A Bicycle Trainer: Critical to Cycling Fitness!

You’ll need a bicycle trainer unless you don’t have a job or you live at the equator. That’s right- a cycling trainer’s critical for after-work riding once the days get shorter and you come home in the dark. But wait. There’s another group who won’t need one either. You won’t need a bicycle trainer if you live on the equator where the days never get short. Right- like any of us live in Ecuador or Kenya.

For the rest of us, it’s tough to watch the fat slowly return after a great training summer. Enter the bicycle trainer. In the ‘trainer world’ it’s always light enough to see where you aren’t going. It’s always near room temperature, and the wind chill factor is carefully controlled by if you put your fan on low, medium, or high.

The scenery isn’t so great when you're riding a bicycle trainer. In fact sometimes you’ll be looking at a DVD of other riders on a bicycle trainer, being yelled at by a guy with a Napoleonic complex. But what types of cycling trainers are there? Read on, my little cycling friend.

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Wind Trainers

If you have the desire to ‘break wind’, the bicycle wind trainer may be the one for you. And with the money you save by not buying an expensive fluid trainer you’ll be able to buy more burritos, and presto! You’ll break even more wind.

How does a wind trainer keep you in fighting shape? Well you pedal and pedal, turning a fan thereby creating resistance. Noise is a major consideration with any cycling trainer, the wind trainer being the champion. If you live in an apartment the wind trainer may not be for you- you don’t want angry neighbors expressing themselves in your general direction. In the case of cycling trainers, ‘silent but deadly’ is good.

The most common of trainers, the Cycleops, seeks to cut down on noise by utilizing 'die cast zinc fan blades in a vortex configuration'. As an added benefit, the extra weight acts as a flywheel making for a smoother, more realistic ride.

Summarizing, a wind trainer is the least expensive but the noisiest of the three varieties.

Magnetic Trainers

Caught between the wind trainer and the fluid trainer is the ‘mag’ trainer. These are a whole lot quieter than the wind trainer, even if that wind trainer has those high tech die cast zinc fins. A mag trainer uses a series of magnets to create resistance. Some of the less expensive models have a variety of settings to vary the resistance. With these ’cheapies’ you get to change the settings by hand. More expensive units allow you to change the settings from your ‘cycling cockpit’ while you concentrate on that DVD.

Now there are variable resistance mag trainers so that the ride gets progressively harder as you pedal faster. They accomplish such variation by using moveable magnets, which as they move resistance changes.

If you need to spend a lot of money, there are magnetic bicycling trainers made by Cycleops which have an enormous load of electronics. With these you can track and record heart rate, cadence, speed, elapsed time, and calories. They can be used with the pre-programmed rides or you can program some custom rides into them yourself.

But I’m getting carried away here. This page is supposed to be an overview of cycling trainers. There are more detailed pages for each of the three types. How about some observations regarding the reliability of mag trainers ?

Fluid Trainers

This type of bicycle trainer uses fluids in a confined space to create hydraulic resistance. They are quiet and smooth, much like Sean Connery. That guy irritates me, but maybe that’s because I suspect that his smooth, quiet demeanor is all made up. Oh yea, he is only acting. I’ll bet he’s really a loud dork- like a cheap wind trainer.

Did you know that silicone gets thicker when it’s heated? That’s right, as the fluid gets hotter due to all that friction it gets thicker, thereby creating more resistance. And that makes for a more realistic ride. Try that with Maple syrup.

If you want an interesting discussion on the merits of the Cycleops trainer versus the Kurt Kinetic trainer, go to the fluid bike trainer page. In short, ‘Kurt’ says that all fluid trainers not using the Kinetic patented technology will develop a leak. But not the Kurt Kinetic fluid trainer! Check out the differences in design.

In Summary

A cycling trainer makes it easier to work on efficiency since you’re cycling in a very controlled environment, away from cars, hills, and tire-sucking training partners.

Of course a cycling trainer is also a great way to maintain your peak cycling fitness. No icy roads to navigate, no bone chilling wind chill factors to deal with, and no ‘dark and stormy nights’ to pedal through. That sounds like a great first line for a book. A first line that my composition teacher, Mr. Mudd detested.

Go to Fluid Bike Trainer from Bicycle Trainer

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