Computrainer and Sprinting

fergie said:

I am coaching a sprinter who is using his Computrainer indoors to do maximal efforts. I haven't done much with Computrainers and he is finding that the trainer alters the resistance for him making it hard to do high leg speed workouts.

Is there any way to do manual workouts? Also with sprint cycling do people have any suggestions to avoid tire slip when aiming to pump out 1200watts plus figures?

We are planning on downloading the files into CyclingPeaks. I take it we just need to take a Computrainer file and drag and drop into CyclingPeaks.

Hamish Ferguson
Cycling Coach

Ferg,

If you mean a manual workout to mean use at as an ergometer, yes you can set the watts manually but my CT in ergo mode won't go high enough -- its max setting in ergo mode is 995 watts. Newer models may be better -- not sure. If you want to download a session, however, you will need to run it through the CT coaching software (or maybe some other program like Erg+) If you run through the CT coaching software, just save the file and then you can drag/drop into CyclingPeaks or WKO+

For a sprinter, the tire slip is going to be the biggest problem and it's the only knock I have on the CT as a whole. If you crank down on the resistance unit to try to get the slippage to stop, then you screw up the accuracy of the coast down calibration. On my CT, if I try to jump very hard for a sprint or if I am in 3D use and the grade goes above 11% or so, tire slip is a problem. I've been able to work around the sprint slip issue by doing my sprints from a rolling start which seems to minimize the problem.

fergie said:

I am coaching a sprinter who is using his Computrainer indoors to do maximal efforts. I haven't done much with Computrainers and he is finding that the trainer alters the resistance for him making it hard to do high leg speed workouts.

Is there any way to do manual workouts? Also with sprint cycling do people have any suggestions to avoid tire slip when aiming to pump out 1200watts plus figures?

We are planning on downloading the files into CyclingPeaks. I take it we just need to take a Computrainer file and drag and drop into CyclingPeaks.

Hamish Ferguson
Cycling Coach

Hamish:
When you do the calibration of the CT, just go with a lot of resistance (over 3.0 should do the trick) although if you are going from a standing start then you may have to go over 4.0 or maybe even over 5.0 to prevent tire slip. Use other than the ergo function and there should be no problem with winding in out on the revs.

I have found that a very good way of doing this is to set the drafting "on" and put the pacer up to a very high wattage (something over 400), sit in behind the pacer in the draft and then sprint to accelerate around the pacer -- very motivating and easy to pump out a lot of watts when you wind up the revs behind the pacer and then hit a shift into a bigger gear just as you are coming around the pacer.

As to putting the CT files into WKO+ -- it works best to use the export function to convert the file into text format and when you do that you should rename the file so that you have the last two hyphenated digits as the year because otherwise WKO+ gets confused and will think the file is years from now into the future and slot it into the calendar way into the future. If you don't follow this explanation I offer the below example:

With a recent CT file that I converted to text, the numeric title of it was:

2006-10-23-13-17-29 etc.

The WKO recognized this as being October 23, 2013. I changed it to:

2006-10-23-06

and it worked fine and slotted into the proper date on the WKO calendar.

Best, and Merry Christmas
Bill Black

I remember doing sprints on the computrainer at my coach's place. We had 4 people stand on each of the four supports to hold it down. I hated how it didn't let your rpms go up much. For that reason, watt numbers read lower than they should.