I thought about this thread as I rode home on my commuter bike with flat, strapless steel cage pedals, in my work loafers. I also tried to observe my normal pedal stroke and I experimented a bit with it.

Most of the time my foot stays horizontal, but I noticed that every once in a while, without really thinking about it or planning it, I would “ankle” on the first part of the upstroke, tipping my foot down about 45 degrees at the bottom of the stroke and leveling it out again halfway up. I was also aware of “pulling” the pedal back and up when I did that. It’s just a habit I seem to have, doing it for two or three cycles and then returning to keeping my foot horizontal. Probably just varying which muscles I use. Of course I’m using pressure on the pedal as I do it, so it’s really a dragging rather than lifting motion.

If I deliberately took one foot off the pedal and tried to pedal as far around the cycle as I could with the other foot, I could get the pedal to about 45 degrees past the bottom (or to 225 degrees if you wish) even with my foot flat, or actually all the way to middle of the upstroke (270) if I ankled. Again this is a dragging effect on the pedal, not “lifting it” as you might if you had foot retention. So you don’t need cleats or straps to get a little bit of upward force on the back part of the pedal circle.

I could also deliberately “pull up” up all the way through the upstroke without losing contact with the pedal, consistent with the notion that pulling up in some cases simply partially unweights the pedal and helps lift your leg, without actually providing an upward force on the pedal.

However at normal easy cruising cadence – maybe 50 rpm, I could easily lift my foot right off the pedal on every pedal upstroke stroke if I wanted to, suggesting that people who choose to pull the pedal upwards with their cleat can do so. Whether they should, or how long they want to do it for, is another matter. When I cranked up the RPMs to what I thought was about 100, I could still lift my foot right off the rising pedal if I tried, but not repetitively, since I couldn’t consistently reconnect to the pedal at that speed, so it would take a lot of coordination to actually assist the pedal in rising on every revolution at high cadences. However, presumably skilled cyclists could do it, or learn to do it at higher cadences than I can manage and up to a certain threshold. Again, whether they should do it, is another matter.

So what did I learn? At low cadences I can lift my unretained foot off the pedal on every upstroke, suggesting I would be pulling the pedal upwards if I were clicked in. You probably can only do that up to certain RPM threshold – probably well below 100 in my case, but who knows what it would be for some pros. You can also “lift” the pedal a little bit even without foot retention, by tilting your foot and dragging the pedal backwards during the first part of the upstroke.