3 ms·

Huh, Zwift sure looks like something I'd be into I'll guess I'll save up for one of their rollers?

• ubermonkey 8y ago
  To do Zwift right, you need a "smart trainer". Bike trainers have traditionally been of two types: rollers and resistance trainers. Rollers aren't super popular; they're pretty much used just to improve efficiency and smoothness on the bike, and are a poor choice for resistance training. The other type of trainer uses some mechanism to impose artificial load on the drive train, for better resistance training. Most serious riders have one of these. Traditionally, resistance trainers clamped to your rear axle and had a flywheel or some other mechanism that would screw down to your rear tire and provide resistance. In the last several years, though, some folks have created "wheel off" trainers where you remove the rear wheel entirely and attach the bike to the trainer. These have their own rear cassette, and are appealing to folks for lots of reasons -- probably the biggest is that you don't need to keep a "trainer wheel" around. (The traditional type will wear out your tire pretty fast, so you don't want to be using your nice road tire on the trainer if you can help it.) Anyway, smart trainers are all resistance trainers. Companies like Wahoo Fitness have smart trainers of both wheel-on and wheel-off varieties (the latter is ~ 180% the cost). A smart trainer will track power for you, and will interface with your other sensors (cadence, heart rate) to get the full set of telemetry. By pairing it with a service like Zwift, you can do "virtual" rides based on real places, including the hills -- and, in some contexts, even other real riders who are in Zwift at the same time. All this costs a lot, but cyclists are crazy. (Source: I are one, and I use a Wahoo KICKR Snap.)