It's getting warmer. Got to me a bit on my last ride. So I started thinking about it. The issue is about dissipating heat. What heat? Heat energy wasted when turning sugar and fat into pedal strokes... ie inefficiency. A little searching about efficiency doesn't turn up much you can do, at best "maybe be more fit or skinnier helps? .. shrug?". But one thing does seem to correlate very strongly: cadence.

There are a couple of studies and plots but they all show very significant differences even between a cadence of 90 and 80, 80 being more efficient. There are strong arguments raised for riding above optimal efficiency, one being higher cadence provides more power. That seems to imply cyclists are limited in the force department, interesting topic in its own. And some suspicions exist aparently that this is all the more true if you're on EPO.

Anyway, maybe the optimization changes in the heat? If you're power limited, maybe high cadence is better. If you're heat limited, maybe the tradeoff shifts down? It's not a tiny effect actually. Depending what assumptions and curve you look at this might be a 10 or 20% effect. That could raise your power headroom a bunch, no?

Here's an example:

Spinning vs Mashing... is it really true?

The right plot to look at is probably GE, which seems to precisely be about heat vs mechanical output.

Thoughts?

Actually I suspect this comes a little intuitively? But so many people pedal by the numbers that intuition may not always apply.