I’ve got a standard turbotrainer but riding indoors is very boring. It looks like Zwift “gamifies” the exercise and might make it more fun. I’d need a new “smart” turbotrainer and it looks like they start at £500 and go up. Anybody here use Zwift or similar? I’m definitely not interested in Peloton.
I started Zwifting last winter.
You don’t need a smart trainer. You can run Zwift on a dumb turbo with speed and (optionally) cadence sensors. You tell it what trainer you’re using, and it uses the known resistance of that trainer in conjunction with your speed to calculate your watts. This is known in-game as your “Z-power” and is frequently horribly calibrated. You may find yourself going substantially slower or faster in game than you do outdoors.
What you lose is that the game cannot vary the resistance of your trainer, so when you go uphill in game your avatar will slow down but you won’t feel the resistance change. With a smart trainer, the game tells your trainer to jack up the resistance, so the slight rise in the road will take a bit more effort and the 15% gradient going up to the radio tower is like hitting a wall. Also, smart trainers have accurate power meters, so your in-game speed will be realistic, if usually faster than your typically speed outside since you’re virtually riding a top-end carbon race bike over perfect roads with zero wind and frequently other riders to draft behind.
That said, I have a smart trainer and have never been on Zwift without it. I can’t personally recommend the el cheapo dumb trainer option, but it needn’t cost much to try it out if you already have a bike and a trainer.
At various points in the past I tried to ride a turbo trainer, and never stuck with it past a couple weeks. In the past year and a month I’ve logged 2247 virtual km, and that with very few rides over summer (cuz outdoors).