- Morning trainiacs.
Trying out some rollers right now.
Instead of a direct drive,
the Wahoo KICKR trainer that I normally use,
we're on, whoa, the Elite Nero Rollers,
which sync up with Zwift.
If you're in the market for a trainer
and you don't know what to get,
if you're thinking rollers or a trainer,
we're gonna talk about the differences
and what my experience has been with the Elite Nero.
I've fallen a lot more than you've just seen.
Way more.
Woo-ee.
(upbeat music)
Alright, trainiacs,
now that I've lifted these
hundreds of pounds worth of trainers into position here,
let's talk about trainers versus rollers.
And in my opinion, there's about five big things
that you need to consider
if you're making a purchase decision
between rollers and a more traditional trainer.
Now number one, rollers are going to require
a little bit of a learning curve.
So my first time on rollers,
it's not exactly what I expected.
It's not very hard to learn,
the big thing is that you do not wanna look down at all,
you wanna just look forward
like when you're normally riding.
A little bit tough to manipulate
like, turns and things on Zwift
or grab a water bottle with one hand.
Try it now, but you see that I'm not really able to,
woo-hoo, look at you at all freely.
Like, You've gotta work for it the whole way.
I've probably spent now about three hours on the rollers.
The first 10, 20 minutes was a complete disaster,
but after three hours now,
I'm a fair bit more comfortable
that I don't have to think about it a ton.
Still going from the drops to the arrow bars
is a little bit uncertain,
but you can get to the point
that it's basically the same as riding outside.
Dr. Dan Plews, the guy that helped
coach me up to Challenge Roth,
he does all of his training on rollers,
and he says that he uses really
no more mental energy than he would outside.
Ride on them enough,
and these can be basically the same as riding outdoors.
With enough time, you'll get there,
but when you first start trying them out,
it is not going to be pretty.
Wasn't pretty for me.
(mumbles)
- Ooh, there you go.
- Whoa.
(laughs)
Up next, the workouts on rollers
is a little bit different than what you get on a trainer.
Whereas on a trainer, you can do really sharp spikes,
you can get up out of the saddle,
you can sprint,
you can't really do that as well on rollers.
A, because sprinting is just hard, it's uncontrolled,
it's going to end up rattling the bike around,
likely jumping you off the rollers,
and B, these are the Elite Nero Rollers,
which are rated at 830 max watts.
These high end trainers, like the Wahoo KICKR,
the Tacx, the CycleOps Hammer,
those are rated for 2000 watts,
so just a lower max wattage rating,
and what I found is that past about 250 watts,
this didn't really want to stay there
for any length of time.
So while I could get spikes up
and have more power behind that for a few seconds,
it didn't wanna stay there,
it didn't wanna allow me to crush out
really high end VO2 max intervals.
On the low end, it also didn't really wanna let me
get down to that really easy cool down
because I think the momentum of the wheels themselves
actually keep you from going too easy.
So the sweet spot on this,
was anywhere between 130 watts, and 250 watts.
The sweet spot on this
is anywhere from 50 watts to 2000 watts.
I've never seen a point where this
basically just sort of steadied out.
Next, the workout on the rollers
will actually make you mentally tougher.
So if concentration is something
that you're struggling with,
if you find that your mind wanders,
or you start just getting
kind of negative self talk going
throughout a race or a long ride,
this might help with that because just riding in itself,
forces you to concentrate.
When I was down at the Zwift Tri Academy
earlier in the year,
what a lot of the athletes were saying
was that they liked going into erg mode
with a Wahoo KICKR on Zwift
and just checking out.
You don't have that option to check out here.
And what Dan Plew said again
about why he does all of his training on rollers,
is because it adds an aspect of concentration,
which is a really important thing
when you get into a race.
You don't want to not have developed
a mentally strong brain muscle
so to that when you get into a race,
all of a sudden you're getting mentally fatigued,
which actually takes up a ton of energy.
If you've trained that mental muscle
with something like rollers,
when you come into the race,
it's going to end up feeling like
a shorter amount of time
and you're going to be able to stay
mentally engaged in the work.
Next thing, really quickly,
if you tend to get saddle sores,
you get a sore bum on a trainer, that's normal,
because with a fixed trainer,
the saddle is basically set up right there
with maybe about a quarter to a half an inch of wiggle room.
But essentially, you're just sitting
on a stationary two by four.
With this, I did not get a sore undercarriage whatsoever
because there's always that little bit of movement
just like when you're on the road,
so it takes some of that side to side pressure
off your undercarriage,
which I really appreciated.
And then the final thing to consider
is just what are you using the trainer for?
If you really want like,
very, very specific workouts
where you have to hit certain power numbers,
certain cadences,
you wanna sprint, you need to get out of the saddle,
you need to do a lot of standing work,
you need really high amounts of power,
this is probably the trainer for you.
If you're looking for something
that is more like recover rides,
long steady rides,
kind of, shorter, strength based rides
where the cadence is a little bit low,
maybe power is just a little bit higher,
this is gonna be a really nice experience.
Or if you like to just be in front of the TV,
have the TV on and ride away,
this is also gonna be a really nice experience.
If you only have money for just one trainer,
I'd probably say get a more typical trainer
because you're going to be able to do more workouts.
In an ideal situation,
you probably might wanna have both.
This, for your really specific work,
this for your recover rides,
this for your off season,
for your base building season,
where it's just a little bit easier on the body
and that side to side movement
forces you to actually develop a nice, stable core
and be able to control your bike with the core,
this is also a training tool, just like this.
Personally, I'm gonna go back to this,
just because I only like having
really one set trainer around here at all times,
and it's gonna be that.
Doesn't mean that I don't enjoy this.
These are actually the Elite Nero Interactive Rollers
that communicate with your Zwift,
your preplanned workouts,
your TrainerWorld, things like that.
So if you do like rollers
and you like the interactivity of Zwift
and all those interactive training tools,
this is one way to do it that historically,
rollers didn't allow for.
As far as rollers go,
I really only have one thing to compare it to.
But I liked it, the learning curve was fairly easy
because there's this small little lip
on the edge of the, gonna have to crop way in there,
small little lip on the edge of the rollers,
keeping the bike from falling off,
so the learning curve was a little bit better,
but there were those issues
of not being able to get up to really high powers
or really low powers.
But overall, thanks for sending this out Elite,
I learned a lot about rollers.
This was very cool.
Alright, trainiacs,
if you like hearing about things like Zwift and rollers,
well, we're coming up fairly soon to winter,
that means trainer season, Zwift season
is right around the corer,
so it'll be a lot of content on that.
Make sure to hit the subscribe button below.
Later.