Old triathlon bike as dedicated trainer bike

Morning all,

Recently I have stopped participating in triathlons and started riding road (2012 Trek Madone but just order Trek Emonda SL 6 pro) and MTB (Trek Roscoe) again. I’m not racing but I enjoy climbing the local mountains as quickly as possible. So I now have a Cannondale Slice (2017) collecting dust/ taking up space in my garage.

My question is: Am I going to be missing out (muscle recruitment) if I set the Slice up as a dedicated trainer bike? I ride all my Trainer Road interval sessions on the trainer (two per week) and sometimes my longer weekend rides. So am I better off using my old Madone road bike as a trainer bike (I would need to set it up for each indoor/outdoor ride) or putting/leaving the Slice on the trainer?

Thanks very much for any advice that you have.

Cheers,
Scott

I have my TT bike 99.9% of the time on my turbo it hasn’t seemed to do my road bike riding much harm (in fact the opposite, everyone pre lockdown says I am getting stronger since I started trainer road with the TT bike). I don’t think you’re missing out on much at all. If you were racing you may be want to have the same geometry bike in and out but your not. Go for it :+1:

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I’ve been doing a lot of Zwift racing the last few months and have been playing with my fit myself until we come out of lockdown and I can go see my fitter again. At the moment I’m swapping between road and TT on the turbo. Initially I was better on the road bike, but with my current setup there’s not much difference in the upright/road position. So from my perspective, using the TT bike on the turbo, but sitting upright with hands on the base bar as opposed to in the aero position is very similar to the road bike and will make your road biking stronger. It will also ruin your ability to TT/triathlon. But as you’re looking to get stronger on the roadie I suspect this is fine. This is just my observation, but because I’ve raised my saddle height on my TT and need to get new di2 cables to properly stretch out the TT bars, I’ve been sitting on my TT more like a road bike and I’m now equal in terms of power/FTP on both bikes when not aero, whereas this time last year there was about 0.5 w/kg difference. Hope that makes sense. It does in my head. :smile:

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