Originally Posted by
nmichell
Some great advice here! My wife and I have a daVinci with two freewheels, so the stoker can coast when she wants to (as can the captain, I suppose). You still need to be in sync, otherwise it feels like you're fighting each other, but fortunately for me, my wife handles that really well.
The most important rule, as someone already pointed out: The stoker is never at fault :-)
I don't think so. For decades we did most of our tandem riding ninety degrees out of phase. It felt perfectly natural, especially on flats where the power pulses are evened out. It takes a bit of patience to learn to climb out of the saddle with the pedals at 90 OOP, but it's not half-bad once you get the hang of it.
That said, when we relocated to a less flat locale, we did set our pedals to just a couple of teeth out of phase. The thinking is that if they are perfectly in phase it is too easy for the stronger rider to overwhelm the other so that each rider isn't contributing an equal amount of their capability. It actually took us a while to get used to being nearly in phase after so many years of smoother power strokes.
There's lots of correct ways to do this, no matter what the owner of Santana says.