Outdoor Power Indoor

Total Access. Why is there a difference between the power you can put into the pedals outdoors than the power indoors? The difference between indoor cycling power and outdoor power tends to be more pronounced with shorter, higher-intensity efforts, especially when you're out of the saddle. The reason why comes down to a few different factors.

Short answer, yes. If you try to take your indoor power zones outside or vice versa without being aware of your individual difference, your workouts can become either impossibly difficult or wastefully easy, neither of which is ideal.

If you try to take your indoor cycling power zones outside or vice versa without knowing the difference, your workouts will be either impossibly difficult or wastefully easy, neither ideal.

There's another, more basic reason for why you can generate more power outside: Heat. Riding outside provides the benefit (usually) of a nice, steady flow of cooling air. Not so inside. As the duration of an effort increases, overheating starts to limit how effectively your body can produce power.

Another reason why indoor training is more strenuous than outdoor training is that the athlete hardly varies his or her sitting position on the bike (trainer). Here's some physics: “Newton's third law of motion states that when a force is applied, there is always a counterforce acting in the opposite direction.

Although modern smart trainers do simulate the kinetic energy of riding outdoors quite well, athletes still need to apply a slightly more constant push and pull phase over the whole pedal rotation to keep the crank accelerated – compared to riding on the road. All these factors explain why riding indoors is so much more strenuous than outdoors.