Learn to love your magtrainer

This evening I did a strength session on the magtrainer. It was 90mins long and involved a lot of sprinting in short bursts with the tension and gears cranked to the max. It started to hurt by the end and it seemed to go on forever.

Now I know a lot of you will have done magtrainer sessions and a lot of you probably hate the magtrainer. Like me until recently you probably only used the magtrainer as a last resort, when the weather just wasn't playing ball.

I am learning to love my magtrainer.

My coach uses the magtrainer as a tool for taking environmental factors out of the equation, so that the only excuse I have for going slower is that I'm out of gas. I can't blame the head wind or the road surface or the hills for slowing me down. My pedals stopped turning because my legs stopping pushing.

The magtrainer needs to be elevated from the 'last resort' category, to the 'essential training' tool category. True, you don't learn the essential bike skills that you get from hitting the road and it lacks the satisfaction of actually going somewhere that you get on the road.

However, despite the fact that it allows you to train when the weather outside is not suitable, on the magtrainer you can focus on the task at hand and forget about avoiding traffic and glass and you can quit trying to look like your feeling fine. On the trainer you can groan and grunt and sweat on the floor and look like death warmed up, and it's fine. More importantly you can focus on one particular task, such as maintaining the exact cadence, or that perfect pedal technique. The magtrainer is the perfect tool to dial in your technique, or to smash yourself and not have to worry about getting home, or to build mental toughness. I think one of the keys to magtrainer survival is not to just get on and spin for long sessions every time, because that will become old real fast. You have to mix it up, one day do sprints, the next vary the sprints, another day do cadence work, the next some one leg work. Variety is the key to remaining sane on the magtrainer.

I foresee many happy hours on the magtrainer in my future, so I'm going to maintain this pro-magtrainer attitude as long as I can, and if I sound fanatical it may be because I'm losing the plot already...

Which reminds me of a joke I read somewhere a long time ago.

One Ironman says to the other Ironman “You will never believe it, but my wife left me this weekend”. “Thats sucks, what happened?” says the other Ironman. “She couldn't stand my peeing on the bike during my long rides” said the first Ironman (I bet you can see where this is going, but I'll carry on for the slow ones) “Really? Its all part of the sport and everyone has done it at some point” says the second Ironman. The recently separated Ironman replies ”Yeah, I guess it was more because it I was on the magtrainer in front of the TV in the lounge.”