Yeah I know, very old school, but my setup, which works perfectly well for my purposes, is rollers + laptop with old style GCN videos playing.
I like the videos as they are a mix of scenery but also useful prompts to save me having to time the efforts myself, I usually do the GCN sweetspot one which is 2x15 minutes (I'll usually repeat the first 15 minutes as a warm up). I ignore the RPE scales as I use wheel speed and heart rate as a rough guide to my efforts.
Just wondering if anyone knows of a similar style of training video that does 2x20 or even 3x20 minute efforts, or similarly an over/under video (GCN does under/over but I'd always thought the point was to do the overs first!).
Ta
I'm pretty old school too, with a very dumb gel resistance turbo and android tablet. But I watch box sets on the tablet (ipcress file was a good length episode) and use my HRM to dictate my intervals.
So i used the British Cycling sweet spot session sheets to program different sessions on the HRM and use that to tell me what i should be doing and when
Now that the weather is nice I'm plannning to take the same sweet spot sessions out on the road to supplement training on my local loop
Now that the weather is nice I’m plannning to take the same sessions out on the road so i can do some more sweet spot training on my local loop
Yeah I much prefer outdoors and usually base an outdoor session around climbs or Strava segments of a suitable length for extra motivation/fun (whilst keeping half an eye on heart rate). Works well but not always convenient because the good stuff can rarely be neatly packaged into a 45 or 60 minute session and wife always objects less to 'quickly nipping out to garage' between family duties 🙄
Good point about programming the HRM though! I can do that on my Garmin so can just make up my own sessions 😎
Yes, it can be tough getting the sessions to dovetail with real life.
I've got a road loop that takes me around an hour, with 2-3 stretches that are around 10 minutes each, and last week tried using those to do a 3x10 sweet spot, keeping an eye on the HRM to direct the effort. Not as regimented as on the trainer, but worked reasonably well.
Sweet spots seem to work better for me that HIIT sessions as well and easier to do on the road cos I'm not busting a blood vessel around traffic.