With winter on the horizon, would you consider home-indoor bike training as an alternative to riding outside? Companies like Zwift, which create realistic, graphics-driven cycling workout apps, are betting you will. A sophisticated, web-based, fitness-video-game-hybrid smart trainer, Zwift communicates with your computer and the app via the likes of ANT+ wireless technology to provide resistance feedback and data—and costs anywhere from $500 to more than $1,000.
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From Outside Online:
Zwift was born of a familiar complaint among cyclists forced indoors: Riding inside and alone, on a clunky trainer with maybe some music thumping through earbuds, sucks. Cyclist and Zwift co-founder Jon Mayfield, a computer programmer who specializes in 3D graphics, quickly concluded that the bevy of performance data produced on rides—including heart rate, power, and vertical feet climbed—could, along with the right graphics, help create a Web-based training system that connects fitness and gaming.
“Video games have reward systems based on numbers,” says Mayfield. “Cycling has them, too. If you take ten seconds off a climb? You want to do it again.”
There are additional barriers to the smart trainer, beyond the hefty price tag for the technology. You’ll need a dedicated bike with a full indoor setup—including details like hitching up bike to trainer, arranging towels to mop up sweat, powering up a fan to keep you cool, and sorting out wires to beam the screen image from your laptop to a much more watchable TV.
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Then there are the subscription fees: Zwift charges $10 per month; Bkool and TrainerRoad charge $12 per month for their full-featured apps; and CycleOps, which allows riders to choose from thousands of real routes captured on video, costs between $6 and $15 per month.
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That said, Bkool claims to have 100,000 members, Zwift has logged over 300,000 rides, and TrainerRoad hosts athletes from more than 100 countries.
While indoor cycling at home is not for everyone, this review gets us wondering how virtual workout approaches will continue to evolve through the years. It’s probably safe to assume we can look forward to even better technology with more user engagement and lower costs.
Curated article from:
Outside Online
Photo: Hiroko Masuike for The New York Times
