Does your speed in an indoor cycling app actually mean anything?
The Moveee team
Free coaching · a real route for every ride
You finish a 45-minute indoor ride, see 34 km/h average on the screen, and feel quietly pleased — that would be a good outdoor pace. Then a nagging thought: is that number real? Does it mean anything at all?
The honest answer is that it means something quite narrow, and it is worth knowing exactly what, because the number is easy to over-read in both directions. This matters most if you ride with a wheel speed sensor and no power, where speed is the only performance number you have — see riding indoors without a smart trainer for that setup.
What the number actually is
Your speed sensor counts how fast your rear wheel is turning and converts it to km/h using your tyre size. That is a real, physical measurement: your wheel really is going round that fast. In Moveee Indoor that speed is also what moves you along the route — the sensor's speed is the world's speed, directly.
So the number is an honest measurement of one thing: how fast your back wheel is spinning. Everything people want it to mean beyond that is where it gets slippery.
Why it is not your road speed
No air to push
Above about 25 km/h on the road, most of your effort goes into moving air. Indoors there is none, so the same speed costs far less — or the same effort gives a much higher speed.
Your resistance setting
A knob half a turn tighter changes your speed at the same effort. Nothing on screen knows you touched it.
How warm the trainer is
Fluid trainers get harder as the fluid heats. The same legs produce a lower speed at minute 40 than at minute 5.
Tyre pressure and roller tension
A softer tyre or a tighter roller both eat speed. Neither is fitness.
The first of those is the big one. On the road at 35 km/h, something like three quarters of your effort is spent shoving air out of the way. Take the air away and the same wheel speed is an entirely different job. This is why indoor speeds can look flattering, and also — on a hard-set trainer in a warm room — why they can look insultingly slow. Neither is news about your fitness.
The hill that does not slow you down
There is one behaviour that surprises every new speed-sensor rider, so it is worth saying plainly. In a speed-only setup, the route's gradient does not change your on-screen speed. A 9% ramp arrives, the scenery tilts up, and you carry on at 28 km/h.
That is not a bug; it is the direct consequence of there being no power figure. With a smart trainer, your watts go into a physics model that works out how fast those watts would carry you up that slope, and the trainer adds resistance to match. Without watts there is nothing to put into the model, so the app uses the only real measurement it has — your wheel speed.
The effort is still real, mind. It comes from your trainer's resistance and the gear you chose, and if you shift up when the hill appears you will feel every bit of it. What is missing is the automatic coupling between the picture and the effort, not the effort itself.
What indoor speed is genuinely good for
Comparing you to yourself, on the same setup. Same trainer, same resistance setting, same tyre and pressure, same warm-up length, same room: then a higher average speed at the same heart rate is real evidence of something improving. This is the entire useful case, and it is a decent one.
Pacing within a session. "Hold 32 for eight minutes, then spin easy for three" works perfectly well as an interval instruction, because you are comparing the number to itself twenty minutes ago, not to the world.
Keeping the route honest. Distance and time are real, so a 40 km route is 40 km of riding.
What it is not good for
Comparing yourself to other riders. Their trainer, tyre, pressure and resistance setting are all different. An indoor speed leaderboard measures equipment at least as much as legs.
Comparing to your outdoor rides. Different job, no air, no freewheeling, no descents. The two numbers happen to share a unit and that is all.
Tracking progress across a change of kit. New tyre, new trainer, moved the bike to a warmer room — the baseline moved with it, and any comparison across that line is meaningless.
The better number, when you have no watts
If you want one figure to steer by, make it heart rate rather than speed. Heart rate responds to your effort, not to your roller tension. It has its own quirks — it drifts upward through a long session, it sits high when you are tired or hot or caffeinated — but it is a measure of what your body is doing, which is what you actually want to know.
The practical approach is to use both: heart rate to choose the effort, speed to hold it steady minute to minute. That combination is how indoor training worked for decades before anyone had watts, and it is perfectly good. We set out the method in using your gears as the resistance dial.
And if none of this satisfies you — if you want a number that means the same thing in June as in January, on any trainer, in any room — then what you want is power, and that is a hardware answer rather than a settings one. We wrote about when that upgrade is worth making.
Sources 5
Where this article summarises a study, the study itself is linked — not a write-up of it.
- 1 Martin JC, Milliken DL, Cobb JE, McFadden KL, Coggan AR Validation of a Mathematical Model for Road Cycling Power · Journal of Applied Biomechanics · 1998
- 2 Debraux P, Grappe F, Manolova AV, Bertucci W Aerodynamic drag in cycling: methods of assessment · Sports Biomechanics · 2011
- 3 Grappe F, Candau R, Barbier B, Hoffman MD, Belli A, Rouillon JD Influence of tyre pressure and vertical load on coefficient of rolling resistance and simulated cycling performance · Ergonomics · 1999
- 4 Coyle EF, González-Alonso J Cardiovascular Drift During Prolonged Exercise: New Perspectives · Exercise and Sport Sciences Reviews · 2001
- 5 Cycling Speed and Cadence Service 1.0 · Bluetooth SIG · 2012
Your own roads, indoors, in a browser tab
Moveee Indoor pairs your smart trainer over Bluetooth and rebuilds a route you have saved as a 3D road — real gradients, ERG for the intervals, and the ride saved with full power data. Nothing to install. Free while it is in alpha.
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