It's probably because the mod that gave me an infraction for post #275 accidentally included your username tag in the nested quote of the message he sent. See if you have an infraction, if not, then that's what happened.

ETA: It looks like he tagged you accidentally for #272.

Maybe it is best that it remains a mystery.

Anyway, wrt post 275 etc, the main point is someone formulated the hypothesis, and put it to the test, and appears to have refuted it.

That gives (at least) three logical possibilities:

(1) The planing hypothesis was successfully refuted.
(2) The planing hypothesis was wrongly, or too stringently, formulated, so what was being tested really wasn't the original hypothesis.
(3) The experiment wasn't done properly (for example, maybe putting the bike in the trainer prevents planing), not enough subjects, etc.

I do agree it would have been more compelling if someone who appears to have benefited from planing had been a test subject.

However, if you want to assert anything other than (1) at this point, the burden of "proof" is placed on the shoulders of whomever wants to save the hypothesis. I still think there might be something to it, but I am less enthusiastic about the idea than I was 4 days ago.

My initial interest was whether a bicycle that exhibits planing could become a non-planing or even anti-planing bicycle by changing something reproducibly (like an elastomer or isospeed coupler setting, or even the length of an inserted seat-post.)

And guessed the right bike to go with that bias? It was a blind test with identical looking bikes. Two people both noted and produced "planing" results.

Maybe the third guy had expectation bias that it wouldn't work for him?

The energy output has to be less than or equal to what is input. I agree it would be very helpful to have a specific mechanism to test. Several have been suggested in the first few hundred pages of the thread.

A rigid cement floor doesn't make a better jumping surface than a sprung wood floor. Nor does a sagging suspension bridge. You have to have the right kind (elastic) of springiness.

I am starting to think about an analogy with a simple vs. compound bow, where the compound bow is emulating the kind of thing a planing bicycle might do in the sense that it more efficiently channels the energy.

Or maybe;

4) None of the bicycles has frame flex characteristics optimized for the rider(s).

And there's this:

Before I ever heard of planing I had an aluminum road bike with 700cx26 tires and a 31.8mm seatpost. This combo was hammering my back on long rides, I saw the fitter at the shop where I worked and he swapped out the 31.8 seatpost for a shimmed 25.4mm post. This helped my back quite a bit and had the unexpected benefit of improving the ride feel immensely. I wouldn't go so far as saying the bike now planed, but seating pedaling, especially hard climbing efforts felt much better. I could stay seated longer before having to stand, for instance..

Look at super shoes, they are IMO one of the closer analogues to what is happening with planing.

OK, let's put it a bit differently. If only one rider out of 10, or 100, or 1000, or whatever, experiences planing, is it a significantly useful idea? (By useful, I include explanatory power.)

Got link? (Is it this? https://www.supershoes.com )

Seriously, I need some decent shoes.

I've been mostly following along with the thread. The floor comparison makes some sense in my head.

That's not the claim.

The idea is that the redistribution of power over time allows some people to make greater power for longer periods, because they don't strain against the peak torque load. (It appears that pros are not those people, and can push through peak load with no issues.)

It is only a little different than what Biopace is supposed to do - lower the peaks and lengthen the power phase.


A stiffer frame doesn't flex, so it isn't doing anything to modify the power output graph. And because it doesn't flex, some riders are going to be fatigued by the peak load that the bike does nothing to buffer.

Yeah, I was referring to that earlier in the thread, and it was why I was wondering if Trek's isospeed coupler might be used in the same way. I think this would really be helpful in trying to pin down what to measure. If you could turn it on and off and measure differences, it would be extremely helpful in experimental design.

You probably want to talk to Mark Groendal. He's been working the basic idea(s) behind planing for 40 years.

Sure. But how did you jump to 1 in 100 without any data either way? What if it 60 in 100? What about 25? 92?

If this was a drug that cured cancer, how many out of 100 would make it worth producing?

This is not a scientific concept, really. You're bordering on "If only 1 in 1,000,000 people are albino, are there any albinos?" Yeah, there are albinos.


Has Heine suggested that ALL riders should have bikes that plane? Most riders? Should interested people look into it even if the rate is less than 50%?

Thanks for the clarification.

The idea is (or was) that many (if not all) non-pro cyclists would benefit from planing. How many counter-examples does it take to refute the planing hypothesis? I do get that many people might not notice it, but whatever is going on physically in the bike itself (or the interface with the rider) should still be happening, and should be measurable, whether or not the planing bicycle is being ridden by a true believer. At the very least, if only one class of cyclists benefits from planing, there should be a way to identify and define that class based on something other than circular logic.

This all gets back to the idea that if you can't state under what experimental conditions you would consider your hypothesis to be refuted, then you don't have a testable hypothesis. That is essentially what separates empirical science from religion or metaphysics. Without predictive power, the hypothesis is vacuous.

You've now inverted the argument.

Hypothesis proponent: All swans are white.
Observation: I looked at 3 swans. One of them is black.

Hypothesis proponent: The black swan is an outlier, and a conditional-lethal mutant, so It doesn't count.

Observation: I checked 100,000 swans. Of those, 28,578 are black.

Hypothesis Proponent: Well, almost 3/4 of the swans are white, so what's the problem?

Observation: I checked an additional 900,000 swans. Less than 1/10th are white.

Hypothesis Proponent: Well, the swan color hypothesis was only really meant to cover the fraction of swans without pigment.

Observation: The 100,000 white swans are all albino.

If you could get more energy out of a system than was put into it, you could solve a lot of the world's problems. And they'd have to rewrite a whole bunch of textbooks.

When they were casting asparagus at phd's upthread, I with my ms consoled myself with 20+ years experience. But at work today I was delivered some pressure data showing -800 psia. I wrote back to recommend they patent it immediately

Re recent mentions of supershoes and Biopace, and quoting myself from post 65:

So: power is applied to the right pedal from 2:00 to 4:00. Bottom bracket swings to the left.

As the right pedal moves through 6:00, the left pedal moves through 12:00. Rider begins applying power at the left pedal at the moment that the bottom bracket begins to swing back to the right.

Instead of an abrupt transition into the application of pedal force, the left pedal retreats slightly down and away from the foot, increasing the length of time during which the full pedal force comes to be applied.

The recent arrival in the running world of "super-shoes" might represent an analogous phenomenon.

The prostetics ARE (optimized) springs, and they orient up and forward in the direction of motion unlike the imaginary springs hidden in bikes being discussed here.

Any piece of metal (or carbon) tubing is going to be a spring, to some degree. The photo I posted of the prostheses made them look like carbon fiber (I am not sure).

The only viable explanation is that this thread is planing, returning 12% more posts.

He has PhDs in parapsychology and psychology, and now he catches ghosts...

I don't know why you are so attached to the frequency question. At this point the main argument is whether this happens at all, with at least half the "academics" on this thread knowingly opining that it is impossible.

Seems to me that it is much more important to demonstrate the underlying mechanisms to everyone's satisfaction before you begin worrying about how often you can make those elements add up to an overall performance effect.

It just seems like a bad faith move to use the lack of a promised statistical result as reason to dismiss what is, at this point, simply a theory based on the experience and documentary evidence collected by one guy. If you want to have something to say about the matter, do the work of testing the idea. Not the hypothesis - the idea. And don't do it because it is important for you to disprove something. That kind of bias isn't science.