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Mostly heat. Outdoors you ride through moving air that carries your heat away; indoors you sit in a still, warming room, so your body sends blood to the skin to cool itself and has less available for your legs. Add the lack of coasting and the lack of distraction and the same power feels much harder.
Riding at 30 km/h outdoors puts something close to a gale across your body. That moving air strips heat off your skin constantly, and it does it for free.
Indoors, none of that happens. You produce the same heat and it stays in the room, and the room gets warmer as you go. Your body's response is to push more blood towards the skin to shed that heat, which means slightly less blood going where you would rather it went. Your heart rate drifts up, your legs feel heavier, and the power that was comfortable in the first ten minutes is a fight by the thirty-minute mark.
This is also why indoor sessions tend to feel fine at the start and awful later. It is not your fitness falling apart. It is the room heating up.
If you only change one thing after reading this page, make it a fan. See how to stay cool on a turbo trainer.
Outdoors, you coast more than you think. Junctions, descents, bends, a car pulling out, easing off over a crest, freewheeling for ten seconds while you drink. Those micro-rests do not show up in your average power but they matter enormously to how a ride feels.
On a turbo there are none of them. Stop pedalling and the resistance stops with you, so there is no momentum to carry you. An hour indoors is an hour of pedalling, where an hour outdoors might be fifty minutes of pedalling and ten minutes of small mercies.
A flat 200 watts for an hour indoors is genuinely a harder piece of work than a ride that averages 200 watts outdoors. You are not imagining it, and it is worth knowing when you compare the two.
On the road you shift about constantly without noticing: out of the saddle over a rise, hands on the hoods then the drops, weight forward, weight back. Each change moves the load around slightly and gives one bit of you a rest.
Bolted to a trainer, the bike does not move underneath you and most people sit far more still than they do outside. The same contact points take the same pressure for the whole session, which is why saddle discomfort shows up faster indoors than out.
Deliberately standing up for twenty or thirty seconds every five or ten minutes is worth doing even when the session does not call for it.
Effort that you are paying full attention to feels worse than the same effort when something else has your attention. Outdoors there is a road to read, traffic to watch, weather, scenery, other people. Indoors there is a wall.
With nothing competing for your attention, you monitor your own discomfort continuously, and discomfort you are watching closely is discomfort that feels worse. The clock becomes something you stare at.
This is the problem that is hardest to fix with kit, and it is the whole reason this site exists. See how to stop getting bored on a turbo trainer.
In the order that gives you the most back for the least effort:
Both, in different ways. The physical side is real: with less cooling you work harder at the same power, and with no coasting you pedal for more of the hour. The perceptual side is real too, because effort you are paying close attention to feels worse.
Partly. People who ride indoors regularly do adapt, and the first ten sessions are usually the worst. But no amount of getting used to it will fix a hot room. Sort the cooling first and the adaptation takes care of itself.
There is nothing wrong with that, particularly for easy rides. What matters is that the session does the job it was meant to do. If a number that works outdoors is unmanageable indoors, the room is usually the reason.
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.
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