(door opens) - Morning, Trainiacs.
It's my birthday. It is, 36 years young.
Feels good. It's not gonna feel good in a minute,
because we are gonna do a brutal birthday bike session.
That's right. This is going to be
one of Team Trainiac's just half hour
near-puke sessions.
That's kind of the premise of the weekday bikes.
Really intense, really short.
Kinda scared.
So, of course, for that,
I need the Scody Team Trainiac Kit,
I need the Flamingo Sporcks Socks,
and after, we are gonna talk about
how I get this gorgeous setup
for Zwift on that TV out there.
There's three options, they have some pros,
they have some cons.
Related to that, if you happen to own,
like, an audio-visual sort of place
and are thinking about birthday presents,
I do have in mind like a
10-foot projector setup.
For Zwift. Just thoughts. Just throwing it out there.
Alright, let's go.
(intense electronic music)
(upbeat electronic pop)
Oh my god.
So that was a 30 minute ride
with a calorie burn of 323,
intensity factor of .87.
How that went was a seven-minute,
scientifically-proven efficient warm up,
and then four times 20 seconds really hard,
40 seconds easy, one-minute
recovery after all of those four,
and then repeat that five-minute chunk four times.
And then a five-minute cool down.
I joke about throwing up on those.
Actually did a little bit.
Why we incorporate those into Team Trainiac
is because there are a couple different types of fitness.
There's central fitness, your heart and lungs,
basically your cardiovascular system,
and for that, we need to do really low intensity
but really high volume.
But for really intense workouts,
you maybe only need about five to eight minutes
of total intensity to get the effect that you want
which builds up your peripheral fitness,
your arms and legs.
And I'm sure I've done an excellent job of
selling you on that as a training premise,
so if you wanna join Team Trainiac,
go to TriathalonTaren.com/TeamWaitlist
so you can be on the wait list for when it launches.
Now, let me just put myself back together.
I'll tell you about Zwift.
'Kay, I'm back. Pieced together.
Wearing a cardigan because that's what older people do.
Just gotta play the part.
So, I think that there are three main ways
that you can get Zwift onto a TV.
Let's talk first about the current Apple TV.
Now we're talking about one of the 4K Apple TVs
that has an App Store built in.
Zwift is one of only two indoor cycling apps
that has an app in the App Store,
and the really nice thing about this
is that there is no latency between
getting the Zwift feed from, say, a phone or an iPad
to the TV, so the feed is really good.
It streams in full 1080p HD quality,
and it is buttery smooth, 30 frames per second.
One thing that the 4K Apple TVs are known for
having, like, downside to them,
it's that they can only allow three Bluetooth connections,
and one is already taken up by the phone.
But how Zwift has created their app is that
it functions as one Bluetooth connection,
and all of the connections of all of your peripherals,
your trainer, your heart rate, your cadence,
everything is coming from that. Very smart.
So the next least janky option is
actually gonna save you a fair amount of money.
That is getting Zwift on either an iPad or an iPhone,
which most people already have, it's basically free.
And to get a really strong signal,
what you can do is get a lightning to HDMI adapter,
take that cable, and plug it directly into the TV.
Now, what you'll avoid is a little bit
of that skipping that ends up happening
when you try to stream something
from your iPhone or your iPad to the TV,
which often happens via Bluetooth.
Bluetooth is not foolproof.
Couple of downsides to this,
one is that you got a cable running across whatever,
your living room, your pain cave,
and the second real downside to that
is that Zwift is a battery killer.
Streaming somewhere around two hours of Zwift
typically ends up murdering an entire phone battery
or an iPad battery.
And once you plug into that cable,
you can't then go and charge the iPhone or the iPad,
so you're playing a bit of a game where you're like,
"Ooh, am I gonna be able to get the workout in in time?"
or, if you have a modern iPhone,
like an iPhone 8 or newer,
you can put it on a wireless charger
which you can get for $40 or $50
while it's plugged into that HDMI cable.
So that's a really good option.
For this, I always recommend going with
an iPhone over an iPad because with an iPhone,
you get that nice 16:9 frame size.
With an iPad, you end up getting black bars
on the side of your TV, and it's just,
it's less immersive where an iPhone renders correctly.
The most janky option is the one that I use.
It is to take said iPhone, stream Zwift on that,
and then AirPlay it to my old Apple 2 TV.
95% of the time, this works really well,
but just now, while we were trying to get footage
of Zwift for this video, it ended up skipping a lot,
and that'll often happen because
Bluetooth and Wi-Fi connections aren't flawless.
Also, if you're doing that from your phone
to get that nice 16:9 frame size that matches the TV,
most people don't have a spare phone,
so your phone is in use while you're on Zwift,
and you can't go and take care of
anything else on your phone
during any rest periods.
However, there is something to be said for
just focusing on doing the work
and having some time away from your phone.
That's crazy.
So what I do is I bought an old iPhone SE.
They're available for about $150,
an old Apple TV, somewhere around $50,
in which case, you're getting basically
the same thing as if you were to get
an Apple TV 4K, one of the newer ones,
because they're both coming in at about $200.
But with the other option of having
a nice, new Apple TV, you get a new Apple TV,
and you get that crystal-clear signal
with no jankiness that you got from this.
So there you go, Trainiacs.
Those are your three options for getting Zwift
streamed on a TV.
Very enjoyable, very immersive, feels like you're in it,
makes all of the trainer rides go by so much quicker.
If you are or aren't subscribed, doesn't really matter,
and you aren't following me yet on Zwift,
go to T is the first name,
and the last name is Riathalon-space-Taren.
This winter, we're going to be doing
a lot of Zwift group rides for Team Trainiac,
so go follow me there. (claps)
Alright. Later.
I would've made a good Mr. Rogers.