Originally Posted by
chasm54
Carbonfibreboy, I understand what you are saying. I tour regularly, sometimes quite heavily loaded. My expedition tourer weighs about 36lbs and on my last long tour I hauled about 50lbs of gear. So I'm very familiar with the difference in feel, and in particular with the difficulty of maintaining momentum on hills when heavily laden. As it happens, at the end of that last tour I chased a couple of roadies into Toronto. They were out training on a Sunday, and were clearly irritated by the old guy with multiple panniers who kept catching them on the flat after they'd dropped him on the (very modest) climbs.LOL
There's no doubt that the workouts on the loaded tourer, and for different reasons on my fixie, are different from those on my road bike. But to be honest I think that most of the difference is simply that I tend to work harder on thoe bikes. On the roadie, even when I am aiming for a strength session, I'll tend to use the gears to moderate the stress in a way that isn't possible with the fixie or when heaving the weight. Were I disciplined enough to put out the same power on the road bike all the time, I'm sure there'd still be a difference in feel, but I'm not convinced there'd be a difference in training benefit.
I agree with a lot of this. The heavy bike does force you to put out more power than you might choose to on a light bike. If one has acquired a sense of being able to make a bike "go," it's hard to give up that sensation simply because one is on a heavy bike. OTOH, I think many tourers don't delight in that sensation. I see some folks even walking. Heck, I wouldn't walk until I saw the bloody rags of my quads come popping out of my shorts. So there's that.
And be that as it may, such training does have an effect on my legs. So if one hasn't tried it, it may be incorrect to knock it down by quoting first principles. One doesn't always arrive at the correct answer by reasoning from first principles. Hence the need for the scientific method. I get the feeling that those who say it can't work are being rather too Aristotelian and forgetting the advances made during and since the Renaissance.
The other thing I thought of on yesterday's Sunday group ride, is that while climbing on the tandem I'm doing muscle tension intervals (MTI) a lot of the time, just at a much higher cadence than is usually prescribed. Which is pretty funny considering Coggan's and asgelle's shootdown of my advocation of such training in the current mashing
thread.
My conclusion is that the benefit comes from the fact that a heavy bike cannot be accelerated by pedal pressure of short duration. One simply isn't strong enough. Instead, one is forced to maintain a constant torque on the bottom bracket, which is the same thing that one is able to simulate through MTI, though at such a low cadence that it isn't maintainable for very long. I think this is the same thing that the "all you need to do can be done on a light bike" folks are saying, while at the same time denying the benefits of MTI.