For people with a bike under their desk
Ride your bike
while you answer email
Pick a heart rate. Cycle at Your Desk steers your smart trainer to hold you there — nudging the watts down when a meeting spikes your pulse, back up when you settle in. Stop pedaling to type and it quietly unloads the pedals and waits. Spin again and you're back where you left off.
would be so proud of you.
10:02 — you took a call. coasted 6 min, clock paused, no death-spiral restart.
What it does
Heart-rate autopilot
ERG trainers hold watts; your body doesn't care about watts. Set 138 bpm and the controller anticipates your heart's 30-second lag, ramps gently through warm-up, and keeps you in the zone you actually meant to train in — even on a day you slept four hours.
Made for a desk
Stop pedaling for three seconds — say, to type an actually-important Slack reply — and the pedals unload themselves while the workout clock pauses. Start spinning and it ramps you back to where you were. Meetings happen. The ride survives them.
Honest numbers
It knows the first 15 minutes of HR data are noise and excludes them. It flags rides where you toggled the fan or coasted through a call as "not comparable." Watts-at-your-target-HR is tracked ride to ride — the number that actually moves when you're getting fitter. Exports clean TCX straight into Strava.
See it run
42 minutes in — heart rate pinned at 138 while the trainer quietly does the arithmetic.
Two worlds, four times of day — Teton to Zion, sunrise to stars. 3D mode, for the days the spreadsheet can wait.
Early rider price — $29 after launch
Six weeks of Zwift money, once. No monthly plan, no "premium tier," no annual auto-renew ambush. $0/month, forever. Cancel anytime — kidding, there's nothing to cancel. Somewhere, a finance podcaster just shed a single proud tear.
Buy Cycle at Your Desk — $19Works with your stuff
Smart trainers
- Wahoo KICKR / KICKR Core / KICKR Snap
- Tacx Neo & Flux (Bluetooth FTMS)
- Elite Direto, Suito, Justo
- Saris H3 / CycleOps
- Zwift Hub & Ride, JetBlack Volt
Anything that speaks Bluetooth FTMS — the standard nearly every smart trainer made since ~2018 uses. Older trainers without FTMS connect read-only (you'll see power, but the app can't steer it).
Heart rate straps
- Polar H10 / H9 / Verity Sense
- Garmin HRM-Dual / HRM-Pro
- Wahoo TICKR
- COROS, Magene, CooSpo…
Any Bluetooth heart-rate strap works — it's one standard. A chest strap is strongly recommended over a watch: the control loop is only as good as the signal you feed it.
Questions you'd reasonably ask
Isn't this just Zwift?
Different job. Zwift wants your eyes and your legs. This wants your legs only. You pick a heart rate — 140, or whatever today calls for — and the app holds you there for literal hours while you think about something else entirely. No workout to follow, no screen to watch, no decisions after the first one: it reads your heart and quietly turns the trainer up and down so you never have to. There's scenery if you want it (a 2D Pacific Northwest ride and a 3D Teton ride), but the whole point is that you don't have to look.
What do I need to run it?
The desktop app (macOS or Windows), a smart trainer, and a Bluetooth HR strap. No account, no login — your rides live on your machine.
Why heart rate instead of power?
Power targets assume every day is the same day. Heart rate is how hard the ride actually is today — under-slept, over-coffeed, or fresh. For easy aerobic volume while working, holding a heart rate is the whole game: hard enough to count, easy enough that your typing doesn't fall apart.
What if it doesn't work with my trainer?
Email support@cycleatyourdesk.com with your trainer model and we'll refund you, full stop. Twenty bucks is not worth either of us being annoyed about.