ADAPTING SESSIONS IF YOU DON’T HAVE A SMART TRAINER

You’ll occasionally see sessions where we ask you to hold a steady power and/or cadence while we apply resistance to your trainer. While we work hard to make our workouts accessible across a range of equipment, there are occasionally sessions like these where you might not be able to follow along exactly.

The good news: if you're riding this type of workout on a basic trainer, you can still make it a really high-value session by doubling down on an opposite but equally important skill: maintaining effort through shifting gears and cadence play. 

For example, let’s say you start out the main set in a moderate gear at 85RPM Z3, with the purpose of the main set being to hold Z3 throughout. When Matt calls out that we're heading up a 6% grade, you won't feel that resistance change in your basic trainer -- but you CAN shift up some gears to add resistance yourself, and reduce your RPM down to 55-60. When he calls out that he's heading into a negative grade you'd shift such that you're spinning above 100RPM while still trying to maintain Z3. And you can make more subtle shifts for the shallower grades. 

You can look at the workout steps on the left side of the Velocity screen for the little grade icon (it's a little hill with an arrow and X% listed next to it) for a heads up on what type of grade you will be heading into at the next interval. 

The skill of being able to maintain steady effort at varying RPM is critical (this is similar to what we are doing in the "Managing Grades with Gears" session). Even though you aren't getting the grade changes, you can definitely still give “fixed-gear” sessions a dynamic main set that allows you to focus on skill development.