Did you know that you can use a cheap $25 bike computer to measure your average and current power output when using a Kurt Kinetic home trainer? This article discusses how.

As the Kurt Kinetic trainer is very linear in its power curve there is a calculation that converts mp/h to power. I have converted this to KM’s and the information is tabled below.

Fig 1. the Kurt Kinetic indoor trainer Power curve from the Kurt Kinetic website

Fig 2. The business end of the Kurt Kinetic trainer – The resistance unit.

What this means is that you can attach a cheap speedo to the rear wheel of your indoor cycle training setup and get average and current power. You can then convert the current and average speeds on your cheap speedo to a power value that will be around + /- 3% accurate using the formula and table below.

Then when doing your indoor cycle training workout by targeting average and current speeds of your interval pacing plan you can effectively start training with power!

But as most people now have Polar or Garmin cycle computers you can use these to measure speed while doing your training workout and convert it to power on the fly. You can also record each of your indoor cycle training workouts and by using the lap button you can mark off the intervals. Once you download your data you can analyse the average speed of your intervals and work out the average power of each of them. Then over time you can see your average speed (and your power) improve. Both the Polar CS600 and any Garmin cycle computer has enough wireless range to work on the rear wheel.

And… this is how we train with power on our remote coaching program with cyclists that don’t have a power on there bikes.


Fig 3. An example of the screen shot from the polar data. Once you have downloaded the data you can see that each interval is marked with a lap marker. You then read the average speed of each lap and convert this into the power figure.


Fig 4. An example of the screen shot from WKO+. Once you have downloaded the data you drag your mouse across the screen to mark out the interval and read the average speed. Then you can convert this into a power figure.

The formula for the Kurt Kinetic Home trainers is Power = (5.244820) * Speed + (0.01968) * Speed * Speed * Speed

Miles KM Power
1.0 1.6 5.3
2.0 3.2 10.6
3.0 4.8 16.3
4.0 6.4 22.2
5.0 8.0 28.7
6.0 9.7 35.7
7.0 11.3 43.5
8.0 12.9 52.0
9.0 14.5 61.6
10.0 16.1 72.1
11.0 17.7 83.9
12.0 19.3 96.9
13.0 20.9 111.4
14.0 22.5 127.4
15.0 24.1 145.1
16.0 25.7 164.5
17.0 27.4 185.8
18.0 29.0 209.2
19.0 30.6 234.6
20.0 32.2 262.3
21.0 33.8 292.4
22.0 35.4 324.9
23.0 37.0 360.1
24.0 38.6 397.9
25.0 40.2 438.6
26.0 41.8 482.3
27.0 43.5 529.0
28.0 45.1 578.9
29.0 46.7 632.1
30.0 48.3 688.7
31.0 49.9 748.9
32.0 51.5 812.7
33.0 53.1 880.3
34.0 54.7 951.8
35.0 56.3 1027.3
36.0 57.9 1107.0
37.0 59.5 1190.9
38.0 61.2 1279.2
39.0 62.8 1371.9
40.0 64.4 1469.3
41.0 66.0 1571.4
42.0 67.6 1678.3
43.0 69.2 1790.2