Just bought one yesterday – given that it has a 5 position resistance dial, what gear is best to use?
or do you all just change gear as if you were actually riding?

I use mine (as little as possible) with a heart rate monitor and a cadence monitor. Keeping on target with those two, the gear pretty much takes care of itself.

Thanks for reminding me – need new batteries for the HRM!

Low resistance and high gear or vice versa. I keep mine at 5/10 resistance , using the inner chainring for warming up and outer chainring for main session – cogs are varied according to how I feel or how difficult I want the session to be.

Steady state riding is boring and pointless – do intervals, or Sufferfest videos or sommat. I tend to leave the resistance and use gears unless I want it really easy or hard.

I’ll be watching rugby whilst spinning away so wont get bored 🙂
yesterday did an hour at level 3 and tenth gear – sweating like a pig I was!

Hour at level 3? Well done. My program called for 100 rpm at L1 for 30 minutes. Surprised how sweaty that was.

What’s the point in that though? Doesn’t really achieve anything, too hard to recover, but you’re not actually training in any meaningful way. I’d suggest using the turbo to actually do targeted stuff. You’ll always sweat like a pig, not necessarily indicative of effort or benefit!

No programs as yet, may have to set the laptop up on a table.
Any recommendations?

Check out Trainerroad if you want something fairly comprehensive, once I get an ANT dongle I’ll be signing up. Otherwise look at the Sufferfest, decent videos that work on perceived exertion, make it a bit more interesting.

once I get an ANT dongle I’ll be signing up

Get the suunto one, it’s tiny and can be left plugged in.

As for effort, My turbo doesn’t have any settings other than ‘PAIN’ so I vary the effort by using the gears like a normal ride.

TrainerRoad is excellent. Makes turboing a lot more fun. Use a combination of resistance setting an gears to get the right power/cadence for what I want to do.

By the way, anyone have any good resources for base building on a turbo? Trying to figure out my winter training plan and I really don’t have time for hours of z3 on the turbo as quite a few seem to advocate (don’t think it’s that effective an use of time either considering my racing is mostly short course stuff and TTs, not grand tours!)