Show notes
Welcome to the Purple Patch Podcast! As winter approaches, it's the perfect time to talk about indoor riding. When the weather gets rough, we take our rides indoors on the bike trainer. It's a great way to stay in shape and improve your outdoor riding. This week on the PurplePatch Podcast, we want to share some tips to help you maximize your training on the bike trainer. Instead of focusing on the usual technical aspects of bike training like FTPs and critical power, IRONMAN Master Coach Matt Dixon shares practical skills to make you faster, smarter, and a true craftsman on the bike. Matt takes us through the benefits and limitations of indoor riding to gain a better understanding of what indoor training offers and what elements of training can only be gained outdoors. Matt covers the different smart trainers available on the market, the three P's of indoor training: posture, pedaling, and power, terrain management, and the importance of end of range work and neurological conditioning. Our goal is to help you get faster and have a great time doing it. If you have any questions or want to continue the conversation, feel free to reach out to us at info@purplepatchfitness.com. If you'd like personalized coaching on the bike trainer, we offer complimentary sessions where I can coach you through a workout. It's a two-way video platform, so I can see your metrics and provide feedback. Just reach out to info@purplepatchfitness.com to set up a session. It's absolutely free, and there are no strings attached. Episode Timestamps 00:00 - 04:52 - Welcome and Episode Introduction 04:52 - 39:35 - The Meat and Potatoes: Weaponize Your Bike Trainer This Winter Matt Dixon 00:00 I'm Matt Dixon. Welcome to the Purple Patch podcast. The mission of Purple Patch is to empower and educate every human being to reach their athletic potential. Through the lens of athletic potential, you reach your human potential. The purpose of this podcast is to help time-starved people everywhere integrate sports into their lives. Matt Dixon 00:32 And welcome to the Purple Patch podcast, as ever, your host, Matt Dixon. And yes, it is getting that way. Winter looms, and therefore, we thought it was a good time to revisit indoor riding. Yes, it is the time of the year when we don't brave the elements and instead get inside, sit on the trainer for hours on end, daring and dreaming about when the sun comes out again. Look at the indoor bike trainer. It's a great workout, but it is important as it represents a great opportunity for you as a bicycle rider to uplevel your outside riding. If you do it right. There is no short-term success in improving your bike riding. But what I go through today is about as close as you can get to amplifying how you ride your bike outside by sitting inside, no matter how strong you are, no matter how tough you are. This is an opportunity for me to educate you today on how to weaponize the use of your bike trainer so that you can get more speed out of that toughness, that strength, and that fitness. Let me repeat that. What I want to try and do today is open up a guide where no matter how tough you are, how fit you are, or how strong you are, you get more speed out of it. That's our mission. That's why we talk about weaponizing the bike trainer. I'm not going to bore you today with the old, sterile stuff that you read in the media. I'm not going to talk about FTPS and critical powers and all of that. I want to give you some actionable skills that are accessible and that will yield a speed return greater than any fitness development you can gain. If you put the lessons into practice, you will get faster. You will also get smarter. You'll become a craftsman on the bike. And by the way, that's really fun because when you go out and train with your buddies, they're going to be very annoyed, and they're equally going to be amused at your newfound speed. What's he taking? Don't worry about that. Just get better at building your craft. Let's do it just before we get going, as now is the norm; we bring you today's show for free and promotion free. And so if while you're listening and you're thinking, Hmm, I'd like to maybe have a little bit of a taste of that, I want to continue the conversation, or maybe you have some follow-up questions. If you want to ask anything else related to today's topic, feel free to reach out. You can have a complimentary consultation where we'll chat with you about any of your questions. All you need to do is reach out to info@purplepatchfitness.com. That's the email address. Info@purplepatchfitness.com and all of our programming can be found at purplepatchfitness.com. That's the website I will say today because we are talking about the bike trainer; I would like to extend a personal invitation to you if you'd like me to coach you through a session. Our video platform is pretty special. It's pretty unique. But the nice thing about it, unlike Peloton, which is just that one too many with rah rah rah, and hey, I'm happy to do a bit of rah rah rah occasionally, but this is two-way video. So, in other words, you can see me as I'm coaching you through executing a workout, much of which we're going to talk about today. But also scarily, perhaps, I can see you and your trainer, if you have a smart trainer, is connected to the platform, so therefore I can see your metrics. I can see your Cadence and your heart rate. If you've got a heart rate, monitor your power production, and I can control the grades and give you feedback. So that's the opportunity for me, no matter where you're at in the world, to actually coach you. If you would like to have a complimentary session where I coach you, feel free to do so. All you need to do is reach out to info@purplepatchfitness.com, and we will set you up with a session. You can come and join the crew. You get a flavor of both the coaching and a little bit of the fun, and even some people say stupidity because why not? We'd like to have a little bit of fun while we are taking your performance very, very seriously, and we can sort you out. So feel free to reach out to us. It is absolutely free, no strings attached. And if you don't like it, go on your merry way and continue on in your mediocrity. All right. Barry, the producer, thank you very much. Let's do this. We are going to get on with it. It is, ladies and gentlemen, the meat and potatoes. Matt Dixon 05:01 All right, today we're talking about the bike trainer. So, let's set this up a little bit. Most triathletes, most people who ride their bikes when winter looms, go inside and sit on the trainer, and that's normal, but unfortunately, the vast majority of riders out there absolutely underutilize the opportunity. They tend to look at training with an indoor trainer as just a time-efficient workout. So it's time on the saddle where they're driving to boost their metrics, their FTP, or the elements that make up critical power, and they do intervals that are really hard, and typically, they execute it while they're either watching some gamification type platform or they've got a Netflix show or something like that, and they're just chasing avatars or watching crime dramas or something like that. But the truth is that they're missing a huge opportunity. If you know how to take advantage of the indoor trainer, you can get so much more out of it than just priming your physiology. So, the goal of the show today is to help you turbocharge your indoor riding in a way that actually delivers real-world performance benefits. So, using the indoor trainer so that you get better with your outdoor riding is a critically important component. Another message that is going to be woven into this is that no matter what your riding environment, the truth is that simply focusing on physiological metrics, such as your functional threshold or just your straight power meters, is a surefire pathway for underperformance on your bike. And so if you want to get faster, if you want to actually get more of a yield from your strength and fitness, and then we want you to go beyond the power, which is just a measure of output, how much work you're putting in and what you're able to generate. And so you need to go beyond the what's if you want to do that. And we want to think about becoming more efficient and more strategic about how you use your energy to ultimately give you what we're going for, which is more wheel speed. And so, yes, indoor trainers are highly valuable tools. They can improve your riding performance. They also bring improvements in safety and other components like that. But approaching your indoor trainer as a tool to upgrade your outside riding changes your whole mindset. I don't want your indoor trainer to just be a convenience tool. I want it to be something that actually helps you become a better bike rider. And so before we get in, I think that we should take a step back and say, well, that all sounds very romantic. That sounds like a wonderful investment. I should just do all my riding indoors if it helps me get better outdoors. But let's first highlight some of the limitations of riding your trainer indoors because it's not a solve-all situation here. Alrighty, we have a lot of people that only ride their bikes indoors, and then they go outside, and they race outside, and that is going to be a limiting prospect. And I understand and appreciate why it's tempting to always ride your bike in dots. There's no impact on traffic. It's very, very convenient. It's a time-efficient tool for training. And so I am all in on the bike trainer. But if you ride your bike trainer only, you are going to severely limit your riding potential as well. So, I'm speaking out of two sides of my mouth here. Use the bike trainer to improve your outdoor riding, but if you only ride it indoors, you're going to limit your riding potential at the same time. And we need to acknowledge that there are things that you just simply can't really develop and improve on a bike train. And so let's go through some of those first because I think it's important. The first is the bike trainer fosters an environment where you don't need to have situational awareness, so you don't need to have 360-degree understanding. There is a reason as you become a better bike rider, and the actual action is stabilizing and balancing the bike, shifting gears, and managing terrain. A lot of the stuff that we work on today slides into the unconscious or the subconscious, and then you have more capacity to understand the environment around you. The challenge is, if you never ride in the environment, you're never going to improve that component, and that can become actually more dangerous. There is a reason that the less experienced outdoor riders are the folks that tend to ride through the glass, that tend to hit the sticks and the potholes and tend to actually have more interactions with traffic, and that's because more seasoned riders have great situational awareness. So if you never. Get to that environment; you're never going to improve that component. So there is a safety component to actually riding outside a little bit, and you should consider that there are also many interactions with the machine itself, with the actual handling skills of a bicycle, that you just simply cannot Foster and improve on the bike trainer. And so how and when you're braking, balancing on the bike, managing different environmental factors, such as riding in the wind, even riding around corners, standing out of the saddle, really effectively. These are things that you can't really develop. Inside the bike trainer, you can apply some of the theoretical concepts. You can work on standing form, but to become a better bike handler, you have to ride your bike outside. And then a third component that I think is really important is that you don't get riding on an indoor trainer; at least, most of the bike trainer setups are many of the stabilizing muscles that actually come into play with outdoor riding. When somebody is on a static indoor trainer only utilizing the main muscle groups, they're not getting the stabilizing effect that occurs because the bike is always moving outside, and you are interacting with the different gravitational forces, the lateral forces of cut, of cornering, even keeping the bike stable in the wind, etc. And your core and stabilizing muscles are always engaging. And if you never use those outside, when you actually go outside, particularly if you're doing something like a half Ironman or an Ironman or a big Gran Fondo, you're going to get very, very stiff and tight. And that's going to have an interaction on how you're performing on the back end of the bike ride, or particularly if you're running off the bike. And so, don't undervalue the importance of doing some mileage outside of all of these factors. So ultimately, your best solution here for riding performance is to have a combination, or a mix, of some indoor riding and some outdoor riding because there are also, equally, some things that only indoor riding can truly provide. So, if we've talked about the negatives, why don't we shift gears and say, okay, the whole theme of today's podcast is weaponizing your indoor bike trainer? That's great. So what are the benefits? Well, I've already mentioned one of them. It is, of course, much, much safer, and that's really great. However, when you lack the requirement of situational awareness, that means that you can amplify the specificity because 100% of your focus can be dedicated to the action of the training. So rather than you thinking about traffic or random stops and starts with stoplights and things like that, inconvenient terrain changes when you don't want them, maybe some inclement weather, you have a highly effective environment to place all of your focus and willpower into the specific intervals that you might be doing, and that's a thumbs up. So, you get to have an increased specificity. You also have a safer environment. It's also a highly effective venue for structured workouts, particularly intervals because you can have a dose and response at a very specific timing that isn't necessarily influenced by terrain, wind, and other factors. So that's great. And you can also, interestingly, really isolate and dig into some very specific skills that are critical. The indoor bike trainer with awareness, with focus, with prioritization, is a great venue where you can actually foster and improve things like your posture, how you're actually sitting on the bike, whether that's in your time trial position or your road position, or how you're actually pedaling the bicycle. Yes, there is an art and a science to how you should be pedaling, and it's also a great place where you can learn the tools of the toolbox of how to become a better bike rider, particularly utilizing variance in Cadence, that's your leg speed and your gear selection. And so there are some critical skill developments that you can do inside that then transfer to outside, and that's great. And then, finally, the bike trainer is, of course, highly specific and particularly valuable for the time-starved athlete. Now, I'm not a massive fan of saying one hour on the train area equals two hours outside. I don't believe that one hour on the trainer is one hour on the trainer and two hours of riding outside is two hours of riding outside, but it is a particularly potent tool that you can use to get a great ROI on, whether you…
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