Will it Zwift? Your worst bike is now good enough for serious indoor training!

If you want to enjoy the full immersive experience of Zwift, with the app controlling the resistance of your trainer, then until last winter you basically had two options: Fork out for a smart bike, or get yourself a smart trainer and use your outdoor bike on that.

Both of these come with their issues: a smart bike is a significant investment; using your nice bike indoors exposes it to wear. And, more importantly, sweat, which when left unchecked can do some serious damage. 

Now there’s a third option: the Zwift Cog. Essentially it turns your bike into a singlespeed, and the shifting is all handled virtually in-game; The Zwift Cog comes with a Click controller which you attach to your bars to change gear. With virtual shifting it’s much less important what the bike is and how the gears work, because the shifting experience is all handled by Zwift: just attach your bike, move the derailleur into line and you’re ready to go. The new version of the Zwift cog includes a micro-adjustment ratchet to tweak the chainline to get things running perfectly. So in theory you could put any old beater on your turbo and get basically the same experience, and sweat all over that instead of your Sunday bike.

See the Zwift Cog at Zwift.com

That’s the theory… but is it a good theory? To test it we’ve lined up four frames to offer up to our testbed trainer, a Wahoo KICKR CORE Zwift One. The KICKR CORE Zwift One is one of the trainers in Zwift’s expanding ‘Zwift ready’ range of hardware that’s setup ready to go in the game, and at £449.99 (or £579.99 with a year’s membership of Zwift) it’s a great value option if you want to commit to getting fitter and faster over the winter. 

Browse Zwift Ready trainers at Zwift.com

Let’s look at our bikes in a kind of most-to-least appropriate kind of order.

Made for the job: the Zwift Ride Smart Frame

First up, this: the Zwift Ride Smart Frame. This frame is designed for exactly this job; in fact you can buy the Ride frame and the KICKR CORE together for £1,199 as a full smart bike setup, easily undercutting any of the other options out there. The frame is fully adjustable, and you can set up everything on the bike with the included Zwift Frame Key (a 6mm fallen key), which handily tucks away underneath the top tube. That makes it easy for multiple riders in your household to use the same setup, and it means you can play around with your position to get the best out of your time indoors.

Zwift Ride Smart Frame: Use code ROADCCZ10 for 10% off!

Unsurprisingly setting this frame up is hardly a chore: put the chain in its storage channel on the dropout, sit the bike on the trainer, tighten up the through axle and drop the chain onto the Zwift Cog and you’re ready to go. In Zwift you get virtual shifting, of course, but the integrated bar controls give you access to steering and braking too, and all the other game controls are accessible via the two keypads. It’s a full setup designed by Zwift, for Zwift, and as such it’s pretty hard to beat. If you’re serious about Zwifting, then it has to be top of your list.

Ease of setup: 10
Ride experience: 9

> How to get started on Zwift

The ex-racer: Merida Scultura 4000

Next up, this: my old outdoor race bike, a Merida Scultura 4000. It’s been a while since I’ve graced the back of the third cats; now I tend to race indoors, where if I get dropped I can pretend my internet went down and skulk off. It’s still a very decent bike, but it’s done some miles now and some of the bits aren’t working quite as well as they once did, in particular the right hand shifter which is kind of a pain outdoors: the cover is loose and it slips and fouls the mechanism, and then it won’t shift down the block. You can see I’ve tried to remedy this with some insulating tape, which works, mostly.

Anyway that’s not a problem here: So long as i can get the chain in roughly the right place the Zwift Click is going to be taking care of all that. The Merida has quick release wheels, but a simple swap of the axle bits on the KICKR CORE is all that’s needed to accommodate the frame. It’s a simple enough job to get everything ready to ride.

And the in-game experience? Well, this is a bike I’ve spent a long time aboard, and I’ve spent a lot of time tweaking the position, so unsurprisingly it fits me well. It’s still setup as a race bike – slammed, with a long stem – and as such isn’t quite the position I’d choose for indoor training: I prefer to be a bit more upright, it’s not like you need the aero gains! But the drivetrain is in good nick, everything feels smooth and quiet, and the virtual shifting works really well.  It’s no surprise that a good bike is a good option.

Ease of setup: 8
Ride experience: 8

The elder statesman: Peugeot Competition 300

This Peugeot is a bike from a time before STI shifters, and disc brakes, and, it would seem, decent bar tape. The Shimano Exage 500EX groupset dates it to maybe 1989 or 1990, so it’s been around a while. It’s still recognisably a road bike though, and if Zwift’s claims about the Zwift Cog hold true then none of that should make much difference to the experience.

The Peugeot has a rear wheel that’s a bit narrower – 130mm, as opposed to the 135mm of the Merida – but it’s not a problem for the KICKR CORE Zwift One: just turn one of the axle ends round and you’re ready to go. In all honesty fitting this bike was no harder than fitting the Merida: tighten up the quick release and get the chain in line – and give it a quick lube – and it’s ready to ride. The smaller frame on this bike is a bit more aggressive in terms of geometry than my race bike, so I added a riser block to lift the front end a bit.

This is the setup where the Zwift Cog really comes into its own. Let’s face it: downtube shifters got superseded for a reason. They’re not fun to use. But the only time you need to use them here is to shift into the middle of the range to line up the derailleur with the Zwift Cog, and from that point on you’re getting shifting that’s exactly the same as the more expensive setups here. Okay, the Click shifter isn’t as nice ergonomically as the Zwift Ride’s dedicated controls, but you could pick up a bike like this for next to nothing, and sweat all over it all winter long, and never have to worry about your good bike until it’s jersey weather again. You could upgrade the Click shifter to a set of Zwift Play controllers – at the moment you get a free set with every trainer on Zwift – and get all the other game controls too.

Ease of setup: 8
Ride experience: 7

The wild card: a Dahon folder

Lastly, this. A Dahon folder from some time last century, that’s been badly treated by the looks of things. To be fair, it’s almost certainly not as old as the Peugeot, but it feels like those years have been harder fought. Realistically, you wouldn’t put this on your trainer. But could you?

Well, yes, it turns out that you could. The axle spacing is 130mm, same as the Peugeot, and although the rear wheel is a bolt-on axle and the dropouts are rear-facing slots, they’re the right size for the KICKR CORE’s quick release adapters and you can muscle everything into place with a bit of effort. I think we can all agree that mudguards on a turbo is a strong look. Small wheels mean that a couple of lengths of 2x4 are needed at the front to level everything up.

Once it’s set up, though, and the chain is lined up and lubed, you can absolutely ride this folder on Zwift, and the virtual shifting works just fine. You’re not going to want to be contesting any sprints on it. But on the plus side: if you’re cramped for space for training this setup will pack down nice and small…

Ease of setup: 5
Ride experience: 5

The numbers: does it matter what you ride?

So, as we’ve seen: with Zwift Cog and Click you really can Zwift on pretty much anything. You might not choose a folding bike as your permanent setup, but is there any disadvantage in using an older frame? My main take-home from riding all these bikes on the Wahoo KICKR CORE Zwift One was that in terms of shifting, there isn’t: The shift experience of the three non-dedicated frames – even the folding bike – is basically the same. But are you losing any precious watts?

To find out we added a set of power pedals to each bike, and did a simple 5-minute power benchmarking workout on each setup, recording the power from the pedals and the trainer independently. Then we compared the numbers! Here are the results:

As you can see, the Zwift Ride Frame, Merida and Peugeot performed basically the same: one watt either way is a discrepancy easily swallowed up by the tolerances of the trainer and the power pedals. The Peugeot’s chain might have looked a bit rusty but actually it was running smoothly, and a bit of oil was all it really needed. The Dahon folder lagged behind a bit: the chain on that bike was in more of a state, with some stiff links, and the rear derailleur was a bit gummed up. But all the losses you can see would probably have been mitigated by nothing more than a good clean, or maybe a new chain. So whatever you find to stick on your trainer, so long as the transmission is in good order you’ll get an efficient setup, with the same shifting feel.

So, what have we learnt?

Is your worst bike good enough for Zwift? Well, in the end that’ll depend on how bad your worst bike is, and what it is. But the real take home from all this fun is that the Zwift Cog really does democratise the shifting across a wide range of bikes. If you have, or can find, an old bike that fits you well, then as long as it has a decently-maintained drivetrain it’s not going to feel significantly different on a Zwift Ready trainer than your posh race bike and you can sweat all over it to your heart’s content. There’s no doubt that if you’re serious about training indoors, the Zwift Ride Smart frame is a great investment for a dedicated setup. But with virtual shifting working so well with so many bikes, there’s never been a better time to get Zwifting.

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