I’m a keen (if only slightly above average!) DH racer, and am trying to utilise the indoor trainer to help with my fitness. Skills are clearly important as well, but I’ve always been of the belief that if I did some proper fitness training it could make a big difference to my results. I will ride outside quite a bit as well, in a couple of months once the worse of the UK gloop has passed. It’s great, riding in the mud, but cleaning the bike and all the muddy kit day in day out takes its toll on motivation pretty quickly!
As well as skills, I’ve also no doubt that off the bike strength training is important as well as pedalling fitness, but for the point of this discussion I’m interested in how best I can take advantage of the indoor trainer.
When I ride MTB outside, whether on the trail or my DH race bike, I’m on flat pedals and handlebars that are some 800mm wide - a lot wider than a road bike’s bars.
I’ve Zwifted on and off since last winter, (I did their FTP builder programme last year) and recently discovered TR. All of my indoor training so far has been on a road bike with clips, just because that felt like the natural thing to put on the trainer, especially when the trainer was a wheel-on affair.
Now that I have a direct drive trainer, I’m wondering if I should stick an MTB on it, with wide bars and flat pedals. The thought saddens me a little bit, because although I’m no roadie, I’ve become quite fond of my FTP and seeing little improvements in it now and then… if I move to flat pedals I’m almost certain to see a drop in power, even though I do try not to “pull” too much with the clips at the moment.
Am I crazy to continue training with clips and narrow bars? It’s got to be “better” to train on something more similar to my DH race bike, right?
Can we think of any pros for staying with the road bike, other than not slipping a pedal during a hard interval and gushing blood all over the carpet?
Additionally, a saddle on a DH bike is only really there for two reasons: to sit on while waiting for your race run to start, and to lean against your knees in corners. You essentially never sit down during a race run. So should I be trying to make all of my hard efforts in workouts standing rather than sitting?
And then there’s the plans… TR has an off-road speciality plan (Gravity High Volume), but there’s very little high-end sprint work. A downhill race run never requires you to sit at 120% FTP for 25 seconds, it requires you to be at 200%+ FTP for anything from a single pedalstroke to 5-10 seconds maybe 10-20 times in a 2-3 minute race. Hardly any of the workouts have anything that closely approximates that. Some might argue that a good DHer doesn’t even need to pedal to win, and it’s true that Aaron Gwin has won a World Cup race even though he snapped his chain pedalling out of the start gate, but the reality is that a lot of more grass-roots races aren’t on such steep hills, and pedalling is an important factor. Not as important as not braking, and being a cornering ninja, but I’m not going to learn those things indoors!
I think the main reason to improve fitness isn’t about pedalling sprints though - it’s just generally coping with a race weekend. A typical race will have an uplift and have practice all day Saturday and Sunday morning, and then a race run or two in the afternoon. Over 2 days one might do 20 three minute DH runs, and if you’re not familiar with the sport trust me when I say it’s surprising how tired you are by the end of a weekend, and hence by the time your all-important race run comes around.
So maybe ignoring all of my ponderings in this thread and sticking to the road bike on the trainer with a high TSS will be enough to help, as it’ll help my overall fitness, help my threshold and vo2 etc etc and just make my body able to recover quicker in between runs? (You can tell I don’t really know what I’m talking about, right?)
Wow, what a lot of pointless waffle. Any useful thoughts, or should I just GTF and leave this structured turbo training to you roadies/triathletes/cx/xc whippets?
Thanks to those who persevered!