Indoor cycling

Indoor cycling is riding a bicycle that does not move, with something underneath it providing resistance. What changed it from a chore into a discipline is that the resistance became controllable by software: a smart trainer can be told to hold you at a given power regardless of what gear you are in or how hard you push, which means a prescribed session is executed exactly rather than approximately.

The consequence is that an hour indoors is not equivalent to an hour outdoors. There is no coasting, no freewheeling down a hill, no waiting at a junction and no soft-pedalling while you look at the view. Riders routinely find that a session that would be unremarkable on the road is genuinely hard on a trainer, and that is not imagination — the pedalling is continuous in a way it never is outside.

Three quite different things now sit under the same heading, and it is worth knowing which one you want. Structured training is executing prescribed intervals, usually to a plan. Virtual riding and racing is a game-like environment with other people in it, and has a real competitive scene with organised leagues. Just riding, with a film or music on, is the oldest version and remains perfectly legitimate. Most of the available advice assumes the first, which is why it feels so relentlessly serious.

What makes it different

No coasting, ever

The purchase that matters

The trainer

The purchase people skip

A large fan

What this page will not print

Training numbers

1. 1

   Step 1: Buy the trainer second-hand, and buy the fan new

   Trainers are upgraded rather than worn out, so the used market is unusually good and a two-generation-old direct-drive unit is excellent. Spend the difference on a fan, which is the cheap purchase that most changes how a session feels.

   You will know it worked when: A working setup for roughly half the new price.

2. 2

   Step 2: Set the bike up where you will actually use it

   A trainer in a cold garage gets used in October and abandoned in January. Somewhere you can leave it standing, with a plug and a screen, is worth more than any specification difference.

   You will know it worked when: The bike is ready to ride without ten minutes of setting up.

3. 3

   Step 3: Deal with sweat and noise before the first session

   Mat down, towel over the bars, fan pointed at your chest. Sweat is corrosive and finds bolts; noise through a floor is what ends the hobby in a flat.

   You will know it worked when: You can ride hard without damaging the bike or the peace.

4. 4

   Step 4: Do a few unstructured rides before any test

   Riding indoors is a different sensation and the position feels harsher because the bike does not rock. Get used to that before doing anything that produces a number, or the number will be about your unfamiliarity.

   You will know it worked when: An hour indoors is comfortable rather than novel.

5. 5

   Step 5: Pick one platform and stay on it for a season

   The structured-training apps and the virtual-world apps are genuinely different products serving different motivations. Choose by which one will get you on the bike on a Tuesday in February, not by which has the better feature list.

   You will know it worked when: You have a reason to start a session that is not willpower.

The first stage is simply becoming comfortable riding indoors, which takes a few sessions and is mostly about heat, position and the absence of coasting. Everything else is easier once an hour on the trainer is unremarkable.

The second is finding the reason you will do it on a Tuesday in February. For some people that is a structured plan with a target event; for others it is a group ride at a fixed time with people who notice if you are not there; for others it is a series they are watching. All three work and the choice is about motivation rather than about training theory.

Beyond that the discipline branches. Some riders use it entirely as a means to outdoor ends, and the trainer disappears in April. Some take up virtual racing as its own sport with its own calendar and never especially connect it to riding outside. And some use it as the tool that makes coached training practical, which is where the numbers this page declines to print become genuinely useful — in the hands of somebody who has met you and can interpret them.

• Direct-drive smart trainer — The rear wheel comes off and the bike bolts to the trainer, which carries its own cassette. Quieter, more accurate, and no tyre wear — which is why almost everybody who stays with the sport ends up here. The cost is that it is heavy, semi-permanent, and needs a cassette matching your drivetrain. The second-hand market is excellent because riders upgrade rather than wear them out.
• Wheel-on smart trainer — A roller presses against the rear tyre. Cheaper, lighter, quicker to set up and take down, and a perfectly good way in. The trade-offs are real though: more noise, tyre wear that will surprise you, and power figures that drift with tyre pressure and how hard the roller is pressed on, so numbers are less repeatable session to session.
• Rollers — Three drums that the bike sits on, unattached. Cheap and genuinely different — you must balance, which makes them a real skill and an excellent one for pedalling smoothly. Poor at high resistance and not what structured interval work wants, so most people who own rollers own them alongside something else.
• Controllable resistance, which is the whole point — A smart trainer takes instructions. In ERG mode it holds a target power regardless of gear or cadence, so an interval is executed rather than approximated; in simulation mode it varies resistance to match a virtual gradient. Riders coming from a dumb trainer usually describe ERG mode as the thing that changed the hobby for them.
• A large fan, which is not an accessory — Outdoors, moving through air is what cools you. Indoors nothing does, so heat builds until performance collapses, and riders consistently underestimate this until they buy a fan and find sessions got easier without getting fitter. The single highest-value cheap purchase in the sport.
• A mat, and something for the sweat — The mat protects the floor, damps vibration into a downstairs neighbour, and catches what comes off you — which is corrosive and will find its way into a headset and a stem bolt if nothing stops it. A towel over the bars is standard rather than fastidious.
• A screen and something to run the software — Tablet, phone, laptop or television. Nothing exotic is needed, and the main thing worth checking before subscribing is that your device can talk to the trainer over the protocol it uses.

• Structured training — Prescribed intervals, usually to a plan built around a target event. This is where indoor cycling has a genuine advantage over the road, because the interval you were told to do is the one you actually do, without junctions or hills interrupting. It is also the version that dominates the available advice.
• Virtual riding and racing — A rendered world with other people in it, group rides, and an organised racing calendar with leagues and results. Categorised racing exists at a serious level, complete with the verification arguments any sport has when the equipment reports the score. Far and away the most effective answer to indoor boredom.
• Just riding — A film, an album, and a steady effort. The oldest version, still entirely legitimate, and probably the one that has kept the most people cycling through the most winters. Nothing about a trainer requires a plan.
• Studio and spin classes — A related but genuinely different activity: a fixed-wheel studio bike, an instructor, music, and a class. Shares the room and almost nothing else — no power measurement, no bike of your own, no continuity with outdoor riding. Worth naming because the phrase "indoor cycling" is used for both and the advice does not transfer.

The culture changed shape when the platforms arrived. Indoor training used to be solitary and slightly embarrassing — a thing you admitted to rather than announced — and it is now a social activity with group rides, clubs that exist only online, and a racing scene with teams, leagues and results that people care about.

It has also inherited the arguments a sport gets when the equipment reports the score. Weight is entered by the rider and power is measured by hardware of varying accuracy, so competitive categories depend on verification, and organised racing has developed exactly the apparatus you would expect: dual recording, weigh-ins for serious events, and performance review. That this exists at all is the clearest sign the racing is taken seriously.

The etiquette is recognisably cycling etiquette translated indoors — do not blow up a group ride by riding off the front of it, and stay with the group you joined. The one genuinely new norm is about honesty on entered data, which is the indoor equivalent of not cutting the course.