Weaponize Your Bike Trainer This Winter

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