Originally Posted by
RChung
Sometimes, but only rarely and not for very long.
Most of the people posting here don't know what they're talking about. Pedaling technique is a red herring.
Researchers were putting force-sensing pedals on bikes decades ago and looking at how people actually pedal. Even riders who *think* they're pedaling circles don't. In the late 1980's Kautz was looking at pedal forces. You can actually find his original data files
here. In 1991 Coyle (and Kautz) published a paper comparing elite "national-level cyclists" with very good regional and "state-level" cyclists. Here's figure 5 from that paper:
Group 1 are the elite national-level cyclists, Group 2 are the very good state-level cyclists. As you can see, on average the Group 2 cyclists pull up very slightly on the pedal on the recovery and push down a little less on the power part of the pedal stroke. On average, the elite national-level cyclists don't pull up on the back side and stomp down harder during the power phase. That means the best cyclists have *less* "circular" pedal strokes, no matter what they thought they were doing. As for "scraping mud" across the bottom of the pedal stroke, if you examine the actual data files you'll see that they don't do that, either.
I have a friend who is a cycling coach. A few years ago he had to have the lower part of his left leg amputated. Now he concentrates on training to maximize his power and doesn't worry about pedal stroke. He can't pull up on the back side or he'd yank his prosthetic off his stump. He can't scrape mud off at the bottom of the stroke, either. All he can do is stomp down, so he stomps down hard. He has years of power files, both pre- and post-amputation. After a long period of recuperation and training, he eventually surpassed his pre-amputation threshold power. Stomping seems to work for him. [Edit:] As for one-legged pedaling, he recommends that you pedal with as many legs as you have.
Hate disagreeing with god here, but . . . I've read that Coyle study. It's of TTers on the TT bikes of the time. I'm one of the advocates of a good pedal stroke that you're dissing, so I'm pretty good at it, and yet I can't pedal circles in that position either. I'd look just like those graphs. Pedaling circles is also not that important for short periods on the flats, even on the hoods, though it will reduce fatigue. Be that as it may, on long rides, especially those with lots of climbing, pedaling circles is how one goes fast. It's not about 1 hour power production, anymore than it's about how much one can squat. It's about many hour power production. The more muscles (muscle volume) you engage, the longer you last at a given power. That's part of it. The other part is that most of us climb at a considerably slower cadence than we use for TTing. Climbing at that slower cadence, one wants to avoid banging one's legs with more powerful contractions than absolutely necessary. The way we do that is by not constantly decelerating and then re-accelerating the bike. Thus obviously there is no need to have a constant power production by each crank, and thus no need to pull up. What is required is that the sum torque of both cranks be constant. That's exactly what a perfect pedal stroke achieves. On the rollers, we hear a steady hummmm. Equally obviously, if our roller pedaling looked like Coyle's graph, that would not be the case.
I've ridden with Chris Ragsdale, first American finisher in RAAM 2013 and winner of the FC 508. He's as smooth as butter, perfect pedal stroke. Same with Merckx for that matter. It's something to aspire to.
Then there's the whole PowerCranks thing.
AFAIK, everyone who's trained on them for a number of months (2000-3000 miles) has had results. I realize that there are venomous discussions of this on various forums, and I'm not trying to start one here. I would note that the PowerCrank user unweights the back leg and does not pull up any more than the weight of the crank itself, about as shown in Coyle's graph. The gentle reader can do their own research and decide for themselves.
In cases like this, I tend to use a rule, not quite as effective as Occam's Razor, but good enough: most people are not idiots. I put Greg Lemond in that most people category along with Merckx and my friend Ragsdale.