Originally Posted by
OldsCOOL
Same in my area. I partially agree with what you had said about the upstroke myth, I merely unload on the upstroke to prevent loss of power on the downstroke i.e. wasted energy.
Originally Posted by
garysol1
Your body is not capable of making very much UPSTROKE power. Hell, we are doing good to just unweight that upstroke foot. Thats just plain old body mechanics fact. Essentially the upstroke does take care of itself. Ride a few miles doing nothing but upstroke and let us know how it goes.
Exactly!
And since we have two legs, and the pedals are at 180* extremes, whatever one side is doing, the other side will doing the opposite of.
And it is my belief that consciously worrying about "the upstroke" results in lowered efficiency, because we essentially can't split our efforts- i.e. we can't put maximum force into the downstroke of one leg, and at the ame time be applying force in the opposite direction with the other leg, even if we somehow did have power in the upstroke mode- which we do not.