It wasn’t too long ago that you had to search high and low to find a satisfied owner of a Magnetic (Mag) bike trainer. Stories of the units listing to one side or the other, or clattering themselves into oblivion were everywhere on the internet.

I’ve now done enough bike trainer reviews to know that the mag trainer ‘winds are a changin’.

The one company that’s made the best improvements in mag trainers is the CycleOps group. Whether it’s their standard Cycleops Mag trainer, or their new cutting-edge Cycleops Magneto bike trainer, they seem to have perfected these products enough to have worked the bugs out. CycleOps mag trainer users are a satisfied bunch.

One shortcoming mag trainers have in relation to their more expensive cousins, fluid trainers, is their inability to produce exponential resistance. Exponential resistance is what we experience when we’re outside on our bikes pushing against the air.

Aerodynamics dictates that it takes significantly more than twice as much energy to go 20 mph than it does to go 10 mph. In short, in order for resistance to be ‘realistic’ in a bike trainer it can’t be linear (like in a mag trainer), but must be exponential (like in a fluid trainer).

But then again, at half the cost of fluid trainers, mag trainers are plenty good enough for a large number of cyclists.

The CycleOps Magneto is the first and only mag trainer to provide progressive resistance (not to be confused with exponential resistance). As the rider spins the flywheel faster and faster, centrifugal force moves the magnets further and further away from center. The trainer’s engineered in such a way that this increases the resistance without the cyclist having to get off the bike to ‘dial up’ the workload.

CycleOps is noted for being a company that’s very concerned with customer service and satisfaction. All of their trainers are made with the same two inch 16 gauge steel frames, and they come equipped with adjustable rubber-padded feet that conform to any uneven surface. They also have a cam-levered locking mechanism that’ll lock your bike into the trainer at the same setting ride after ride.

On the downside, mag trainers have the unfortunate ability to ‘max out’ at a top-end workload and suddenly provide no resistance whatsoever. Because mag trainers provide resistance by the repulsive forces that magnets have for one another, if you spin them extraordinarily fast, the magnets may be spinning fast enough to not influence each other (thereby furnishing no resistance whatsoever).

You can imagine how disturbing this could be should the rider be a beastly sprinter who’s standing up on his pedals, practicing his finishing drive to the finish line. When the mag trainer ‘gives way’ he’ll be saddened to find himself suddenly straddling the top bar of his bike on his manly parts.

But I digress…mag trainers are a perfectly fine way for most cyclists to stay in shape through the dead of winter …as long as they don’t have a compulsion to see how much punishment they can dish out to themselves, or to the trainer.

Magnetic trainers are about half the cost of a good fluid trainer, and with the recent developments in design and quality they’ll suit many cyclists just fine.