Go Faster With TruTrainer Rollers

TruTrainer Premium Bicycle Rollers will improve your bike handling skills, your pedaling form and your physical fitness. Our secret is a patent pending design consisting of a flywheel, viscous load device, and roller geometry that provides a real world ride sensation while eliminating many of the limitations experienced when riding standard rollers or stationary trainers. Our rollers allow you to train in a more realistic way than other indoor trainers. More realism means the pedaling form and handling skills you develop on our rollers can be directly applied to track or road riding. More realism also means more fun and less boredom; so you are inclined to train more often and for longer periods.

TruTrainer rollers provide a higher level of comfort than regular trainers. Everybody that has trained indoors knows how tough it is to train consistently day after day. Minor annoyances like vibration, noise, numbness, or muscle cramps can mushroom into unbearable burdens. These burdens may cause you to cut your current session short and to dread the next one. Our TruTrainer rollers are vibration free and whisper quiet. And, the flywheel allows you to coast and to ride out of the saddle so that you can easily make an adjustment to whatever is bothering you, take a stretch, grab a drink or change the tune on your MP3 player. TruTrainer rollers reduce the little distractions that prevent you from getting the most out of your training session. With less distraction and more comfort you will train harder and longer.

Going faster on the bike is all about improving fitness and pedaling efficiency through quality time on the bike. TruTrainer rollers are a comfortable, natural training tool that allows your indoor training sessions to be more productive. The bottom line is that TruTrainer rollers will help you become a better cyclist by maximizing quality time on the bike.

Who Should Train With Rollers?

If you happen to live in bicycling paradise, then .....you know that place all the magazines write about: 72 °F average temperature, never any fog/rain/snow, 12 hours of sunshine a day, wide freshly paved and lightly trafficked roads....you don't need to train on rollers. You can just get on your bike and ride!

Unfortunately, few of us experience this kind of cycling heaven. In the real world, it is sometimes too dangerous to be on the road. Our training is often hindered by extreme weather, vehicle traffic, poor roads and darkness.
Commitments to day jobs, significant others, and children also limit our ability to get out and ride. If you love to ride, but find that for one reason or another you just can't get enough quality time on the bike, then our rollers are perfect for you. TruTrainer rollers' real-world ride sensation brings the road to you anytime and anywhere. At last, you have an indoor training solution where time on the trainer is equivalent to time on the bike

TruTrainer rollers allow you to maintain and improve your fitness by bridging the gaps between your outside rides. Our rollers are an ideal training tool for the hardcore enthusiasts, like competitive racers, tri athletes, bicycle club riders, time trialists and bicycle tourists. TruTrainer rollers allow you to get in more miles per week than ever before. Many of our customers ride them for two, three, even six hours at a time. TruTrainer Premium Bicycle Rollers allow you to train when it is convenient for you. Never again will you need to delay or put off your training ride due to bad weather, darkness, work or other obligation.

Rollers Improve Your Bike Handling Skills

Rollers are unequaled at developing your balance. As you pedal, you must control and position your bike between the left and the right edges of the roller tube. Experienced roller riders have excellent balance and can usually maintain their position on the rollers to within a few inches. Bike racers must be able to "ride a line" to maintain safety in the peleton and minimize energy expended while drafting in a pace line. To check your ability to ride a line, cruise through a puddle. If you leave a single tire track, Congratulations! You can ride a line. If not, and your considering racing, you had better learn, otherwise you are more likely to cause a crash. The ability to ride a line is also a great way to minimize distance traveled and energy expended; thus very valuable for century rides or time trials.

TruTrainer Rollers Overcome The Deficiencies of Conventional Rollers

Conventional rollers have two short comings that have prevented them from becoming a popular training tool. First of all, most people find them difficult to learn how to ride. It is not uncommon for beginners to crash a few times until they re-learn how to ride a bike. There is a saying: 'There are only two types of roller riders, those that have fallen and those that will fall.' No surprise that the stationary trainer market has boomed. With a stationary system, you can jump on your bike, and train without the fear of falling off. Unfortunately, stationary trainers do nothing for your balance skills. Secondly, conventional rollers do not provide realistic steady state or transient power absorption capability. In other words, standard rollers just don't feel like you are riding your bike on the open road. So, you cannot equate miles ridden on conventional rollers to miles ridden on the road.

The good news is that TruTrainer rollers have overcome the deficiencies of conventional rollers. TruTrainer rollers are easier to ride, provide a realistic ride sensation and thus make indoor training much more enjoyable and beneficial. What follows is an explanation of how TruTrainer rollers' innovative functionality has overcome the deficiencies of standard rollers; and how they can help you become faster on the bike.

TruTrainer Rollers Are Easier To Ride

It is best to first understand why conventional rollers require you to re-learn how to ride a bike in order to understand why it is easier to ride TruTrainer rollers. When you ride standard rollers, the feedback your brain receives is very different from the sensation of riding a bike on the road. The brain interprets the difference as a "new experience" even though your body already knows how to ride a bike. Subsequently, the brain sends the body incorrect signals in response to the new stimulus. These errant signals cause your body to over correct balance and steering. Combine this with a relatively narrow roller tube, and you get a potentially difficult learning experience. The result is that most learners ride off of the roller tube. Typically, most people say that their first ride on conventional rollers was a white knuckle affair. They had to stop because either they fell off or could not continue because their hands were cramping from squeezing the handlebars so tight!

Standard rollers provide such a different feedback than the open road because they lack sufficient inertia. In other words, when you start pedaling on conventional rollers, your legs feel very little resistance to changes in speed. On conventional rollers, without expending much effort, an average rider can accelerate from a standing start to sprinting speed in a few seconds. The chart on the left illustrates this point. It was created by getting a rider to do maximum intensity sprints on both standard and TruTrainer rollers while measuring how long it took to accelerate up to speed. As you can see, standard rollers can be accelerated from 10 to 40 mph in about 5 seconds, while it takes a on the order of 20 seconds to accelerate TruTrainer rollers to the same speed. The feedback the brain gets when the body starts pedaling a bike on TruTrainer rollers is essentially identical to that from pulling away from a stop sign on the road.

The reason for the similarity to the open road feel is that TruTrainer Rollers feature a tubular flywheel internal to the rear roller which provides a resistive load when accelerated. The load comes from changing the momentum of the flywheel mass as it is accelerated. When riding TruTrainer rollers, the brain is more likely to interpret the feedback as something that the body has done before. Thus it will send the correct signals for balance and steering. While there is still some learning required, it is easier to master the learning due to the realistic pedaling feedback provided by our patent pending design.

On traditional rollers, when you stop pedaling, it takes only a few moments before your wheels stop spinning. The chart on the right compares TruTrainer rollers' coast down time to those of conventional rollers. As shown, standard rollers loose all of their speed in about 5 seconds, while it is possible to coast for more than 30 seconds using TruTrainer rollers.

Based on the coast down times, TruTrainer Premium Bicycle Rollers provide a more realistic coasting experience. The ability to coast is also a sensation that eases the transition from open road to roller riding. The quick accels and decels allowed by standard rollers are a symptom that they lack the inertia of a a rider on their bike on the open road. Feedback from test riders and owners alike confirm that TruTrainer Rollers are easier to ride than standard rollers.

TruTrainer Rollers Provide a More Realistic Workout

A significant drawback of standard rollers is that they do not simulate the steady state load experienced while cycling on the road. Standard rollers don't provide much of a workout because they can't absorb very much power. TruTrainer rollers have overcome this problem through our innovative viscous load device and we provide a realistic training solution by simulating the aerodynamic loads you would experience on the open road.

We have fine tuned the steady state load absorption of TruTrainer rollers so that it approximates what you would experience on the open road. The graph on the left compares our steady state load absorption capability to the open road. The data for this comparison was obtained from a power meter using the same rider and bike for an apples to apples comparison. TruTrainer Premium Bicycle Rollers duplicate the aerodynamic loads that a solo rider experiences at 20 miles per hour on a level grade with no wind. At higher speeds, our rollers absorb load in line with what a rider experiences drafting behind another rider. Most importantly, TruTrainer rollers have a maximum continuous load absorption capability greater than 1/2 a horsepower (375 Watts). For reference, it takes about this much power to cruise at 26 mph on a level road. This means that TruTrainer rollers can provide adequate load for those training sessions where you need to crank out some high power. A key feature of TruTrainer rollers is that the power absorption happens automatically. That's right, no knobs to turn or buttons to push. When you accelerate, the load automatically increases. Oh yeah, no batteries or auxiliary power required either. Just get on them and ride!

TruTrainer Rollers Are Perfect for Interval Training

Interval training is another strong suite for TruTrainer rollers. Our integral flywheel assures that the rider feels a life-like inertia load as they accelerate to speed. The chart to the right shows that TruTrainer rollers require approximately 5 times more energy to accelerate up to speed than conventional rollers. When sprinting on TruTrainer rollers you will find that it feels like sprinting on the open road. With our power absorption capability and life like inertia, TruTrainer rollers provide an ideal interval training tool.

TruTrainer Rollers Are Ideal For Perfecting Spin

Simulating the momentum of the bike and rider via the flywheel is essential to developing proper spin. Inertia is what smoothes out your pedal stroke when you are on the road. So, with TruTrainer rollers, the pedal smoothness that you feel while roller training is identical to the feel you will have on the road. Thanks to Mother Nature, the spin you develop on TruTrainer rollers is the same spin you can use on the road.

Ridding Out Of The Saddle Made Easier With TruTrainer Rollers

Riding out of the saddle is also easier on our rollers because of our flywheel. On the road, when you ride out of the saddle, your body mass can be supported through the pedals. As your stand on a pedal, your body's weight is opposed by an inertial load developed by the changing the speed of your body mass. This is the same load your legs would feel if you were sitting in the saddle and accelerated from low speed where aerodynamic loads are negligible. With TruTrainer rollers, our flywheel provides an inertial load which can support your body weight through the pedals, just like the open road. While it is possible to ride out of the saddle on standard rollers, you have to do so by supporting your body weight with your arms through the handle bars. This is a very unnatural feeling and is very difficult to sustain long enough to be of value. Standard rollers do not have enough inertia as evidenced by the previous charts which show they can be accelerate from low speed to nearly 40 mph in less than 5 seconds.