Everything you need to know about cycling computers

Alright guys, what's up? Welcome back. We're talking computers today. In front of me, we have, in chronological order, the computers I have used from when I first got into cycling all the way up until just a few months ago, the newest computer I'm using. We're going to break this video into two parts. I want to talk about each of these, the reason I upgraded, where you can spend money, where more importantly you should be saving your money, and I want to talk about each of the features that are important to me, that are important to racers, and why I made each one of these upgrade choices. In the second part of the video, I'm going to talk about the screens that I use when I'm just riding around, when I'm doing a proper interval session training, and then also when I'm racing. I'm also very particular and very specific on how I set up my screens, so let's just dive right into it. Okay, so right off the bat, there actually might be another computer all the way here at the end, which is your smartphone. I know a lot of people think, why even bother with a cycling computer? Why not just use my smartphone? Nowadays, most of the things that you connect to your cycling computer, your heart rate monitor, your power meter, your speed sensor, all of that is Bluetooth. Nowadays, it can connect to your smartphone, so why doesn't this one go here? Well, first of all, when I first started racing, Bluetooth wasn't ubiquitous with all of these sensors that you pair to your cycling computer, and also this is like a specific tool, which isn't meant to be sitting on the front of your bike all day in the sun, screen on, maybe it starts raining, maybe you start sweating on it, so not really a good decision if you're serious about riding, serious about training, serious about racing. So, what was my first computer? Well, it was this little dinky guy here, which I think really sets the bar for where I'm at with cycling computers. My general mentality is perfectly illustrated by this little guy right here. This is the Edge 25 by Garmin, and I mean, look at how ridiculous this thing is. It's like my wristwatch, right? It's incredibly small, so the obvious shortcoming is the screen is tiny, but more importantly, it did not support power meter integration. So, as soon as I got a power meter, in fact, I think even before that, this one bit the dust. It was fun, it was novel, but Edge 25 went away, and that brought us to this hand-me-down computer that I got from a former teammate. This is the Edge 510, also by Garmin. This is a great computer. I will say that we are already entering the good enough territory. It's very dated now. The screen is kind of small. It's a little bit chunky, you can see, but unfortunately for me, it just bit the dust. Like I said, it was a hand-me-down. Eventually, it just stopped turning on. I think the battery died on the inside. So, around that same time, I went back to kind of this small form factor. I didn't learn my lesson with this guy over here. It's not quite as small, but you guys might remember seeing this because by the time I started using the Edge 130+, I was making YouTube videos. So, I got a lot of comments on this computer. I think this is a great computer. It's not for everybody. It has a small screen, so it kind of has the same shortcoming as this guy. If you run a lot of screens, which you're going to talk about in the second part of this video, this might not be the option for you, but it connects to all the peripherals. It does everything you want it to do. It's small. It's light. It's not particularly thin, but around that same time, Stages, they started sponsoring this channel. We had a couple of videos we made together, and they don't make good bike computers. Sorry, Stages. Nothing against you guys. You guys make great power meters. You guys make a great stationary bike, which is just right there in my garage. But cycling computers, nah, this ain't it. First of all, look how big this thing is. It's enormous. The battery life wasn't fantastic. It always kind of glitched out. It just wasn't a great experience for me. So, sorry, Stages. I moved on from that, and this one's beat up. We're going to talk about that. Oh, this thing's heavy. This is the Hammerhead Karoo 2. This is a computer that they gave to me, and they said, hey, saw that you have a little bit of a following on YouTube. Would you like to try out our computer? No strings attached. I was like, duh. The answer is yes. And I was excited about this. Legion uses this computer. But again, just like the Stages L200, I mean, look at this thing. Like, we're getting into phone territory now, just in terms of weight and size. It's just enormous. This thing is so feature-packed. There's almost too much going on with this computer that I just don't use. And we're going to talk more about that when I get into the screens that I set up and kind of my use case for a cycling computer. There is just too much going on here. And like I said, it's huge, and it's heavy. In fact, it's so heavy that these little Garmin quarter turn ears broke off. I wasn't doing anything spectacular. I was just a little bit of a bumpy descent, and the hammerhead went flying. And as a result, that was it. That was it for the hammerhead. But honestly, it's just too big and too heavy. So a lot of great features in here. It does everything I want and more, but there was just too much going on. This runs like Linux, too. It's like a small computer, just way overkill for what I do. Next up was Performance Bike sponsoring. After they saw this happen, they sponsored what I think is a fantastic computer. I mean, Garmin does a really good job. This happens to be the Edge 540 Solar, which I specifically asked for the non-touch version. Oh, I should mention, this hammerhead computer is also touchscreen, which I do not like. I do not... I turn that feature off on these computers that have touch. Because the problem is it rains, or you sweat, and it thinks you're touching the screen when you're not. So it's a feature I don't want. I specifically got this 540 Solar without the touch functionality. And as the name suggests, it's solar powered, which is kind of cool. It gets you a little bit of extra battery life. It's a little bit on the smaller side. It has a relatively large screen. Again, it has way more features than I'm ever going to use, just like the hammerhead. But I think this is a great product. The only problem with this is the price. This is expensive. I'll list all the prices for all of these either on the screen or down in the description. I don't know them offhand, but this is an expensive computer. And that is why when Trim reached out and sent me their new One Light to talk about on this channel, I was kind of excited because, you know, at first, I was like, I have everything I need in the Garmin. But then I started reading the spec sheet on this thing. And first of all, it's cheap. I think it's $200, maybe even less. And according to what I read online, it does everything I want and nothing more. So it doesn't have all of the features of the Karoo or the Garmin 540, but it has everything I need, nothing more. And look at this little thing. It's like a little smartphone. It's like, look how thin it is compared to even the Garmin. Much thinner, especially compared to these other guys. I mean, look at that. It's night and day. If you're a weight weenie, it is incredibly light. In fact, let's wait. All right. We're getting fancy over here at NorCal Cycling. 138 grams for the Hammerhead Karoo 2 with a little bit of glass missing from the screen compared to less than half the weight. So if you're a weight weenie, there's a lot of savings right there. But here's the thing is you get all of that screen real estate. You get all of the battery life. In fact, I think this much smaller and lighter Trim 1 Lite, in fact, has more battery life than these bigger computers. And that is why for me, this is the final form. This is like peak evolution of cycling computer. There are a couple of other quirks that it has. It has a proprietary charge, which at first I was kind of bummed about. But it's like kind of convenient. Here it is just right next to my desk. It's just kind of convenient because it just snaps in. So I would say don't lose the proprietary charger. But it is convenient because it's like MagSafe, right? Like you just yank it out. So it's kind of cool. It comes with a solar unit. So the solar isn't built behind the screen like Garmin, but it has solar functionality in the box. No tether, but it's really light. So I'm not actually worried about no tether. I'm not worried about it bouncing off the bike like this one did. And the last thing I'll say is it just turns on, which is kind of cool. If you're always stretched for time like me, I mean, you push the button and bam, it's on. Push the off button, it's off. It's like incredibly simple, you guys. So let's dive into part two of this video. Let's talk about the specific screens that I use. All right, so let's talk about my screen setup here. We're going to turn this thing on, trim one light, bam. We're in that quick. So here is my main screen if I'm just out training. Three second power. Why three seconds? Well, you want there to be a little bit of smoothing going on because if it's just one second power, it's very jarring the way it's bouncing around. Anybody with a power meter knows what I'm talking about. So that's up here. Now we have instantaneous heart rate in this section right here. Just to kind of know where I'm at, we talk about training, we talk about decoupling. That's an important metric to look at. Cadence, it's kind of nice to have. I do a little bit of big gear work, especially this time of year, the base season, to get that leg strength going. Elapsed time, how long has my ride been since I've started? And then distance, another just kind of nice to know. Speed, another nice to know. These bottom two are big ones for me. This is normalized power, NP, and TSS. Normalized power, without launching into a long discussion about how that's calculated, normalized power is like, it can be similar to your average power, but it takes into account all of those spikes. So if you were to go out and do a really hard crit with a bunch of spikes in power, your average power might be really kind of low, but your normalized power is going to be very high because normalized power strives to describe how taxing is this workout. So that's an important metric that's going to guide your training, as well as TSS. This is another metric that aims to just kind of give you a snapshot of how difficult was this workout? How does it fit into your overall training plan? This is something that's really important in the Couch to Crit Masterclass, and this is a big driver for a lot of how I built the training plans that are inside of the Masterclass. So that's my main, just go out doing like a base endurance ride, for example. But if you're doing intervals, that's what this second page is for. So press this middle button, we go to the next page. This is my interval page. So I will flip over to this page. We have three second power on top, the most important training metric still right there. Now, average power with a little stopwatch next to it. And that means as soon as I press the lap button, which by the way, this button becomes the lap button once you start the ride. Lap, average power. If I prescribe to you a workout that is, it's trying to go to sleep on us. If I prescribe to you a workout that calls for 15 minutes at 85% FTP, you are going to make sure that this number under your average power hits that mark. Heart rate, same as before, this isn't a lap heart rate or anything like that. This is just what's your heart doing at that moment in time. And then of course, lap time. So the aforementioned 15 minute at 90% or whatever I said it was, this is going to be one that you're staring at when you're close to the end of some of those really hard workouts that I prescribe. And then cadence, that's just kind of nice to know because I've had a lot of athletes in the past who will, generally newer athletes go way too low in cadence. And I try to urge my riders to try to be in between kind of 80 to 90 cadence, if not even higher, because it's going to be really important when it comes to crit racing for reasons that are outside the scope of this video. Let's go on to the next page. This is my race day page. Three second power on top. You're seeing a trend here, right? This is the most important thing. It's first and foremost, it's right on the top, three second power. We have heart rate and we have lap time. The reason this is my race page is I want to know what power I'm doing. I want to know what my heart rate's doing. And I hit lap right when they blow the whistle. So if it's a 60 minute crit, I know about how much longer there is to go in the race. Now, really the time is the most important thing here. Guys, if you're racing, don't look at your computer. In fact, I urge some of my newer athletes, especially start the computer, have it log all your data. That's important, but then take the thing off and put it in your pocket and don't look at it because it'll drive people crazy. The reason I sometimes look at it is especially heart rate is because if you get into that early breakaway in a crit and you're super excited and you're going for it, you want to make sure that you're not going too crazy. You can look at your power and your heart rate and make sure that you're doing something that is in fact sustainable. Now, one gripe with the Trim 1 Lite is I only actually want these three metrics on this race page. Unfortunately, you have to get a map included with that too. So this is something that is easily solvable if Trim is listening to this. Give us an option to remove this map. I actually don't want the map on this page. And they may have already solved this actually with the Trim 2, which of course is the successor to this Trim 1. And they're telling me it's set to be released in May. So check back, I'll pin a comment or something about that. But in any case, those are my three setups I use across all of these computers. It's the same. This is what I've developed over the years. And this is my favorite system. If I press this lap button again, we just go right back to the start. All right. So that's all I got for today. If there is something about computers that I missed, there probably is, drop a comment down below. I read all them. I'll respond to it. And if there's another topic out there you guys are interested in, feel free to let me know. I love making these. So thanks for hanging in there. If you've made it this far, I appreciate you guys. And I'll catch you in the next one.