Indoor training guides

Same watts, twice the suffering. Four reasons, and the one that matters most is cheap to fix.

A gap of five to ten per cent is normal. What causes it, and which number you should actually set your sessions by.

It is not that you are unfit. Sweat that cannot evaporate does not cool you, so your body simply makes more.

Same watts, ten beats higher. Usually the room, occasionally something worth paying attention to.

For fitness, yes, and often better. For some things it is no substitute at all. An honest comparison.

Twenty minutes that felt like an hour. There is a reason for it, and it is not that you are weak-minded.

Ten minutes doing this properly saves a winter of creaks, slips and a ruined carpet.

One measures your power and can change its own resistance. The other just makes it hard. What that means in practice.

The trainer holds the watts and ignores your gears. Brilliant for intervals, wrong for sprints, and it has one famous failure mode.

Cheaper and faster to hop on, or quieter and more accurate. The trade-off in plain terms.

Only if your trainer touches the tyre. Then it is one of the better small purchases you can make.

A two-minute job that keeps your numbers comparable. Done from cold, it does the opposite.

One is already in your laptop. The other handles more connections at once. When each is the right answer.

The single highest-value thing in indoor cycling, and most people are using a fan that is far too small.

Most of what your neighbour hears is vibration through the floor, not noise through the air. That changes what works.

Sweat eats headsets, stem bolts and bar tape. Thirty seconds of protection saves a very annoying repair.

Usually not the saddle. Usually the fact that you never move, plus a bike tipped forward.

A bike, a fan and somewhere to put it all afterwards. It is more doable than it looks.

Much less than you think. Bib shorts and a fan beat any amount of technical fabric.

Thirty to seventy-five minutes covers almost everything. Why an indoor hour is worth more than an outdoor one.

The 20-minute test, done properly, plus the preparation that decides whether the number means anything.

Just below threshold, where the work-to-wreckage ratio is best. The most useful indoor intensity there is.

Five sessions with real numbers, from thirty seconds to twenty minutes, and which one to do when.

Yes, and it is more efficient than outdoors. The hard part is keeping it genuinely easy.

Three is the number that works for most people with jobs. How to build two, three or five into something coherent.

Ten to fifteen minutes, and the hard sessions need the full version. Plus the five-minute emergency one.

An attention problem, not a character flaw. Eight things that work, ranked by how much of your head they actually occupy.

It happens to nearly everyone, at nearly the same time, for reasons that have nothing to do with willpower.

Most people quit for logistical reasons and blame themselves. Remove the friction instead.

Match what you watch to how hard you are going. A plot is wasted on a VO2 session.

Short, playful, and never called training. What works and what to watch out for.

Entirely doable, and more efficient than you think. Here is what a winter indoors actually looks like.

A 250 metre oval banked at forty-five degrees, four painted lines that are really rules, and a bike with no brakes. Explained, with footage.

Winter racing on a drop-bar bike over mud, sand and barriers. An hour long, three kilometres a lap, and you will be running some of it.