TURBO TRAINERS
Bargain turbos, lab-quality smart trainers and apps mean there’s never been a better time to train indoors
Like many things in cycling, turbo trainers used to be a lot simpler. You just bolted your bike in, cranked a roller onto the tyre and pedalled until exhaustion or boredom got the better of you. Some were smoother or quieter than others, and the posh ones had adjustable resistance, but even those were only a few hundred quid.
Then, in some twisted Terminator- style scenario, trainers started becoming selfaware. They began talking to your laptops, phones and tablets, allowing you to track speed and power data from the trainer, rather than bike-mounted sensors. Then the laptops, phones and tablets started talking back. Within a few years a slim selection of jerky videos or Ceefax-quality ‘virtual riding scenarios’ evolved into addictive riding simulators where you could ride with real people from around the globe in real time, nodding, texting, racing and even struggling up the same real-feel hills together.
Top-end turbos have changed structurally over the last few years too. Red-hot rear tyres rubbing on noisy, rumbling rollers were replaced by direct-mount trainers on to which your bike could be directly bolted. Some replicate road feel much more accurately, reduce noise and remove any worries about rear tyre wear for those who could spend more on a turbo than most of us would on a winter bike. Meanwhile the basic trainers that haven’t really changed in decades have been gradually dwindling in price.
With so much variety to choose from today, finding the right trainer for your training needs/desires is much more complicated than it used to be. Luckily, we have sweated through exhaustive and exhausting comparative tests of over 20 current trainers from super-smart to utterly dumb before narrowing down to our top six, to point you in the right direction.