IT'S COLD OUTSIDE...

Can you improve your cycling fitness in six weeks without leaving the house? Frank Bauer takes the Rouvy app for a spin to find out

- Frank Bauer

Now the weather is on the turn, the nights are getting darker, earlier, and motivation to brave the elements starts to wane, many of us look to indoor alternatives to keep our cardio fitness in tune.

There has been a huge growth in indoor cycling apps and one of the newest kids on the block is Rouvy, which positions itself as "the world's most realistic cycling app".

Other apps focus on 'gamifying' indoor cycling and creating a virtual world; Rouvy focuses on high-quality video and augmented reality to transport riders to real-world global locations.

I was invited to try out Rouvy for myself with a simple, if not easy, brief: complete 2 training sessions per week for 6 weeks and see if you can improve your cycling fitness. To help make sure that the sessions were as effective as possible, they were to be selected from the workout files of Lidl Trek, one of the world's best cycling teams, and the process was to be overseen by their Head of Performance, Mattias Reck.

To implement the training sessions, I used the cycling app Rouvy, which, with a home trainer and an internet connection, allows you to ride with others on thousands of courses curated from around the world using real life footage.

In addition, Rouvy provides the opportunity to race or ride virtual events, complete challenges, follow training plans, such as Lidl Trek's, or just execute a workout. Although I've used several other cycling apps over the years, I had never used Rouvy, but it's very easy to setup and I was up and running in minutes.

First things first