Episode 1774 - Front or rear mount trainer: which one is right for me?

The #PTonICE Daily Show

Dr. Matt Koester // #FitnessAthleteFriday // www.ptonice.com

In today's episode of the PT on ICE Daily Show, Endurance Athlete faculty member Matt Koester discusses the differences between front and rear mount bike trainers, which is preferred for different bike types, as well as budget options.

Take a listen to the episode or check out the full show notes on our blog at www.ptonice.com/blog

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EPISODE TRANSCRIPTION

MATT KOESTERWhat's up everybody? Good morning and welcome to another episode of the PT on ICE Daily Show. Today I'm going to be your host. I'm Dr. Matthew Koester. I'm one of the lead faculty in the endurance athlete division with a specialty in bike fitting. I am super stoked to hop on here today and talk about probably the most popular question that we get in every live course and one of the most important things when you're getting into fitting for the first time as far as equipment goes. But before we dive into those topics, I want to talk about the opportunities that y'all are going to have to come and find us on the road. with number one being in Denver next weekend. We've only got four seats available for that course, so if you're interested in popping in, it's gonna be in South Denver in the Denver Tech Center area. We are really, really stoked to be heading out there soon, but if that's not gonna work out for you, we have another option, which is gonna be in Bellingham, Washington again, because the last time we were out there, it was completely sold out, the wait list was filling up, and we decided we'd run it back and set up a second course in Bellingham, Washington later this fall. There's gonna be another opportunity as well to see Jason London, who's the original content creator for this course, which is an absolute opportunity in Park City. That's a really cool location. We're gonna be out there in October as well for that course. So if you're looking to get a jump on some of this education and use this stuff in the clinic, the live course is the best way to get through it. So by all means, come find us on the road and check out one of those course options. Now, I said I was gonna talk about probably the biggest question in the course. The biggest one is really the thing that gets you into this. And it's what type of trainer do I need? We have two options in most cases. So to my left and behind me here, we have a front mount trainer, which offers a whole lot of options as far as what bikes can go on. And then we have the tried and true rear mount trainer. And what I want to do today is talk about probably like the biggest pros and cons of each. I want to talk about which one is probably the most appropriate for you and your clinic, depending on what type of bikes you're typically seeing. And then the ones that kind of have, I'd say, more budgetary constraints and or are just limited in availability sometimes. So, to start off first, I want to talk about the rear mount trainer because that is the one that is tried and true. That is going to be, in most cases for us, this green guy here. This is the Curt Kinetic trainer. Now, if I slide that thing forward, You'll see we've got the rear roller, which is basically what compresses the tire and allows you to kind of go through resistance while you're pedaling. You've got this rear cup that basically compresses the back axle of the bike and allows you to keep the bike nice and steady. And then we typically put something underneath the front wheel. Sometimes it's a custom wheel block. Sometimes it's an adjustable wheel block that allows you to lift that thing up and down and change the positions. But with this trainer, one of the things that people really, really love about it is that it's been around forever. They're used to it. When somebody comes into your clinic for a bike fit and they see something like this, they're like, ah, I know what this is. This makes perfect sense to me. I even brought my training skewer, which is typically the axle that they have to replace in the back of the bike if they're going to get on this bike. Because these metal cups here that compress the rear axle when they're tightened up are gonna basically act to lock the bike in place only on the contact points they get to touch. So if those contact points are plastic, which is pretty common as a way to save weight, save money on a bike, you have to replace that either with a training skewer, which just has metal cups on the sides, or in many cases nowadays with how bikes have gotten, these new through axle skewers. So the through axle skewer is typically a lot thicker, it's a lot more robust. It's common on bikes that allows them to put disc brakes on the bikes, which is really more and more ubiquitous these days. So having these options for different through axle skewers allows you to put metal on metal and compress it in the rear end of the trainer. Now depending on what types of bikes or what brands of bikes you're seeing more in the clinic, the skewers that you're going to need are going to change. So they all have various thread types that go on them. Some are very fine, some are medium, some are coarse. Now the Other kicker to this is that even though you might have the thread type dialed in, the distance, so the width of the actual screw itself might change. Last time I checked on the Kirk Kinetic website, which is the name brand for these guys, they had somewhere between, I think, five different options. I think it was like five different ones, three that were the different thread types, and then two more that were XLs for different distances. And each one was running about 50 bucks. So there's a bit of a financial investment to have all the options so that folks can come to see you and have all the options available to them. If you don't have one of these available to you and their bike doesn't have that, you're going to be kind of stuck in a place where you don't have an option with this style of rear mount trainer to throw them on and do the fit appropriately. That could be a bummer. got to have all the pieces. I'll say there's one other option out there, or not one, but two other like styles of these that are completely adjustable. CycleOps makes one, and I'm forgetting the other brand right now, but they basically have plugs and things that you can change in and out to put on. In my experience, they can be a little challenging to work with. They don't always match up exactly the way that I want them to distance wise. I like the tried and true nature of these ones from Kure Kinetic, but if you're in a bind, and you can only afford to grab like one adjustable through axle, I think you can figure it out. You just have to spend more time with it and go through the trials and tribulations of working through it. So, to recap real quick. This guy, tried and true, everybody knows it, everybody's used to it. It's a trainer they spend their entire winter on. The adjustability in terms of having different through axles is definitely a key. You gotta have them, especially nowadays as bikes have gotten more and more modern, going to disc brakes. These through axles are just like almost a non-negotiable So you gotta have all the different types so you can match the different brands and the different bikes that they come in. So, tried and true. Now, we step into one thing that Jason and I have been seeing over probably the last few years that's really become more popular is this front mount trainer. It really started to make its way in probably like a couple years ago in staging areas or like warm up areas for cross country cycling and downhill cycling. Specifically in downhill cycling, you'll see these guys everywhere when it comes to just getting through warmups. What this guy has to offer is two pieces that basically slide together. These two pieces include the front end triangle here, which allows me to remove and add the front fork of the bike. So we take the front wheel off, slide the forks over top of this guy, and snug it up nice and tight. The next piece from there is the rear rollers, where we have to get the tires centered in the rollers so they can smoothly pass back and forth as it's rolling. Cool part about this, they only have one adjustable piece as far as the actual front axle goes. So, and they send it with them. So when you buy this piece, you have everything that you need in order to do the fit. You can put any bike on here, because the front mount options will work for a standard fork, so they'll work for through axles. You can often put their own through axle back into the same bike. When you're talking about the distances here, there's a little track here that allows you to work with different size bikes so that when you overcome that issue, you can even separate them or buy the extenders. It just has to get, you have to make sure they're nice and perfectly aligned. Otherwise the back wheel might want to roll off one side or the other as you get started. So the rear trainer here offers a whole lot of options for being able to just throw a bike on quick. Now, the challenge that comes with that, as you start to get into like, oh, this thing works for everything, is that it kind of has that jack of all trades where it's not quite really any good at one thing. The challenge behind this thing is that it's not near as stable. It kind of sacrifices the stability and the tried and true nature of the rear mount for something that can be a little bit tippy if your patient or client gets on it and you're not paying attention. If they just throw a leg over it, it can kind of pull the weight with it, I'll say I've never had anybody fall off one. I've never had an actual incident, but I can definitely tell you that when I am with a client in the clinic and we're setting up to do a bike fit, I talk to them about getting on and off the bike carefully. I talk to them about how, like, when they're going to transition on, I'm going to grab ahold of the bars just to create that element of stability. But then even once they're up and on, an experienced rider, so I would say a good example of this would be a triathlon athlete. So somebody who's in the Madison area for me, who's doing Ironman Wisconsin and is coming in for a fit, If I throw them on this guy, it will work, and it will be fast to throw it on, but it lacks some of the stability and control that they're used to having when they're on the rear mount trainer that they spend all their time on. So they might hop on this, and they might notice that they just don't feel as confident. They don't feel as great. So they're more thinking about the experience of being on the trainer than they actually are thinking about the fit as they're going through it, which can be a negative. Okay. So there's the negatives to it, and there's the positives to it. From a financial standpoint here, if you were in a clinic where you were going to have to buy things new, and I'm going to kind of make that a subject for a moment, you can't just go on Facebook Marketplace and buy new stuff and throw it in at your organization. This guy's going to run you somewhere between $400 to $500, but it's kind of that jack of all trades. You can put anything on it. There's no bike you need. There's no custom pieces that you have to go through. You can just get any bike on here. The rear mount trainer, gonna be a similar ballpark. In many cases, it'd be like 250 to 450, depending on how nice you go, you can certainly spend more. It's gonna be limited in some ways because you're gonna have to have all of the different through axles to accommodate any different bike that walks in the clinic, but you're gonna have that stability and just steadiness that people really rely on and like when they're riding a trainer at home. So it's familiar, so that's kind of a nice option. If we take a step away from the idea of having to buy new, and you're like, okay, I'm going to budget my way through this in my clinic. And I know that if I buy something used, I can just make sure that it's good quality and it's broken. We started to get changed the tone here a little bit. These are harder to find use, but they are definitely. Hmm. They're harder to find used, you can get a hold of them, but they definitely have deals all the time on new ones. So you can find the ballpark, if you go on Amazon or various websites, you can get anywhere between that $400 to $500 mark. And this is where I would spend the bulk of the money, because you're going to have almost no scenarios in which you can't get the person's bike on the trainer. That is going to get you through more fits, even if it's a little bit less ideal of a setup. On the flip side, if I've invested in this one right here and I've got the money spent, I'm probably going to start looking at Facebook Marketplace because these guys are a dime a dozen. There were so many folks during COVID that were buying up bike trainers and they were going to spend more time on them at home. We saw the same thing with Pelotons and indoor bikes. These things are on Facebook Marketplace, Craigslist if you still go down that rabbit hole. They're everywhere for sometimes like under 100 bucks, maybe 50 bucks sometimes. And then from there, most of your investment on this guy goes towards the actual, through actual skewers that allow you to get all the bikes on. So your investments kind of change a little bit as you go through this. This guy's going to be the most money up front. This guy's definitely going to be cheaper as you go through it. But you got to get more components, more pieces. If I only had one in the clinic, which is kind of the question that people boil it down to, if I only had one, it would be the front mount trainer. and that comes with one more layer to it. I love the ability for a private practice or a clinic to be able to get out in the community and showcase the things that we do on a high level. If I want to go out to our local high schools here and go talk with them about mountain bike fits and making sure they get the best performance, injury rate reduction, all of those things, I can pop out to the local high school on one of their opening practices, which is actually coming up in a few weeks. I can throw up the front mount trainer, and in a very short time, take out their front wheel, put that thing right over top of this guy, pull the back up, and go right through things like seat height, have a quick look at their reach. I can make adjustments to small things on the bike very fast and make quick transitions to the next bike and not have to fiddle around with various components and other changes. So the, not only in the clinic does this kind of become the absolute jack of all trades, getting it on, It also makes some of those like community events that much more approachable and that much easier to go through. So I am always going to lean on this guy, but I will tell you it's nice having both for that occasion when somebody comes in and I'm like, Ooh, I really want the stability of the rear mount trainer for this person to throw it on. But I would say nowadays as I've gotten more and more comfortable with this, those things are few and far between. There are a few more nuances that would definitely go into this. There's more questions that surround them about the live courses. but deciding between which one is right for you. Hopefully this is a helpful conversation, a helpful talk to get you through that decision. Feel free to drop a comment, ask us questions here, send me a DM, but we will be in Denver next weekend. If you're ready to join us, we'll talk this stuff through even more. Thanks, y'all.

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