I have a dumb trainer at the moment for zwift. I’ve been up to 60kmph on it without any issues which surprised me to be honest.
I bought a 4iiii power meter and I’m wondering what I should do to improve power. Should I set my trainer to the highest resistance and rely on my bike gears to do the rest? Or should I use my gears as per normal and manually adjust the dumb trainer resistance when going in for a sprint?
I’m not the most athletic but hoping to push above 400w and win a shirt or two.
The only dumb trainer I’ve ever used didn’t had a resistance controller lever thingy. So I would just use the gears as you would outdoors. I’d expect most people use that same approach.
If you seem to constantly be in a certain gear then you will gear that gear out faster than the rest of the cassette so you could adjust the trainers resistance to favour a different gear every 1000 km or so.
Hi Leslie,
I had a setup similar to yours. Power meter with rollers.
I used to adjust the resistance of the rollers depending on whether I was on a recovery ride or a race, or somewhere in-between.
If you find yourself spinning out on a certain setting, then increase the resistance. Having a power meter gives you a choice, I wouldn’t say there is a right or wrong approach.
Ben makes a good point on changing the resistance from time to time (if the differing settings are usable for you) in that way you can avoid wearing out a single gear or couple of gears. (with that in mind, check your chain (cheap) for wear now and then so that you can change that, before it causes damage to the cassette (expensive))
Have fun.
Thanks to you both for the advice. I find that I am changing gears often as I’m relatively new to Zwift and tire out easily My bike will be going to the shop soon for a service so I’ll be sure to have the chain checked and replaced if required.
Sounds like a higher trainer resistance will help produce more watts during a race and a lower resistance for more relaxed sessions. I’ll let you know how it goes once my power meter is installed (currently in transit and taking ages due to Covid)
My bike will be going to the shop soon for a service so I’ll be sure to have the chain checked and replaced if required.