Originally Posted by
achoo
Except that you're really never anywhere near your max leg strength. Run the numbers. Even say you're putting out 600W at 50 rpm with a 165mm crank arm. Those numbers will maximize the amount of force your putting out, and I'd bet it's not all that much force.
Think about it - on a bike, you're going to have to output that force hundreds if not thousands of times. It can't be anywhere near your max strength, otherwise you couldn't do it that often. In fact, it's far enough from your max strength that your max strength pretty much doesn't matter except in extreme situations - a standing start in some track events, maybe the first second or so of a sharp acceleration - MAYBE.
Yeah, low cadence/high force can do a lot for you, but one thing it's not going to do is improve your max leg strength. Muscular endurance? Yeah. Ability to climb? Yeah.
OK. Agree that max leg strength was a bad term to use. I was trying to be generic since I'm very new to cycling. However what you're saying is not what I intended it to mean.
So lets provide an example with something I'm familiar with. In running, speed is not determined by peak force to the ground, but how quickly a force can be applied. You want you ground contact time (ct) to be small, and the only way we can apply a large force is through a longer ct. Now when you do plyometrics like bounding, bunny hops, skipping for height, etc. the force is greatly increased but ct greatly increases, turnover decreases (and speed along with it obviously). Sounds like it fits with what we are talking about.
While the force doing bounding is not maximal at all, and not as large as say doing squats, it still recruits a good bit more muscle fibers than even full out sprinting and does it in a more sport specific way than weights. This trains you CNS and muscles to pull from greater pool of fibers. Now obviously once you have gained access to those fibers they need to be trained for endurance. The idea is that with a greater pool of fibers it is more likely that when the kick starts you will be able to call on more un-fatigued fibers than the guy next to you, and reach a larger percent of your fresh maximum speed. For sprinting it is useful for acceleration phase when ct is lower but force is higher. It has not been shown to increase max speed.
Seems like it would be useful for accelerating to cover a break, a finish sprint, or hills, whether the force applied is maximal or not. The idea may or may not be applicable to biking, but that was my thoughts.