Rollers are good fun, the minutes fly by and it’s a great way to improve your cycling fitness and cycling skills from the comfort of your own garage. (However, for reasons which may become apparent later – don’t use rollers in your greenhouse…)
With a set of rollers you don’t have to worry about the weather or going out in the dark. There’s always some way to keep yourself ticking over.
Reasons to get some rollers
1. Look outside at the weather
- You can practise high cadence pedalling. Consistently pedalling 100rpm takes considerable concentration. There are different opinions about optimum cadence, but it’s a good skill to have the ability to cycle higher cadence and a nice fluid pedalling style.
- You can try to maintain a straight line on the rollers. This is almost impossible to do, but you can spend hours trying to do it.
- If you ever ride the track, rollers make excellent practise in terms of both bike handling and high cadence pedalling.
- It’s marginally more fun than a turbo. This is probably the main reason I bought a set of rollers. I though I might be marginally more likely to do indoor training sessions with rollers than a turbo. When I just had a turbo, I used to max out at about 30 minutes. Last winter I did a couple of two hour sessions on my rollers – including one at threshold pace on TT bike. I’m not sure how I managed that though.
- You can practise trying to take off a jacket whilst still pedalling on the rollers. This is much more tricky than it may sounds. But, if you’ve ever used rollers, you will know it is no easy task of changing clothes whilst still pedalling away. So far I have only fallen off my rollers three times – twice because my discarded jacket got caught in my rollers.
Do you need rollers and a turbo?
If you want to do all your training indoor, you probably do. Turbo for high intensity, big gear efforts. Rollers for developing smoother pedalling style and helping indoor hours pass quicker.
Tips on Using Cycle Rollers
If you’ve never used cycle rollers before, it’s a bit like learning to ride a bike all over again. When you first get on – you can become nervous about letting go. It seems really difficult – as if you are cycling on ice. But, when you finally let go and cycle normally, you wonder what all the fuss was about in the first place. Before you know it you are riding with one hand and seamlessly shifting all over the rollers.
Getting started if it is your first time
- When starting having something to hold onto. – A door handle for example.
- It is useful to have something to stand on next to the rollers. This makes dismounting easier.
- When cycling, look ahead, it’s easier to keep balance.
- Like rollers, you need a fan
- Be patient, it will definitely get a lot easier to use rollers with time
- I found this youtube video helpful for getting started:
Pros and cons of using cycle rollers
You can’t put out as much power as on a turbo. Yesterday I did an hours threshold training on my rollers. After a warm up, I put it into 53*13 – second biggest gear (highest gear wasn’t working). My heart rate was 170, after 30 mins spinning 90rpm at 52*13 – my heart rate steadily rose to 180. In a ten mile time trial, my heart rate is something like 181-187.
Basically, with rollers, you might not be able to do that really high intensity / high power interval training. To get near your peak effort, you have to be spinning pretty fast – a bit like a track cyclist.
TOP TIP: To get a higher effort rate / power output on rollers with the same gear, you can let a bit of air out of your tyres – it creates more resistence. If I had my bike in top gear, with a little lower air pressure and spinning 100 rpm – it would have replicated a 10 mile time trial – but not really a hill climb interval.
I’m quite proud of my mastery of the rollers. It’s a good skill to learn. However, this hasn’t stopped me making quite a few ‘undignified dismounts’ from my bike (i.e. falling off). When you’ve had a really good threshold session, it needs an added concentration to get off the hamster wheel.
Rollers make it very difficult to do out of the saddle efforts. There might be a way to ride rollers out of the saddle, I haven’t yet plucked up the courage to find out. One thing is that after one hour glued to the saddle, your posterior is sore. If you’re doing very long roller sessions, you might consider getting off after 30 minutes to give yourself a rest.
Using a timetrial bike on rollers is even more challenging. But, it makes a good work out for trying to hold your TT position and getting used to the bike. I will be getting my TT bike down from the loft fairly soon. I know I need to start riding my new TT bike, but I’m reluctant to take it out on wet salty roads. So it will make a good choice for the roller sesion.
Rollers are noisier than most modern turbos. I’m worried rollers may get me into trouble with that small print you sometimes have on CTT startsheets ‘don’t use noisy turbos to warm up – most people at 6am are still in bed and don’t want to be woken up by cyclists’
TOP TIP – you need a flatish surface to use a rollers.
A difficulty of using rollers to warm up for races is that you need somewhere reasonably flat to warm up. Here I’m trying to get some rollers to work by using energy bars to prop it up.
Using rollers to warm up for a race
Generally, I like to use rollers to warm up for a race. However, if you want to be very scientific about warming up and do some race pace sprints, you are probably better off on a turbo. For important hill climbs, I did use a turbo for warming up last year. But, sometimes I just prefer to take rollers.
TOP TIP. If it is raining, you may find you can’t use rollers at all. When it’s wet, it is too slippy. If you rely on rollers to warm-up, it is worth bearing this in mind.
Best Rollers
Elite Ghibli parabolic
Elite Ghibli rollers at Wiggle – £140.99
These are the rollers I bought. They are easy to set up. Easy to use. Works well. I like the fact that you just put your bike on. No fixing, no stress on bike. No changing wheels just to use a roller – good for pre-race warm up. The main drawback is that you can max out at 270 watts – and that is with spinning pretty furiously.
Tacx Rollers
Taxc Antare rollers – £141 These Taxc antare rollers are very similar in design to the Elite Ghibli. In fact rollers really haven’t changed much in the past 20 years.
Resistance rollers
The only real technological development to come into the roller market is the ability to set greater resistance – enabling you to do more power.
Like these Cycle Ops – resistance rollers – £255. If I had unlimited funds, I would probably upgrade to these, but at the moment, I can’t really justify the extra cost for the limited times I would actually use the feature.
Related
To stand up hit a biig gear and keep the weight over the bottom bracket, lifting you up by putting all weight on thhe crank and slightly hanging on to the handlebars with weight far back.
Be surre to lookk forward and up, like when getting ahead in a sprint.
Good practice is no handed riding sitting up, and pedaling with one leg at a time ( this one is worse ). Good luck, keeping back when standing will give you more power on sprints and uphill, also try this in the bends might be easier.
Two points from someone who’s ridden rollers for far too long. First, regarding standing up – just to piggyback on what Lars says – start by just practicing coasting. Stop pedaling for a couple seconds and the bike will weave. Start pedaling to even it out. Shen you can do that, then you can start trying to do the same thing except with lifting yourself off the seat, even for a fraction of a second. The trick is to get used to the bike weaving by itself. Once you learn to not over-correct, you’re on your way to standing. It is tough to learn and tough to do, so start with simple things like not pedaling and shifting your weight around. It’s worth it though for two reasons – it relieves pressure on the parts that touch the saddle and it teaches you to stand up in a pack without throwing your bike backwards (and taking out the person behind you).
Second, regarding power, it’s pretty easy to match the power outputs of a turbo – just let air out of you tires. I weight 180# and run my tires at 55 – 60 psi. It makes it a little harder than riding on the road. I can pretty easily hit 800-900 watts in an interval session with this tire pressure. (and for me, that’s pretty darn high – obviously I’m an amateur!)
The one thing you can’t do on rollers that you can on a turbo is sprint wildly and out of control. But why do you want to careen all over the road when you’re sprinting? If you can sprint on rollers, you’ll never again fear a group finish, road or track.
Good luck..
Cheers Erik good points.
i did not try cycle rollers yet. but the things reading this made me challenged. it will new experience if i would do ti. i think only skilled person may made this as you showed there. but i will try. thanks for coming up with tins.
Old thread I know –
Using them with cleats for the second season – I just turned 65! Fell somewhat often early on so was happy I was next to a bed to plop on to.
Getting used to them, watching movies and net flix.
One problem was watching bike races on large screen tv. I instinctively fall in behind the pelaton and so, of course, drive off the rollers when they take a turn! Pretty funny,
Try them, carefully, you’ll be proud of the accomplishment. I read that running at 60psi gives a good workout and found it so.
I am using a Miroura roller for few months, aluminum drums. My bike is having a wheel of 700x28C and I am 162 lbs. However, back inner tube broke down 2 times in 3 months, I think this is not normal. I use the roller 30mins everyday, tire pressure between 90-100psi. Please advise what is the real problem for flat tyre? Is the pressure too high?
Someone told me to loosen the screw of the tyre valve attached to the wheel rim when the pressure is high (as 90-100psi). Do you think this will help to prevent inflat inner tubes.
I’d say remove the screw entirely. I’ve had the valve tear off the tube by using them and I was being cautious about tightening them too much. They don’t have any value other than keeping the tube on the wheel pre inflation. More hassle keeping them on, and they rattle!