How the Elite Square Smart Frame is reinventing indoor cycling at home

Elite is known primarily for two things: its fantastic range of accessories – such as its exquisitely manufactured bottle cages and innovative Fly range of water bottles – and its highly rated selection of indoor training options, from the most cutting-edge interactive smart trainers to tried-and-tested rollers.

However, the Italian brand has recently developed something a little different.

The Elite Square is a dedicated frame for home training that looks quite unlike any bike you have ever seen, and which offers functionality quite unlike possibly anything that came before it. 

> Find out more about the Elite Square and where to buy

From its huge range of bike fitting options – the Square can fit riders from 152-198 cm, with seven specific adjustment points, including crank length – to its compatibility with a massive selection of third-party trainers and software, and its ability to replicate any groupset either real or imagined, the Square brings a new level of utility to the indoor training market.

We spoke with Elite’s Mattia Gomiero to find out more about this breakthrough product. 

road.cc: Let’s start with the biggest question: with so many home training options available, why should people be interested in the Square?

Mattia Gomiero: We have been working on this product for two years. We have put a lot of effort into it, we think that it's a great product and there are a number of different reasons why cyclists should get one. 

The main reason is for cyclists who are tired of removing the back wheel from their own bike when they want to train indoors. Perhaps you store your bike in the garage but your pain cave is on the second floor. You’re fed up of removing the back wheel, carrying the frame upstairs, mounting the frame on the trainer, and then doing all that in reverse when you are finished. It’s a pain.

Or perhaps you share your one trainer with your partner. You both want to do indoor training sessions, but you have to keep removing and replacing each other’s frames depending who is using it. That can become annoying, too. 

But there are also other benefits. For example, in use, the Square is silent. It doesn’t have a cassette, it doesn’t even have a chain. The Square comes with a belt so it is completely quiet, completely clean, more durable and requires less maintenance compared to a bike with a chain.

And finally, you have all the ‘smartness’ offered by Square, with multiple buttons within easy reach of your fingertips on the hoods of the handlebar, offering various functionalities and enhancing your indoor cycling experience.

Some of those issues are solved by buying a smart bike, so why choose the Square?

Smart bikes are fantastic and the price has dropped a lot. But we thought, what about those people who already own a trainer – why should they have to buy a smart bike and sell their old trainer?

Two of the most important features of the Square is that it is what we call ‘App neutral’ and ‘Trainer neutral’. The Elite Square will work with any software and the latest models of almost any trainer that has ANT+ FE-C wireless communication. 

So this is for people who want a stationary bike, who already have a trainer but who don’t want to use their road frame, and who want to access a huge range of functionality without spending thousands of pounds or euros. 

Before we go deeper into its functionality, let’s talk about its appearance. The Square looks almost scientific – it reminds me very much of a bike fitting rig. Why did Elite decide to go with a square design rather than a triangle-based design?

We wanted to do something different and we thought: OK, why does a road bike have the shape it does? It’s to optimise the ride quality, it’s so people can ride faster, it’s the perfect shape for cycling outside. But when training inside, you don’t have to satisfy the same range of criteria.

And, you’re right, there has been a big interest from people who want to do bike fitting with the Square. This was absolutely not the target market we had in mind when we designed it – it was not our chosen final customer and we think the Square will appeal to a far broader range of cyclists – but it could be a product of interest for people involved in bike fitting.

On that note, then, tell us about all the parameters that can be adjusted on the Square?

There are seven areas of adjustment. 

If we start with the most obvious, you can raise and lower the saddle, you can adjust its tilt, and then you can set the saddle position forwards and backwards along a far longer range of movement than normally available using just a saddle’s rails. 

You can then also adjust top tube length and there’s another adjustment point to set handlebar height, and also the handlebar’s fore-aft position. 

Then we have something that is very exciting, which is five different crank length options: 165, 167.5, 170, 172.5 and 175 mm. That is something that seems to have been greatly appreciated by the people who have experienced the Square. 

This works via a cool one-hole ratcheting system that doesn’t require taking off the pedals and putting them back in a different hole in order to have a different length, like in the case of a claw crank solution. This is quick and easy.

I know the handlebar has normal gear shifters but there is also quite a selection of buttons. What can you do with all those?

Some of those buttons have been designed to future-proof the Square although they do offer some functions now, such as controlling our Aria smart fan. 

But the limit is the sky with these buttons in terms of what can be implemented by our team in the future, together with all the app developers out there, such as Zwift.

The Square’s ability to simulate almost any gearing set-up is also incredible. Tell us about all the groupsets it can imitate?

First of all, there are real shifters. We wanted to reproduce, as far as we could, the real shifting experience of a road bike. While the Square frame might be a creative departure from a traditional triangular frame, on the other side of the coin, we realised that the handlebar and the controls had to be as similar as possible to what people are used to.

We wanted to be able to offer riders an experience that is essentially identical to any groupset available in the real world, meaning we can replicate the entire experience of using a system that’s from Campagnolo, Shimano or SRAM. 

Then we wanted to be able to offer riders the experience of having any amount of chainrings, from single to triple with a choice of 22 to 60 teeth. And we wanted to offer riders the experience of having any cassette from 8 to 13 cogs with 9 to 52 teeth, matching any groupset on the market.

Riders can also set the levers like a sequential gearbox. And the levers can also be used to vary resistance when in stand-alone mode. Meaning you don't have to have a piece of software to be able to train on the Square.

And selection of gearing set-up is all done through the Elite App?

That’s right. To control all this, you simply download the Elite App and connect it to the Square. From that, you can set any type of groupset that you want or you can modify the set-up to create your own unique gearing options. 

The Square is an incredible piece of kit. How happy are you with the way it has come to market?

We know that cyclists are very demanding, so we know that our products have to be flawless. With the Square, have put a huge amount of research and development to make sure it’s not only the best product that we can make but that it is essentially perfect. Because of that, we think it has the potential to revolutionise many people’s indoor training experience.

To find out more about the Elite Square, visit Elite's website