Home trainers help you improve Just like your heart rate monitor your indoor home trainer is a fundamental tool in improving your cycling fitness. During your building and peaking phases the humble home trainer becomes the most important piece of equipment to help you perform high intensity intervals and sprints. Sadly skipped by many cyclists these high intensity efforts are critical to your success as a cyclists and stop you from being spat out of the back of bunches when climbing hills, responding to vicious attacks and hammering into cross winds while riding in the Gutter.

Not only that, training on an indoor home trainer is the most important key to improving you Time Trial performance for road races and triathlon events. It's is scientifically proven that a structured six week session on a home trainer can improve you average speed by up to several kilometres per hour which can cut minutes off your personal bests for these events.

This improvement is accessible to anyone with a bike, a home trainer and the desire to spend two - four hours on it a week.

Indoor home trainers are also a necessity when the weather gets really bad. You can jump on a indoor home trainer in the safety of your living room or garage and get in some seriously good structured training in a relatively short amount of time... Without having to suffer hours of cold hands and wet feet while riding though the storm raging outside.

Indoor home trainers are great at keeping you fit during the off season (if you have one). They help you keep the weight off and maintain or even increase fitness over the cooler months. In fact you can make your greatest fitness and weight loss improvements during the winter. If you can use your indoor home trainer for a half hour every other day throughout the off-season you will notice a big fitness improvement while keeping your weight stable or even shedding a few kg's. And if you are a summer rider it's not rocket science to understand that by keeping yourself fit during winter you'll be able to hit the summer season as a much stronger, slimmer and fitter cyclists than if you were slouching around over winter.

When you Ride on the road you stop for traffic lights, coast and draft. Something you don't do on a indoor home trainer. For that reason every minute spent on the trainer is quality training. It's so time efficient that we double any kilometre ridden on a indoor home trainer. That means a one hour session on a home trainer is equal to two hours on the road. And in these times of being time poor it's nice to cut your training in half and still get the same if not better benefits with the time you invest. In our time poor sport it's also great to be able to give something back to your cycling widowed wife or husband and family by spending that time saved as quality time with them.

There are a lot of people that hate indoor training. This is mainly the result of these people jumping on a trainer without any structured plan. I'm sure you have done it too. It's not long before your mind starts wandering and the only thing that you can focus on is the amount of time still to go as you slowly watch the seconds count down on your monitor. This is easily and simply solved by setting up a structured weekly training plan with goals which includes the exact details of the set exercises to complete during each of the sessions. Just like going to the gym and working through a set routine it is amazing how motivated you can become. Even to the point when you can't wait for your next stint on the home trainer.

This new found motivation is to do with getting instant feedback on your progress and being able to consistently measure it with past results. This it a very powerful motivator because once you do set up a training plan you can start to measure your progress in a controlled environment. If you add a heart rate monitor like the Polar CS400 or CS600 to the program your can then download your data and start comparing it with your previous attempts. The feedback is extremely powerful and motivational to the point where your will naturally want to spend more time on the trainer.

Another motivation advantage is that at home you can get a iPOD and listen to it while training. While we don't in any way endorse using such a device on the road as we consider it very dangerous, the iPOD becomes another powerful device to help you with your training. Music, again has been scientifically proven to help keep you motivated and enables you to push harder for longer than you are without it. One of the main reasons why spin classes are usually pumped with music.

This is the power of home training. When done correctly with a structured plan you can actually get far greater benefits than almost any training done on the road. All it takes is two to three sessions a week. And... That's a great thing to do to top up your fitness mid winter during the road season if the weather is fowl.

If you are interested in purchasing a home trainer why not look at the world's best fluid trainer being sold at our Cycling-Inform Store