Bicycling Gear Ed, Oli Munnik, brings you five of the best indoor trainers to keep your legs turning when the weather doesn’t play along.

Giant Cyclotron Mag Trainer

If you’re looking for an indoor trainer that’s light on the pocket but still offers you the chance to ‘ride’ when the weather closes in, look no further than Giant’s Cyclotron Mag Trainer.

The sturdy A-frame, made from heavy-duty steel, is fitted with rubber levelling feet that help to keep the trainer steady – as well as dissipating vibration when you’re giving it your all. The Cyclotron Mag Trainer is compatible with 24”, 26”, 27” and 700C wheels/

The Cyclotron Mag Trainer is compatible with 24”, 26”, 27” and 700C wheels/tyres. A quick-release skewer is supplied, ruling out any compatibility issues. To fit your bike, simply swop out the rear axle and secure your rear wheel via a double-sided clamp. Once your bike is secured, raise the magnetic resistance unit until the contact between it and your rear wheel is firm enough to provide sufficient resistance.

A handlebar-mounted lever allows you to shift easily between seven resistance levels, ranging from very easy to challenging. Compared to more expensive trainers, the Cyclotron’s top-end resistance is somewhat lacking; but it’s sufficient for basic training sessions.

R2 299

giant-bicycles.com

JetBlack Z2 Fluid Trainer

Unlike magnetic (or ‘mag’) trainers, which use adjustable magnetic resistance to create drag against your bike wheel, fluid trainers like JetBlack’s Z2 create resistance through an impeller spinning in fluid inside the flywheel. The specially formulated fluid becomes thicker as its temperature increases, which means that when you pedal faster, the trainer’s resistance becomes progressively more challenging.

While the Z2 has the traditional A-frame trainer design, its resistance unit can be folded into the centre of the trainer, making it compact and easy to store. Your bike is secured via a threaded clamp, which rotates inwards to align your rear wheel with the roller. All wheel sizes, from 26” to 29” (including 700C), are compatible with the Z2. You’ll just have to make sure you have compatible quick-release axles.

The fluid resistance unit is rated to a maximum of 900W at 60km/h, which provides more than enough range to keep the winter kilograms off. The resistance is progressive; meaning the faster you spin, the harder it gets. But nothing too complicated – just secure your bike, get on, and pedal.

JetBlack include a free training app (available for both Android and iOS users) with the Z2 Fluid Trainer. It’s perfect for monitoring your sessions and gauging your progression over time. The app also includes access to basic to advanced training programmes, which can be uploaded directly to the app.

R4 780

twowheelstrading.co.za

CycleOps Super Magneto Classic

The Super Magneto Classic trainer takes minutes to set up, and offers a realistic road feel – thanks to a large flywheel, which uses magnets to adjust resistance progressively.

After you’ve secured your bike with a bolt-action lever, the Magneto Classic’s resistance unit is easily tensioned against your rear tyre, ensuring a smooth and consistent connection. A large yellow clutch knob allows you to set the resistance unit at exactly the right tension. It works like a torque wrench – as soon as it gets to the optimal point, the lever clicks, and won’t tighten any further.

The Magneto Classic sports four different resistance levels, allowing various types of training sessions. Each setting offers progressive rather than linear resistance – thanks to the clever flywheel design, which moves the position of the magnets as you spin faster. CycleOps describe progressive resistance as much more “true to the road”, because when you pedal faster or shift gears, the resistance increases just as it would outside on your bike, and not simply proportionally to your change in speed.

The trainer’s ‘easy’ setting, as the name suggests, offers very little resistance, and is ideal for warming up and cooling down between intervals. The ‘road’ setting is best for building volume, or simply riding with consistent power output. The real action is reserved for the ‘interval’ and ‘mountain’ settings, which offer harder levels of resistance, allowing for more intense and structured workouts. As you’d expect, shifting gears within each resistance setting also affects the degree of difficulty.

Swopping between settings requires you to dismount from your bike and adjust the unit manually, as there is no remote lever. This has the potential to be slightly annoying; one solution is to choose the setting you’re most likely to spend most of your session in, and adjust your gears for the specific level of effort required.

The Magneto Classic fits 120mm, 130mm and 135mm axle widths and will accommodate wheels sizes from 27.5” to 29”, depending on tread pattern. And in terms of noise levels, CycleOps claim that at 35km/h, the trainer produces 70 decibels, which won’t keep the neighbours up at night.

R6 595

bicyclepower.co.za

Tacx Bushido Smart

The Bushido Smart is one of Tacx’s range of interactive trainers, which means it’s able to adjust resistance automatically via a computer, tablet or smartphone app. So instead of you having to adjust resistance manually using a lever, the Bushido Smart’s resistance unit uses Bluetooth or ANT+ to communicate with a connected device, allowing you to accurately set and tweak your training session parameters.

Like most A-frame-designed trainers, the Bushido Smart is easy to store and set up. It’s suitable for both mountain and road bikes, and will fit 26” to 29” as well as 700C wheels – understandably, Tacx do point out that axle adapters may be required on specific frames, and that with 29” wheels, a narrow training tyre is necessary to ensure a secure fit. Although most of us can only dream of unleashing 1000+ watts, the Bushido Smart’s wireless motor-brake provides a maximum resistance of 1400W for 10 seconds, and 750W for a minute.

What sets the Bushido Smart apart is the fact that it requires no outside power source to function. Its wireless motor-brake uses the rider’s pedalling force to generate the energy it requires to provide dynamic resistance. No power cables means you can literally use the Bushido Smart anywhere – outdoors on a veranda or balcony, for instance.

And when you aren’t hooked up to a device, the Bushido Smart performs like a normal fluid trainer offering progressive resistance – the harder you pedal, the higher the resistance.

Once connected to a device through ANT+/Bluetooth, the Bushido Smart allows a variety of different training applications, depending on your needs. So whether you’re doing specific high-intensity intervals, racing others online, or riding a simulated stage of last year’s Tour de France, the Bushido Smart’s wireless motor-brake is able to perform hundreds of calculations per second to ensure the smoothest possible (and most realistic-feeling) workout, even on perceived gradients as steep as 15%.

Resistance may be adjusted either by you yourself (via your smartphone or tablet), or by an app that communicates the changes called for by the particular workout session or route profile. In all instances, changes happen wirelessly, and you have a choice between using the Tacx software and apps, or those of a third party such as Zwift, Perspro or TrainerRoad.

R15 185

coolheat.co.za

Wahoo KICKR Power Trainer

While you may raise an eyebrow at the Wahoo KICKR Power Trainer’s price, the ride quality, compatibility, functionality and sturdiness make it a compelling player in the ‘direct drive’ trainer market (and at R22k, it’s still cheaper than Tacx’s equivalent Neo Smart).

Though less expensive trainers are better suited to simply keeping your legs ticking over as winter unleashes its wrath, the KICKR provides a solution for competitive riders looking to dominate their training sessions as quickly, effectively and efficiently as possible – even when the sun is shining outside. That’s how good the KICKR is!

Weighing in at over 20kg, the KICKR is more than a few doughnuts ahead of the competition. This means it isn’t easily transported; but on the up side, the weight helps to keep it well grounded, no matter how violently you’re pedalling.

As you’d expect, the system is compatible with all major wheel sizes, and uses a sliding scale to easily select which wheel size you’d like to use – from 24” to 29”. The KICKR has been designed so that regardless of wheel size, you don’t need a front wheel block to neutralise your position – one less thing to think about. Out the box, the KICKR comes specced with an 11spd Shimano/SRAM-compatible cassette (the freebody can fit anything from an 8spd cassette and up). A Campagnolo adapter is available aftermarket.

Wahoo Fitness, who produce the KICKR, offer their Wahoo Fitness App at no charge, which allows you to record your workout and share it directly to the likes of Training Peaks and Strava. Like other interactive trainers, KICKR also communicates with a wide range of third-party apps, to give the user free range in software selection, as well as in the type of training they wish to do.

The KICKR features a ‘direct drive’ resistance unit with a built-in power meter that performs accurate, hassle-free power measurement, and talks to compatible devices and software via Bluetooth 4.0 and ANT+. The system does require a power source to operate. A major benefit of the direct drive system is that wear and tear on tyres and wheels is eliminated – as are variances in power readings due to torque slippage, or inconsistent tyre/roller connections.

The KICKR offers four different modes, each of which allows you to control the resistance unit differently. Level Mode offers 10 different resistance curves, for basic training; Resistance Mode allows you to set the level of resistance as a percentage (with 100% being reserved for the likes of Hulk Hogan, or Hercules); Erg Mode sees you set a specific wattage that you need to maintain, no matter what – you can adjust the target wattage with a +/- buttons, if necessary; and Sim Mode (short for ‘simulation’) allows you to feed various factors (slope/wind speed and rolling resistance) into a virtual environment, to create a world of pain in your living room.

R21 999

wahoofitness.co.za

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