into your USB port of your laptop and it will take care of the communication between your speedometer/cadence/heart meter of your road bike and the laptop.
Make sure that your cadance,speed and hearth meter support the ANT protocol.
This way Rouvy (in my case, or any other training program) can read your meters. You understand that Rouvy cannot return data (it is not a smart-trainer), so if you climb a mountain you have to adjust the resistance of the trainer yourself. What I did was, at 1% slope, position it to 1; 10% slope position it to 10. Disadvantage... at the moment the slope percentage changed, I first had to adjust the resistance manual and then I had to change my road bike gears. But as a first acquaintance...it worked.
Costs : 11 euros for the ANT dongle and 8 euros for 1 month Rouvy....(and Rouvy has a 7 day trial)
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| ANT dongel on ALI Express |
And I was excited, I did this for 3 months (with a Rouvy License) in the winter and for me it was clear...my next step would be a smart-trainer. Since adjusting the resistance manually (and sometimes I didn't do it...tired) was not ideal. But I really liked riding the indoor routes for the winter.
Conclusion :
For very little money you can make indoor training more fun by putting your road bike on the trainer and connecting your speed/cadence and your heart meter to Rouvy via an ANT dongle.
Advantages:
- Cheap solution (especially with 2nd hand trainer)
- Good acquaintance
- Enjoy sports indoors on your own bike
Drawbacks:
- manual self-resistance setting
- Can get boring / How to keep it exciting for yourself
- Not realistic due to no resistance feedback from the training program
In any case, my next step was a smart trainer, in a next blog I will dive deeper into this topic : Selection, cost, usage and associated software ...
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