Blackburn Designs
trainers white paper

Client: Blackburn Designs • Studio: RVMS • Art: Laura Rinaldi • Concept/Direction/Words: RV

This is the 12-page abstract (for the media) of a 30-page white paper (for engineers) and a 20-slide PowerPoint (for presentation). Big project, but I enjoy taking complex information and chunking it down to reach different audiences. Apparently the client liked the result, because they brought me back for three more projects like this one.

((Intro text—note image links to full PDF ))

Given the competitive nature of the bicycle trainer market—not to mention of cyclists themselves—it’s no wonder there would be a complex and often self-contradictory body of information in the field about which trainers perform better than others.

From a pure engineering viewpoint, it’s a complex and sophisticated topic involving some highly technical elements like the fluid mechanics of shear stress, magnetic eddy currents and Lenz’s Law, vacuum cavitation, impellor design, and optimized flywheel mass. But from the cyclist’s viewpoint—in terms of what you get out of the trainer once you climb on and start riding—everything boils down to a handful of critical elements that directly impact the trainer experience.

One of the problems facing cyclists is that the market is full of competing claims and counterclaims about what trainers are supposed to do, how they’re supposed to do it, and what they end up doing in the real world.

We applied standard engineering analyses and practices to the prevailing wisdom about trainer performance and arrived at some startling conclusions. (Specific protocols, math, and data analyses are all in the White Paper, but here’s the in-the-saddle reality.)