Carbonfiberboy 

Yeah, that's the sort of thing where I did the best. I've finally gotten my heart thing sorted and I'm back at it but with a CTL of 25. It's gonna be a long road. '25 maybe.

This thread reminds of of when I joined here, back in '07. By then I'd been doing bike-specific strength training for about 10 years and found that it worked really well, giving me a killer sprint and better endurance on long rides. But I was the only poster here who thought that. Back then, everyone else here agreed that all strength training did was steal time away from cycling and make riders put on unnecessary weight. This kinda feels just like that and we still see some residue from that here. I've been training my pedal stroke since '95, haven't had to think about how I was pedaling in decades. That said, I do pedal stroke maintenance every year. Even skiing, every year I work on the same things, I never "just ski." That's how one gets good at doing a thing. Cement it into one's ganglia and constantly reinforce that information.

Just watch Shiffrin run slalom. She's changed the sport. Go back and watch slalom videos from a decade ago: and now: Besides incredible talent, a lot of that's training and specific strength training. Watch the slo-mo and see how she brings her skis off the snow coming out of those turns. That's how hard she's pushing down in the turn (and Vilhova is starting to do that too), the g-forces she's generating to get her though the turn more quickly.

Anyway, back to cycling. Every year, I do these drills:
1) From October to January 1 I do FastPedal on my rollers. Until I hit 70, I'd try to pedal in a very small gear on my rollers at 115-120 rpm for 15'-45', once a week, gradually increasing the time while trying to stay in HR Z2. In the fall I'd be slower and a lot of Z3, but I'd get better as the weeks went by. The trick is to relax the feet, wiggle the toes, keep the feet flat, and pedal with the uppers, trying to keep a little air between one's socks and the shoe's insole.

2) From January 1 to April 1, I'd change that once a week to one-legged pedaling, again on my rollers, 2' right leg, 2' left leg, 2' legs together in Z2, alternating the cadence in the one-legged sets between 55 and 85 rpm, freely chosen cadence for legs together. Then repeating that sequence until I start to get a slack chain on the backstroke or 45', whichever comes first. Most people find that this is not easy. Early on in the season, I cut the 2' interval short if I get that slack chain, which I define as failure, but keep on trying until I just can't. I figure if I'm not crying for my mommy, I can keep at it. When I could do 2' consistently, I'd increase the gear so it was still at my limit, and of course I'd use a different gear for the 55 and 85 cadence sets.

3) For 4 weeks in April, I change that once a week to 50-55 cadence Z3 X 10' hill repeats, no upper body movement. By then, this felt quite natural.

The nice thing about this work is that until the end of March, this is all of relatively low aerobic impact. It works your legs but not your aerobic/hormonal system. So even though it's hard to do, the impact on training load is low, but the performance impact is large..

Of course I don't pull up on the backstroke when riding normally, but I do unweight that pedal to reduce downforce in the downstroke. The object of this whole thing is to reduce radial forces in the pedal stroke. Any energy one spends on radial force is endurance lost. I'm actually a mediocre physical specimen who got into it late and taught himself to keep up with the faster folk 10 or so years younger on long rides. Strength training also helped a lot as did just riding my butt off.

This is now late January. If one was inclined, one could shorten this up and do a month of each exercise in the progression. This probably won't be enough time to really cement this into one's ganglia, but enough time to see what happens as one goes through the phases.