Wahoo Kickr trainer

Wahoo's Kickr power trainer offers a very smooth and realistic road feel, is simple to use and is compatible with an increasing number of apps that give you access to a huge virtual training world. But at £999 it's scarily expensive, an investment of serious proportions.

Pros & cons

Getting started

The Kickr is a direct-drive style trainer, which means you remove the wheel from the bicycle and mount the frame directly onto the trainer. The trainer comes fitted with a 10-speed Shimano cassette, and it's compatible with 10 and 11-speed cassettes and a Campagnolo freehub is available. That makes getting going a cinch.

An obvious benefit of the direct-drive approach is that there is no wear to the rear tyre. There's no more delay setting the bike up for a session than a regular turbo trainer.

The Kickr is a hefty lump, 21kg, which ensures that it is impressively stable. You can lunge and flail about as much as you like, the Kickr ain't budging. There's a useful handle to facilitate moving the trainer, and two legs fold away for storage.

It's easily adjustable to accommodate different wheel sizes. The feet are height adjustable too.

At its heart, the Kickr utilises an electromagnetic resistance unit with a built-in power meter, and Bluetooth 4.0 and ANT+ connectivity. It needs power, so you need to set up the Kickr near a power source. That provides some limitations; I couldn't set it up in my garage for lack of power so had to commandeer the spare room. Another is the inability to use it for warming up before races and time trials, unless you could bodge together a portable battery supply - rumour has it Team Sky use such a custom battery device for warming up and cooling down after races.

In use

A big appeal of the Kickr is its ANT+ and Bluetooth 4.0 connectivity, and the fact Wahoo have allowed third-party developers to produce compatible apps. There is a growing list of compatible apps such as Zwift and TrainerRoad, a feature which no other trainer can rival.

Wahoo's free Fitness app provides quite advanced control over the Kickr. You do need a compatible Bluetooth device (you can't control it from a Garmin at present) and my Samsung Note worked just fine. The app will pair any other devices, like a cadence or heart rate sensor, and track all your data on various screens.

The adjustable resistance is a big appeal of the Kickr. The Wahoo Fitness app gives you a choice of four modes for controlling the resistance - level, resistance, erg and sim - depending on the sort of training you want to do.

By far and away the most useful, and it's really the jewel in the gem of the Kickr, is the erg setting. Quite simply, you enter a power number, and all you have to do is pedal, the trainer provides the required resistance. Whack it up to 500 watts and see how long you can maintain the effort until you collapse.

This erg setting transformed my training sessions, providing a level of accuracy and consistency I had never achieved before. It's a mode that will appeal to anyone wanting to really maximise power training and ensures you can hit the desired power figures, providing you have the legs, every time you get on the thing.

The transition through the resistance levels is smooth and progressive giving you enough time to adapt to the change in tempo, and takes a couple of seconds to adjust after you change the power setting. One small blip I found is if you stop pedalling for whatever reason, that it then takes a huge effort to get going again, and the only solution is to reduce the resistance level right down.

Once a session is completed you can share it to a number of training websites to track and monitor your progress, including of course Strava. There's nothing to stop you using a Garmin or similar computer on your bike, using ANT+, to record all the data if you want from the Kickr and other sensors, but the app does it all anyway.

Wahoo have smartly made the Kickr open to third-party developers, and there's a growing number of compatible apps if the Wahoo Fitness app doesn't do enough. I personally found Fitness more than adequate for the largely interval based training I undertake on an indoor trainer, with more than enough control over resistance.

There's Wahoo's own Segments app (£22.99), allowing a simulated Strava segment to be ridden which, does sound interesting. After that, the list is pretty extensive, with the likes of TrainerRoad, Zwift, Kinomap, VeloTrainer, iMobile Intervals and more.

The Kickr provides a very realistic road feel, and the transition through the power levels is very smooth. It's also acceptably quiet, certainly enough that I could use it in the spare room and other people downstairs or in the next room weren't disturbed excessively by the racket. With a decibel meter on my smartphone and used during a regular training session, the highest recording was 78 dB with the phone on the desk a couple of feet away from the Kickr. Wahoo claim 70 dB, measured at 3ft and riding 250 watts at 10mph.

Conclusion

The Wahoo Fitness Kickr is a seriously impressive power trainer that is easy to use and offers exciting compatibility with a growing number of third-party apps like TrainerRoad and Zwift, and opens up the potential of the Kickr enormously.

If you want to train with power and think you do enough indoor training to justify the high outlay of the Kickr, you won't be disappointed with the level of performance it provides. While it's one of the most expensive trainers on the market, it is at least half the price of the Wattbike, and the Kickr is vastly more flexible.

If you can get past the price, you'll find a seriously feature-packed power trainer that has the potential to transform your training, and fitness.

Verdict

Impressive power trainer with exciting app connectivity, but it comes at a high price