Ride Inside: The Essential Guide to Get the Most Out of Indoor Cycling, Smart Trainers, Classes, and Apps

From bad weather to business travel to traffic safety, there are dozens of reasons why cyclists and triathletes take their rides inside. Although indoor cycling workouts offer the ultimate control over workout conditions, most inside riders don’t get the most out of their trainers or spin bikes.

From bad weather to business travel to traffic safety, there are dozens of reasons why cyclists and triathletes take their rides inside. Although indoor cycling workouts offer the ultimate control over workout conditions, most inside riders don’t get the most out of their trainers or spin bikes.

RIDE INSIDE offers cyclists and triathletes a smart guide to getting more fitness from every indoor cycling workout. From the world’s most experienced personal cycling coach, Joe Friel, RIDE INSIDE reveals all the unique aspects of indoor riding:

• Mental aspects like motivation, focus, and enjoyment
• Changes in upper body stability, posture, and pedaling technique on a stationary bike
• Respiration, hydration, and cooling
• Inherent changes in power output
• Lower leg tension and eccentric loading from flywheel momentum
• Lower effort from lack of terrain changes, headwinds, and crosswinds
• Road-like feel
• Different shifting patterns

All these differences of indoor riding add up to a big impact when the rubber hits the road.

Drawing from the foundations of Friel’s classic training guides, The Cyclist’s Training Bible and The Triathlete’s Training Bible, RIDE INSIDE shows how to apply smart and proven training concepts to indoor cycling. Riders will get expert guidance on the best ways to set up a trainer or smart trainer, how to modify outdoor workouts for indoor cycling, how to better monitor power and RPE, and how to use social online training platforms like Zwift to make training better and not worse.

Most critically, RIDE INSIDE shows cyclists and triathletes how to do indoor cycling workouts that actually meet their training goals instead of compromising.

With a masters degree in exercise science, Joe Friel was a marathoner and running coach throughout the 1970s and early 1980s. After his first triathlon in 1983 and falling in love with the sport he began coaching multisport athletes becoming one of the first triathlon coaches in the country. The following year he opened a triathlon store in Ft. Collins, Colorado―probably the first in the world. Throughout the 1980s his race management company organized several triathlons in Colorado. He left retail and race management in 1987 to focus on coaching. The athletes he coached for over 30 years ranged from novice to high-performance amateur to professional to Olympian. In 1997, he was a founding member of the USA Triathlon Coaches Association. He served as co-chair in 1999-2000. In 2000, he attended the Sydney Olympics to assist with team preparation. The following year he was the coach of team USA for the World Triathlon Championships. Throughout the 2000s he was a frequent speaker at USAT coach seminars. He wrote 17 books on training, the most notable being The Triathlete’s Training Bible, which is now in its 5th edition and translated into 15 languages. It remains the best-selling book in the world on triathlon training. In 1999, he co-founded TrainingPeaks, online training software for endurance athletes. As an athlete he competed in hundreds of events including national and world championships, was an All-American Age Group Triathlete several times and a USAT-regional multisport champion. He stopped competing after a bike crash in 2014 restricted range of shoulder movement. He continues to present at triathlon camps and clinics for triathletes and coaches around the world. Joe currently lives and trains in the mountains of northern Arizona and is working on his 18th book―this one for coaches.
Jim Rutberg is the communications manager for Haute Route and the media director for Carmichael Training Systems. He is coauthor, with Chris Carmichael, of The Time-Crunched Cyclist, The Time-Crunched Triathlete, The Ultimate Ride, Chris Carmichael’s Food for Fitness, Chris Carmichael’s Fitness Cookbook, The Carmichael Training Systems Cyclist’s Training Diary, 5 Essentials for a Winning Life, and innumerable web and magazine articles. His work has appeared in Bicycling, Outside, Men’s Health, Men’s Journal, VeloNews, Inside Triathlon, and more. A graduate of Wake Forest University and former elite cyclist, Rutberg lives in Colorado Springs with his wife, Leslie, and their two sons, Oliver and Elliot.