Back in October, during a momentary lapse in judgment, Olly decided to test his fitness by attempting an outdoor gravel-based Functional Threshold Power test. Normally, this kind of testing is done indoors where the conditions can be controlled — unlike on a gravel climb in the Scottish Borders! Apparently undeterred by that experience, he chose to do it again, this time in the ‘glamorous’ setting of his garage. Did he freeze? Did he die of boredom? Is he about to turn pro as an e-sports racer next year? You’ll have to read on to find out…

A circle of anxious-looking people sits in a bland community room. In the corner, a slightly wobbly table holds a jumble of mismatched mugs, a jar of instant coffee and a plate of rather miserable looking biscuits. One by one, members of the group stand, avoiding eye contact as they mutter a few sentences, each met with the organiser’s gentle reassurances. When my turn arrives, I stand up awkwardly, push my chair back a little and brace myself.

“Hello, I’m Olly. I’m 51. I’ve been riding bikes for 35 years… and I’ve never used a smart trainer before.”

At this point my alarm goes off and I realise with a big smile on my face that it’s Friday, which means it’s my day off. The smile is because I’m due to be heading out on my gravel bike with my regular group of local bike chums. But then I remembered the weather forecast and my smile became a little less broad. 

Our WhatsApp group had been pretty busy the night before. We’d all separately been looking at the weather forecast predictions and it would be fair to say there was a decent amount of trepidation about what conditions would be like in the morning. “I'll still be sitting on a (central heated) fence until the morning. If it's not like an ice rink I'll come and join you.” The message from Francis summed up our group thoughts eloquently. Gravel riding in the snow can be absolutely amazing and will bring a grin to the face of even the grumpiest gravel grouch. But sheet ice is quite a different matter. Taking up a space in a never-ending queue in our local Accident & Emergency unit wasn’t high up anyone’s list of ideal ways to spend a Friday. 

"Everything glistened and sparkled like some kind of early Christmas wonderland."

I knew instantly that I opened the back door that we wouldn’t be going out riding. The ice outside was so thick it looked like it had been poured from the heavens like a layer of crystalline concrete. The pre-dawn sky held the promise of an amazing day ahead, but the lethal sheen across every surface told me it was a day for sitting next to a radiator blasting out heat, not venturing out on to the roads. After I had topped up my calorie and caffeine levels I ventured back outside in full winter gear included my insulated wellies just to check my initial assessment was right. Everything glistened and sparkled like some kind of early Christmas wonderland, but the fact I could hear ice being energetically scraped off car windscreens all down the length of our road made me realise it was time to admit defeat and break out my Plan B – a garage gravel ride.

It took me nearly 15 minutes to chip the ice off the wooden steps and decking that were the route from my house to the garage. It’s only a matter of a few metres, but the ice was solid and resisted my attack with all its strength. However, the effort was worth it. I figured that walking around in SPD shoes is a pretty skittery affair at the best of times, so trying to mince my way across a mini-glacier was asking for an impromptu lie-down. 

My plan for the morning was to make the most of an enforced indoor day and try something I’d been contemplating for a month – comparing the results of an indoor ‘Half Monty’ FTP test to the outdoor gravel-based one that I had done a month previously. I’d managed to get through more than three decades of riding without ever being that bothered about quantitively assessing my fitness levels, but now that cherry had been well and truly popped, I figured it would be interesting to compare the gravel version with the garage version. My wife was the proud owner of a Wahoo Kickr trainer and regularly braves the cold, cobwebs and somewhat cramped conditions at one end of our garage to get the digital miles in. She was obviously much mentally tougher than me as I would prefer to go and ride outdoors, no matter what the weather is like, than sit in the garage, spinning my way to nowhere. But, with the icy conditions stopping play, I figured I should get over my mental hangups and give indoor riding a go.

I would consider myself pretty tech-savvy, but getting myself plugged in to the digital world wasn’t as easy as I had hoped it would be. Physically getting my bike set-up worked easily enough, courtesy of a bag of adapters than came with the Wahoo trainer. It was a quick job to remove my wife’s quick-release equipped road bike and slot in my bolt-thru equipped gravel bike in its place. Getting my laptop to talk to the trainer proved to be a more frustrating affair however. In the end there was a simple fix – I needed to select a training programme before I could connect to the trainer via Bluetooth, but this seemed unintuitive and it wasn’t apparent in the online instructions. However, with that hurdle overcome, I was all set.

"If you have any peculiarities in your pedal action/style, indoor riding will shine a glaring light on it."

I decided that starting straight with an FTP test would be an error, so instead I selected one of the many training programmes that come as part of Wahoo’s SYSTM Training App and (digitally) headed off to the Pyrenees for a 45 minute hilly warm-up session. 

As I entered this new digital riding world, there were a number of things which struck me - apologies to anyone already ‘sold’ on indoor riding if any of these remarks seem overly obvious:

• Despite the fact it was only 5 degrees C  in my garage, I warmed up surprisingly fast and was soon shedding layers and turning on the cooling fan that my wife has sensibly included in her indoor trainer set-up.
• Riding indoors felt just as demanding as riding outdoors and I needed to regularly top up fluids while riding (and mop up fluids afterwards….), so you’d be advised to bring a towel and whatever hydration/nutrition products you normally use.
• Wear your most comfortable shorts and use good quality chamois crème. You will be sitting in the same position for significantly longer than you might on a gravel ride and staying comfortable will ensure you can get the best workout possible/generate the most representative power figures in your fitness test.
• If you have one, don’t forget to put on your heart rate monitor – it will give the SYSTM training app much more accurate data and you will need it during the latter part of the FTP test. 
• Even though we have 500m/bit fibre broadband connected to our house, the Wi-Fi signal in the garage was patchy, so you unless your training space is physically part of your house you might need to consider a Wi-Fi booster. Even with a booster, the video feed of the programme was glitchy at times.
• The training programme did a good job of distracting me/keeping my attention and the time passed significantly more rapidly than I thought it would. 
• If you have any bike set-up foibles, they are significantly more noticeable when you are indoors – it turns out my SPD pedals were much more worn/rattly than I had noticed when riding outside.
• If you have any peculiarities in your pedal action/style, indoor riding will shine a glaring light on it. Riding indoors brought into sharp focus the fact that I mash big gears rather than spin (which I knew anyway, but choose to ignore) and my pedalling action was much lumpier/less smooth than I had previously believed (which I didn’t realise).
• The metrics that the Wahoo trainer displayed matched the information that my Wahoo Element head unit displayed for heart rate/cadence etc, but the power output registered on the Kickr was 20 watts lower than that recorded by my 4iiii crank-based power meter. I’m not sure which was the most accurate, but I’m going to claim the higher figure as that’s better for my mental self-image….
• The FTP test doesn’t have a proper audio track (just some occasional sound effects) so I would suggest playing some loud music – either to help motivate you or just to distract you from the pain. 

With the warm-up done, it was time to start the Half Monty test. Unlike my outdoor FTP test, where I had the instructions hand written on a piece of masking tape applied to my stem, Wahoo’s FTP is *significantly* more precise. You will be taken through a series of screens where you are given advice, warnings and instructions about what you need to do and why. 

The first part of the FTP protocol includes some warm-up sections where you have to ride at specific power output and the system tests your heart rate. As long as you follow the instructions on the screen, the smart trainer does everything else. The ramp test portion of the test increases the power targets you are required to meet at one-minute intervals. It starts off easily enough and you might be lulled into a false sense of security. With each passing minute the requirements go up and your self-esteem goes down (or it did in my case anyway). I managed nine ramps before my brain screamed at me to give up. The lack of external stimulus meant that unlike being outside climbing in the hills, you had nothing to take your mind off the pain and it turned out my will power was quite a lot weaker than I had thought.

"At the end of my last ramp, my brain was nearly as fried as my legs."

At the end of my last ramp, my brain was nearly as fried as my legs. When I read the instructions before starting the Half Monty session, I was sure that it had said that once you reach the end of the hardest ramp you can achieve, pause the system and skip to the end of the ramp then spin your legs to help you recover. But, no matter what combination of inputs I gave my laptop I could not get the software to allow me to skip to the end of the ramp. This meant that when I tried pedalling the resistance was off-the-scale and I could barely turn the pedals. I’m not sure if it was user-error, a glitch when using an Apple Mac Book Pro laptop or an error in the SYSTM software, but it was pretty frustrating. There are some spikes in the yellow data trace where you can see me try desperately to pedal before climbing off the bike and prodding the computer again to try and skip to the end of the ramp. All the while lactic acid is coming out of the eyes. Not an ideal cool down! Eventually the app got to the end of the ramp portion and I could then happily spin my legs again.

It's fairly obvious from the images above how cooked I was by the end of the ramp! At this point you are prompted to switch the smart trainer into Level mode (you get regular reminders, so there’s no excuse for forgetting) and then you have to do 20 minutes riding at a very prescriptive heart rate. I was given a ‘window’ of five beats (159-164 bpm) to achieve and you’re supposed to maintain this for 20 minutes. I suspect I was already pretty cooked by this point (maybe doing a 45 minute hilly ride before trying the FTP wasn’t such a smart move after all…) and I found this last section of the test to be significantly harder than I was expecting. Initially I couldn’t get my heart rate high enough, but with some extra oomph through the pedals I did eventually manage it. 

If you are anything like me, by the end of the test you will be a sweaty mess. I’m not sure why I expected anything different, but it was significantly tougher than I had thought it might be. Perhaps I had mentally glossed over the pain of doing the outdoor FTP? Perhaps the physical and mental stimuli of being out in the hills takes your mind of the hideousness of what you are trying to do and makes it feel a little less awful? Either way an indoor FTP test is tough physically and mentally. My outdoor test had been crazily hard, but there was an endorphin rush from having arrived at the top of a large hill at the end to help balance out the pain. Plus you got to enjoy a long downhill back to the bottom afterwards….

Where Wahoo’s Half Monty indoor test really shines is how rapidly your receive the results and the sheer amount of data you are presented with. Wahoo say that their Half Monty test “provides you with 3 critical fitness benchmarks - Functional Threshold Power (FTP), Maximal Aerobic Power (MAP) and Lactate Threshold Heart Rate (LTHR).” Wahoo’s system quickly takes the data you generated during the test and creates a 4-dimensional Power (4DP) profile for you – essentially a summary of what type of rider they think you are – Sprinter, Attacker, Pursuiter, Time Triallist, Climber or Rouleur. You have probably spotted that “gravel rider” isn’t one of the pigeon holes currently on offer, but it will give you an idea of what type of riding your physiology is currently best suited to and will help you to train strategically if you want to improve on one particular area in the future.

So, what do my results show? Interestingly, but perhaps not surprisingly, my indoor FTP score (217 watts) was 19 watts lower than when I did the outdoor FTP test (236 watts). My power to weight ratio had dropped from 3.75w/kg to 3.44w/kg. I’ll be honest and say that I was a little disappointed with my results. For some reason I assumed that indoors, without all the random variables of trail riding that I’d record significantly higher results. But that didn’t seem to be the case. However, Wahoo say that FTP tests based on the 95%-of-your-20-minute-flat-out-effort rule of thumb (which is essentially what I had done outside) aren’t all that accurate and will generally over-estimate your FTP, so perhaps my outdoor results were overly inflated? Of course, external factors can play a part in different results too – insufficient recovery, life stress/fatigue, illness, weight change and inadequate fuelling are all examples that pop up if you search online for guidance on factors affecting changing FTP values over time. 

"I’m really glad I tried it out, but unless the world is covered with a thick layer of ice, I’m going to continue to do my riding outdoors. "

Ultimately, it was a useful experiment. It gave me some valuable insight into the world of indoor riding and made me even more in awe of professional cyclists (who spend significant portions of their life riding on a trainer) than I was before. Wahoo’s SYSTM and their Half Monty test generates an impressive range of data and will help anyone with specific fitness goals in mind to more easily achieve them. Riding indoors allows all the external factors which might negatively affect the accuracy of the test data to be reduced or eliminated. Perhaps most importantly, no matter where you live, you’ll be able to get consistent, repeatable results without having to have an appropriate length climb on your doorstep.

But it’s not for me. I’m really glad I tried it out, but unless the world is covered with a thick layer of ice, I’m going to continue to do my riding outdoors.