Sadly, no. I haven't gotten that far into it as yet.
Can you offer some suggestions? Tnh, Ive never actually looked into it. I just got a trainer, got some sufferfest videos (some from a friend, some i bought) and just did 'em and tried to ride as hard as I could.
I usually take a few months off at the end of the season (october or so) and then hop back on the trainer in February. Couple of weeks of just easy spinning. Then mid-late Feb, start with the videos and work my way up to when I bring the bike outside the first time whence the snow and salt are gone.
You can certainly get a great workout using any trainer and workout video. Without active feedback though, you are limited to your own perception of how hard you are working. Even a low-cost speed sensor would make a huge difference.
A fluid trainer offers massive benefits over a magnetic trainer. Mag trainers have a linear power curve, which doesn't correlate with the exponential power curve one experiences in the real world. On top of that, unlike the real world, there is very little momentum you can carry on a mag trainer. Once you stop pedaling, the wheel comes to a very abrupt stop. In the real world you can coast for a few seconds and lose only a percentage of your kinetic energy in the wheel.
A real power meter is very expensive, but there are programs out there that have the measured power curve of a specific trainer built into the program. The program just needs to know the speed of the wheel and can translate that into "virtual power". The trainer I have came with a sensor and their own program, so the "virtual power" that it shows is very, very close to the actual power that I use. While the accuracy isn't necessarily the most important thing, since they support their own program, I don't have to pay $10/month for a 3rd party program that reads virtual power. Then again, Sufferfest has basically gone app only and most of the videos are available only with a subscription. I would definitely do that if I didn't have a trainer with its own free app and already own over half of their library (before they essentially went app-only).
In summary:
1. Kurt Kinetic "smart trainer", so you have an excellent trainer with a lifetime warranty and an app to avoid the $10/month charge. I personally like the Rock n Roll version, but the road machine would be fine.
2. If you don't already own a lot of Sufferfest videos, any "smart trainer" with the $10/month Sufferfest app.
3. Do both. Next winter I may subscribe for a few months to get access to workouts I haven't done yet. Over the summer, when I only use my trainer on bad weather days, I can use the free Kinetic app and whatever videos I already own.
