Q: Are one-hour trainer workouts really enough to keep me fit in the winter?

A: Ideally we’d all migrate with the seasons or live in places where it’s warm all year, but that’s not reality for many North American cyclists and triathletes. Instead, as we lose roughly one minute of daylight each day as we approach the shortest day of the year (December 21st), many of us have been forced to take our training indoors. For those athletes in the northern half of the US, it may be several months before you’re once again training outdoors on a regular basis.

So, since indoor training is a matter of necessity for so many athletes, the question isn’t whether you can stay fit with predominantly indoor workouts, but rather how you can do it.

Training volume almost always drops when athletes move indoors, mainly because it’s difficult to stay motivated for more than 60-90 minutes on a trainer or rollers. That’s nothing to be ashamed of, it’s perfectly normal. Fortunately, you’re able to do more work in 60 minutes on a trainer than you almost ever do in 60 minutes on the road. With no stoplights, descents, or tailwinds, a moderately-fit rider can do plenty of work in an hour indoors instead of 75 minutes or more outdoors.

What’s more, you can control your efforts with much greater precision indoors. That means you can do a good warmup without having to cruise your way out of town to your normal training grounds, and then hit those interval power and heart rate ranges without worrying about fluctuations from rolling hills, corners, or stop signs. And when you’re done, you just have to spin for a few minutes and you’re done.

A lot of people worry that there’s not enough training stimulus from indoor training sessions, but when we look at power files from athletes riding 90 minutes outdoors – and sometimes even two hours outdoors – there’s often fewer than 60-minutes’ worth of really high-quality work in there. That’s not to say you should give up riding outdoors, but it does mean that a focused indoor session can be just as beneficial for your cycling performance as a longer session outdoors.

Intensity is crucial, though. You can’t expect to get anywhere by merely spinning leisurely on a trainer for an hour. You have to exploit the advantages offered by training indoors. Even with fans, the environment is hotter than outdoors. This tends to cut down on the necessary warmup time. Instead of 30 minutes on the road, you can be interval-ready in 10 minutes indoors. A steady, moderate-pace indoor session is rarely a good use of time. Since you’re only going to be on the bike for 60-90 minutes, and typically only 3-4 times a week, you have to ride at a higher intensity in order to achieve a training stimulus similar to what you achieved in more hours outdoors. The controlled environment allows for greater focus on intensity levels, so nail those power or heart ranges and stay at the right cadences. On the road it’s important to be aware of your surroundings, but on the trainer you can focus on the numbers and make each effort count. To get you started on the right track, here’s a cornerstone workout for a good indoor training program:
* Warmup: 10 minutes with 2x 1minute FastPedal (low gear, low resistance, pedal as fast as you can maintain without bouncing in the saddle)
* SteadyState Intervals: 3x 8minutes with 6 minutes of easy spinning recovery between intervals. Interval intensity is 86-90% of your average power from the CTS Field Test (or your max. sustainable power from a time trial or similar effort), or 92-94% of your max. sustainable heart rate. If you have neither power or heart rate monitoring equipment, ride at 7-8 on a scale of 1-10 where 10 is an all-out effort. Cadence should be 85-95rpm.
* Cooldown: 10 minutes easy spinning
Total time on the trainer: 56 minutes More advanced riders should increase the interval times to 3x10minutes with 6 minutes recovery between intervals, or even 3x12minutes with 8 minutes recovery between intervals.