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For building fitness, yes, and often more efficiently: an hour indoors is an uninterrupted hour of training, where an hour outdoors includes junctions, descents and traffic. What indoors cannot give you is bike handling, descending skill, riding in a group, or the simple pleasure of being outside.
Treat them as different tools rather than one being a poor copy of the other.
A sensible pattern for most people riding through a British winter is to do the structured, hard, time-limited work indoors, where it is efficient and safe, and save outdoor rides for the longer, more enjoyable ones when conditions allow. In summer, flip it.
If you are training for events that involve descending, cornering or riding in a bunch, keep some outdoor riding in the plan all year regardless of how good your indoor fitness is. Arriving at an event very fit and rusty at handling is a real and avoidable problem.
The reason indoor training works is also the reason people stop doing it: it is relentless. There is no coasting, nothing to look at, and no cafe.
Most abandoned turbos were not abandoned because they stopped working. They were abandoned because of the boredom, usually somewhere around the second week of February. That is a solvable problem and it is worth solving deliberately rather than relying on willpower. See how to stop getting bored and why indoor motivation collapses in February.
Yes. Plenty of people hold or build good fitness entirely indoors through a winter. The limits are skills and enjoyment, not the physiology.
Often, in terms of training effect per minute, because there is no coasting and no stopping. That does not make it better overall.
Your fitness will carry over directly. Speed also depends on handling, pacing and position, so expect the engine to improve more obviously than everything else.
That is the problem we are actually trying to solve. Turbo Trainer Games turns your watts into the controls of a browser game — your power flies the aircraft, climbs the mountain, pulls the sledge. Nothing to install, and it works with a smart trainer you already own.
It is in closed testing at the moment, so there is nothing to play yet. But you can put your name down.
Ask for early access