Originally Posted by
redlude97
Nope, you still don't get it. If you do 1000 reps with either weight, you will not get stronger. You throw out words like threshold and anaerobic training, but you clearly don't understand what they mean, and you don't actually do any real training. If you think that you are getting stronger, and by stronger I mean faster, by using your biggest gear to mash on hill repeats, then you are always going to be slow. The thing that matters in cycling training is POWER, which is a combination of cadence and gearing. If it takes you longer to do hill repeats using a 53x11 because you can only pedal 50rpm compared to 90 rpm with 39x13 then you aren't training as hard. Take your meathead mindset out of here, it has no application to actual cycling training.
Okay, this is where we went wrong. I meant strong/strength in the sense that you are able to push on something harder, not in the sense that strength=speed. I meant muscular strength. (Though the amount of strength gained is VERY small.) Muscular strength does not translate to overall speed in cycling, like you said. For me, intentionally using higher gears, over time, has made me able to use those same high gears at a higher cadence. It works for me, so I'm speaking from my own experience. Maybe it doesn't work for you, since we are different people. And again from my own experience, doing threshold training (high, but not too high, power output for an extended period of time (~30 mins)) and anaerobic training (very high power output for shorter periods of time, thus going into lactic acid fermentation, i.e. anaerobic) has helped me develop speed significantly more so. Those are the definitions I had for those exercises, and it doesn't seem like you had the same definition as me, for which I apologize.
In any case, what I'm doing works for me and what you're doing works for you. I'd call that a win-win.