I recently bought a bike trainer from one of our local and well-known online shopping apps. My logic for buying a trainer is I can do HIIT or high cadence rides on it since I don't think it would be safe for me to ride fast either inside or outside the subdivision.
Before the trainer arrived I noticed the pace of my morning rides was getting faster. Not insanely fast, but faster than usual. I usually average around 14 - 15 kmh inside the subdivision. The past three or four sessions before the trainer arrived I averaged well over that, peaking at 17 kmh.
I rode around again this morning after spending the weekend trying to do HIIT and high cadence cycling on the trainer. This morning I got around 15.3 kmh, but that probably had to do with me continuously stopping to wipe my fogged up glasses.
Anyway back to the bike trainer. I tried doing HIIT last Saturday and I was only able to do 4 reps of 30-sec effort 30-sec rest before stopping. I have no idea if I'm exerting too much or not but it was a fun challenge. Then Sunday I tried riding at high cadence and was able to do maybe eight minutes overall. The reason why I stopped was I increased the seat post height by around 5 mm. When I did high cadence before raising the seat post I felt discomfort on my knees. After raising it disappeared.
Sadly I also got bored staring at the wall which is the biggest reason why I stopped after a total of ten minutes including the time needed to raise the seat post height. Besides, I was excited to try out the raised seat height in an actual ride and this morning I did just that.
It felt great this morning. I just rode and couldn't hear my Runtastic app notifying me how far I'd gone so I just rode around and around the subdivision. I ended up going around 9 km, about 2 km farther than my usual morning rounds.
I'm planning on using actual rides as my "recovery" ride or relaxed ride, and using the trainer for higher cadence and HIIT, like I said earlier. Hopefully I can get used to riding inside the house on a trainer that I can increase the number of HIIT cycles to maybe 3 or 4 30/30 efforts. Then if I can consistently do that I'll probably shift efforts to 40/20 or so. Of course the resistance of the trainer is also a factor but as of the moment I'm happy doing my efforts on 3/6 resistance.
I honestly wish I had a speed sensor to mount on the rear tire so I have an idea how "fast" I go on the trainer. A cadence sensor would also be nice so I also know just how high my high cadence pedaling is. For all I know I could just be doing 60 rpm.
Out.
