Most of us have a real love-hate relationship with our trainers. They are an exercise in futility: who wants to pedal his hardest for an hour just to go nowhere, alone, dripping in sweat, with this annoying droning in your ears? Yet they make us so strong.
Fortunately, more and more brands are finding ways of making it more entertaining, and BKool’s latest attempt at keeping you motivated is a definite upgrade from the first generation we tried. Here’s where they succeeded and where they’re still improving.
The BKool Pro Trainer retails around $700 and comes with the trainer, power adapter, riser block and compact ANT+ USB adapter. You can add ANT+ cadence and heart rate monitors as well. You then download their indoor riding simulator, pick your workout, add ghosts or bots to ride against and you’re off…
The trainer itself is plenty stable, attaches and detaches to your skewer easily and pairs with your computer easily. For a smart trainer, it’s fairly compact, but it can’t quite slide under a bed like a basic fluid or mag trainer might. You don’t adjust tension or resistance on the trainer itself, otherwise it couldn’t accurately deliver metrics such as power. As a result, your tire will occasionally slip if you come out of the saddle on a hard effort, but significantly less often than on the prior model and it was never really a problem. Another complaint we had about the original trainer was the noise. The Pro model is slightly improved, but it is still a mag trainer, so it can get loud on “downhill” sections.
The simulator offers an almost overwhelming number of options and is continually improving. For a while there it seemed I had to download a new version of the program every time I wanted to work out.
One nice way in which the program has improved is that when you open it up, it shows you a number of sessions currently being ridden by other riders which you can join. There is the option to lock these if you don’t want someone to join your session. Using tabs like this or favorites means you can jump on for a quick workout if you don’t want to take the time to select workouts from their website.
While the initial interface offers a lot of options and is more intuitive than previous iterations, it sill has a few oddities. For example, to go full screen you can’t just click the maximize option, you have to go through settings. Same thing if you want to use Spotify, which they’ve also embedded in the program, but I found it a lot easier to have music or videos in separate windows because of this.
You can really focus on your watts when you don’t have to pay attention to what’s in front of you, and I found myself spending a lot of time
focusing on this little box, which tells you your current slope, upcoming slope, and your progress through that slope. The transition between slopes is well done too. 
Rather than an abrupt change in resistance, you carry some of your momentum with you. You can anticipate your shifts and never really find yourself scrambling for the right gear. The slopes do, however, feel more dramatic than in real life. 12% grades often felt more like 20. There are some occasional glitches. For example, the cadence would show numbers like 120 rpm when I was probably doing 80, or when no cadence meter was on the bike. Also, during one workout the slopes were off and all of a sudden I could maintain over 500 watts, peak over 900, and blew everyone else out of the water. While it was really fun, it wasn’t accurate (sorry ego). This was a fluke occurrence and only happened once out of dozens of workouts, but judging by some of the times of other riders, (completing 14 miles in 17 minutes, for example) it has happened to others.
