Originally Posted by
AdelaaR
Sorry, but that article is complete nonsense.
Do you actually believe that professional riders would use anything but THE BEST system?
This is a silly argument; your needs and a professional racer's are not the same. A racer is happy to trade $1000 extra cost and an increased injury risk to get a 0.1% speed increase; if you feel the same way you are an idiot.
For reacreational riding ... ok ... it will not matter there ... in fact ... nothing matters if you are just riding for fun, right?
But have you ever gone steeply uphill with SPD clipless? Have you felt for yourself that you can more easily ascend because you can pull and push at the same time?
I have.
People who have bought expensive hardware "feel" all sorts of things. What matters is what can be measured. As Keith Bontrager (one of the greatest living bike designers) pointed out, measured and rider perceived performance are only randomly related.
I have only had clipless pedals for about a week now and I felt the difference when going steep uphill immediately.
The logic is simple: if you can use more muscles to drive, you can have more power, right?
Wrong. The logic is not logic. Your lifting leg could only contribute power if the lifting muscles are stronger than the descending ones on the opposite leg. BECAUSE THE PEDALS ARE LINKED! And as Peterson said, your belief has been proved *empirically* to be false. (There are special crank systems where the pedals aren't linked precisely so the lifting leg muscles can be strengthened; riding one is said to be a hell of a shock.)
Clipless pedals do make sense for road racing, but the advantages they offer are slight and very subtle and almost certainly irrelevant to you. They offer a measurable advantage in high wattage sprints because they let the lifting foot get out of the way faster - but unless you're at least a serious amateur you won't be able to sprint that hard:
http://www.bikejames.com/cardio-trai...s-pedal-myths/
Clips vs. flats: (again, using a bmx situation) I put out 2060 watts on a G-Cog (it`s like an SRM made specifically for BMX racing, and a device all of the US Olympic bmx team uses) equipped bmx bike clipped in over a 50 yard sprint. My best on platforms was just over 1800. Those results were consistent with everyone else participating, but so was the fact that the average power output got close and closer the longer the sprint was. There was a HUGE difference in how soon we hit max power clipped in.
This sprinting advantage is important in racing, but not for anything else. And the trades off for clipless do seem to include an increased rate of debilitating long term foot injuries, as well as the obvious one of not being able to get a foot down in an emergency.