If the pandemic wasn’t enough reason to take your cycling inside last spring, the cooler weather this fall will be. And while sweating up a storm in your basement after a glorious season of summer outdoor riding seems, well, kind of gross, there are still a lot of reasons to rejoice over the increasing sophistication of indoor trainers.
Take the fifth-generation Wahoo Kickr that debuted in early August. While it carries the same price tag and compact design as its previous iteration, the new Kickr offers impressive upgrades in calibration, accuracy, and especially connectivity—those who have ever been dropped on Zwift mid-ride (or mid-race) because of a bad connection will be psyched to learn that Wahoo’s new built-in Direct Connect port will forever eliminate that issue. We’ll get to that. But first, the basics.
Unlike the Kickr Smart Bike, the stand-alone indoor bike we reviewed earlier this year, this new Kickr is a trainer; you use your own bike, removing the back wheel and attaching your frame to the unit. Even though it seems relatively simple, setting up a trainer can be as time-consuming as waiting in line at the DMV. That’s why I budgeted an entire Saturday morning to do it. The process with the Kickr, however, was so intuitive that it took less than a half hour.
And that's despite a kink, which is that the Kickr comes out of the box with an 11-speed Shimano freehub body attached, but my “indoor” bike is my 10-year-old Specialized S-Works Amira, which is a 10-speed. Wahoo, however, thought of that variable and includes a spacer to make it compatible with 10-speed cassettes. You can also install 8- or 9-speed cassettes with spacers procured separately. For 12-speed systems, you’ll need to replace the freehub driver body.
Other intuitive features are prevalsent. Two easy-to-see LED indicator lights confirm the trainer is connected and transmitting the data it's collecting to your devices. The trainer can talk to both GPS devices (over ANT+) and smartphoness (over Bluetooth) simultaneously or separately. Five available, easy-to-adjust wheel-size settings make the Kickr compatible with the most common wheel sizes found on mountain bikes and road bikes: 24-inch/650c, 650B, 26-inch/700c, and 29ers. I also appreciated the built-in carrying handle.
Downloading the Wahoo app, filling out the requisite registration, and connecting it to platforms like Zwift and Strava was a five-minute process. Thirty minutes after unboxing the trainer, I was ready to ride.
One of the less desirable features of the former Kickr was the necessity of manually calibrating it by a spin-down procedure that measured the trainer’s drag and, therefore, power accuracy. The process was time-consuming for already time-crunched cyclists. To alleviate that, Wahoo developed a proprietary auto-calibration process that not only shaved minutes off the setup but also further refined power accuracy from within 2 percent to within 1 percent. This impressively reliable measurement not only gives you an accurate read of your own power output, it also ensures that it’s not being inflated—something that would surely anger the friends you'll be racing out there on the virtual roads.
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