Why Learning How to Cycle on Rollers is SO IMPORTANT
Learning to ride the rollers is definitely not as easy as one thinks!
It’s actually quite difficult and can take a fair amount of time to learn to ride them extremely well (at least a few months of almost every day practice).
Despite this, they’re hands down one of the best pieces of equipment that you can buy that will assist with developing pedalling efficiency.
Why is pedalling efficiency so important?
Check out Kerrie Meare’s FREE video on ‘How to Ride Faster’ and you’ll learn just how important pedal efficiency is!
For those of you not familiar with the rollers and are thinking about giving it a try... we’d recommend you watch our athlete Yvette Waterfall’s homemade video on how she learnt to cycle on rollers.
Yvette is one of our Masters track riders and since learning to ride the rollers (and with a whole lot of training) has achieved gold medal podium performances on the track! You can watch her comical video here...
Hopefully you’ve found some inspiration from Yvette’s video on learning to ride the rollers!
But if you’re still a bit unsure, drop us a comment below, let us know your concerns and we’ll come back to you with some tips to get started.
If you’re already fairly proficient on the rollers, Congratulations! Make sure you incorporate rollers regularly into your training regime for the following reasons:
- Rollers will allow you to develop a smooth pedalling technique and efficiency without the ‘bounce’. This is because for the rollers to ‘roll’, they require the apparatus on top (bike + rider) to roll smoothly. If you bounce, the rollers won’t roll smoothly (or at all), and you will find it very difficult to stay on them and pedal consistently.
- The better you become at riding the rollers, the more opportunity you will have to participate in active recovery between training efforts or racing efforts. This can be achieved on a road bike as well, but sometimes it’s not convenient to take a road bike with you, and if you do, it can be hard to find an area to ride whilst staying close to the facility you’re training or competing at.
- They are brilliant for warm up purposes (and warm down too). You can use a road or track bike on the rollers, and as you develop the ability to ride them proficiently you will find that you can complete just about any effort you can think of making it possible to execute a full warm up on them. They will allow you to complete long aerobic warm ups, short sprints, resistance training efforts, resistance warm up efforts and so on.
If you haven’t yet purchased a set of rollers, we recommend Kreitler rollers - no, we don’t have any special sponsorships or deals with Krietler, we just highly recommend them as they’re quiet, smooth, and importantly easy to ride (not heavy on resistance or fatiguing).
Here’s a link to the Kreitler website where you can view / purchase these awesome rollers: http://www.kreitler.com/qxw1dcyiu7uxww712q95f6d7e5gnxr
Unless you’re planning on using your rollers for strength-endurance efforts, or efforts that require resistance (as you would with a mag trainer or ergo), we would encourage you to purchase a set of rollers that are extremely easy to ride with very little resistance.
Why?
Because this will allow you to neurally develop pedalling efficiency without acquiring too much fatigue.
We also like our athletes to use rollers for recovery purposes.
If the rollers naturally have higher levels of resistance (the rollers themselves are hard to turn over) then you won’t be able to effectively use them for recovery purposes.
Dont’ forget, to Tag and Share with your cycling friends!
If you have any questions about rollers please drop us a comment below and we look forward to helping you become a proficient roller rider!
