Indoor rides

Indoor riding is fully supported. Turbo, smart trainer, Zwift, spin bike with a power meter: if the ride is on Strava, or you’ve got the .fit file, Cycladat will put power, heart rate, cadence and speed on your video the same as it does outdoors.

The one thing that goes wrong

You set the phone up on the tripod, hit record, then get on the bike, and start the ride on your head unit or in Zwift a minute later. Perfectly sensible. Cycladat won’t match it.

The app looks for a ride that was already in progress when the video started. A recording that began before the ride did falls outside every ride you’ve got, so the app finds nothing and asks you to pick one. That’s not a bug, it’s just the app being careful; outdoors, a video from before the ride really isn’t from the ride.

So match it manually. Pick the ride from the list, then swipe up in the editor and slide the data along the strip until it lines up. The walkthrough is on my data doesn’t line up with the video.

Or avoid it: start the ride first, then hit record. Then it matches on its own.

Lining it up indoors

Outdoors you line the data up by finding the climb in the elevation profile. Indoors there may be no profile to speak of, so use the effort instead. Pick a moment in the video you can see, the start of an interval or the sprint at the end, and drag the data until the power sticker jumps at the same moment. Pinch to zoom in on the strip for second-level placement.

On a Zwift ride with virtual climbs the elevation profile is there and works as normal.

What the numbers mean indoors

Everything comes from what your trainer and sensors reported. Speed and distance are the trainer’s numbers, which is what Strava shows too. Altitude and gradient are flat unless Zwift or your trainer app provided them. The temperature sticker is whatever your head unit recorded, which indoors is usually the room.

There’s no GPS, so the route trace that fades in over the video while you’re aligning outdoors doesn’t appear. Nothing’s missing; there’s just no route.

Stickers that suit an indoor clip: power, heart rate, cadence, and the whole-ride totals like ride time and average speed. Gradient and altitude won’t tell anyone much.