Hi everyone. Thought I'd share something I discovered. A friend of mine in Oz recommended this training tool after I was discussing powermeters with him. It's called Trainerroad and it's an online training resource for turbo training. I absolutely hate the turbo, but I have been loving it since I joined up to this. It's like having a coach, at a fraction of the cost!! 99dollars for the year.
Ideally you need to have a powermeter, but they also have a thing called virtual power, which makes a calculation based on your speed/cadence sensor, heart rate and an algorithm for your particular turbo trainer, commumicating with these through your Ant+ usb dongle and giving you power readings on the fly. It gives you a weekly programme based on you doing an FTP test and you pick a programme to suit your target. They have 40K TT programmes, and cyclocross, Crit, Climbing etc. You can match up the training sets with Sufferfest if you have access to them. You can download the app to use your phone if you can mount it on the bars, or laptop or smart tv.
I'm probably not explaining this very well, but if you check the website www.trainerroad.com it'll explain better than me. Also there's some really helpful instructional videos on youtube. I'm finding it a really helpful, constructive training tool to work on my weakest discipline.
If anyone uses it, can you post here how your getting along so we can share anything we learn from it.
One thing I've noticed with virtual power is the FTP it gave me is almost definately wrong, but don't let that put you off. It's only being used as a baseline with which to construct your programme. Also if you find that the sets are not challenging enough, you can manually change your FTP. I went out too hard on my FTP test so my reading was probably off. So after I did a few sets, I added 6 watts onto my FTP and it's made the sets more of a challenge. I can do this all the way along to keep it challenging, but your programme has a test built in every 6 weeks to keep it up to date anyways.
I hope this is of help to somebody .