Originally Posted by
J.Oxley
Does anybody ever include riding old, heavy-as-death bikes in their training? Seems like time spent pushing one of those around would make even the worst hills seem like nothing on your good road bike. In my mind I'm referencing stuff like athletes running with a tire dragging behind them, or fighters training in a pool so they work against extra resistance, that sort of thing.
It used to be quite popular to train with fixed gear bikes. These were actually lighter than a geared bike but were a type of handicap training nonetheless. You had to push a lot harder on the uphills and spin a lot faster on the downhills. Since both the ability to push a big gear and the ability to spin a fast cadence are valuable in many types of racing this type of training made sense to us. Nowadays the experts seem to agree that training for strength with weights and weight machines is better than the old fixed gear because the loads and the intervals can be more easily controlled and the progress (or lack thereof) more easily measured. Me, I hate weight training: I'm building a fixed gear road bike this spring.
Brent