chasm54

LOL. The tandem-rider as Renaissance man. I tend towards mannerism rather than classical revivalism, myself...

asgelle

It's been twenty years since just the opposite has been proven true. Stomp down as hard as you can and do nothing on the way up. https://www.sykkeltrening.no/forum/do...er/coyle91.pdf cf. Figure 5.

Carbonfiberboy 

That's a very interesting study and I thank you for posting it. I must confess that I already knew that elite national-class cyclists were faster than I am and can generate higher pedal forces. I think, however, that you have reached a conclusion that is not supported by the data.

From pp 105&106:
Thus the authors admit that experienced cyclists "display more uniform pedal force application" than non-cyclists, and that this difference is likely to "reflect cycling skill and experience rather than muscle type."

So how are we do reconcile these conflicts in the study? Simply by coming back to the obvious: elite cyclists can generate more pedal force than non-elite cyclists. I, for example, can train with the finest coaches in the world and I will not be able to hammer on the pedals hard enough to keep up with those folks. Never could. If I could, I would.

So what about the differences in pedaling strategy between group 1 and group 2? I think the authors have it backwards. Group 1 is not group 1 because they hammer on the pedals during the downstroke harder than group 2. They are group 1 because they are physically more talented. Group 2 uses a more efficient pedal stroke to make up for their inability to hammer that hard. If they could, they would. But this is what they do to stay as competitive as they can.

One of my core beliefs is that people are not, in general, stupid. When people do a particular thing in a particular way after long study and practice, it's just possible that they are doing the best they can.

Please note that subject A (and national champion), with the highest continuous wattage, pulled up very noticeably late in the backstroke, something that I've never gotten strong enough to do, the efficacy of which I've always doubted, and which you are preaching against. He also did not have the highest peak pedal torque. Also note how A's torque persisted much later in the pedal stroke than anyone else. I pedal much more like subject F, perhaps because I have well developed hams and glutes from skiing and hiking.

One thing that these studies ignore, and I don't know the reason for it, is that what one wants to do is to put a near constant momentary torque on the bottom bracket. This does absolutely not mean pulling up on the backstroke. I can't do it hard except for very short periods, probably not even a minute, in spite of all the MTI and OLP work I've done. Why would one do that, after all, since one is already pushing down much more effectively with the other foot? Although there must be a reason for some folks, as we see that the national champion pulls up. IMO one does better to increase the area under the curve by keeping torque on the BB more constant from about 20° to 200°.

For if it were true that all we needed to do was hammer harder on the downstroke, then why do we have light climbing wheels? Simply because momentary accelerations are a waste of energy. We don't get all the energy spent in acceleration back. Yeah, one would think we do, simply examining the equations, just like you were saying that a heavy bike must be easier to pedal on the flats. But in the experience of all cyclists, heavy wheels are a drag on a climb and a heavy bike is not easier to pedal on the flats. The reason is the inefficient conversion of resources into ATP.

My takeaway from this study is that we don't actually learn anything except that elite cyclists are more talented and that less talented cyclists are more likely to have acquired improved technique as a defense, though the best of the elites may also have improved technique, see Lance Armstrong and the unnamed national champion.

asgelle

Your takeaway certainly differes from the consensus of trained exercise physiologists.

asgelle

Have you considered this, https://www.biketechreview.com/review...el-performance

Weight is the last thing I consider when choosing wheels.

Carbonfiberboy 

It's true that no one rides Heliums anymore. Everything has to be aero. And light. Which is assuming that everyone climbs at 17 mph like the elites, when actually only the elites climb that fast. Most folks climb the average grade at more like 8-9, when the aero part is immaterial and only the weight counts. Still one sees duffers running (and breaking) Zipps on training rides.

Be that as it may, this time you're saying that everyone who's been advocating light climbing wheels for decades is wrong and you are right because of some calculations someone performed which look like experimental evidence but in fact are only calculations, just like the Coggan calculations you put forward at the start of this discussion.

Calculations are not experimental evidence. The national champion pulls up on the backstroke. Champions spend their own money on light wheelsets, which technology has now also allowed to be aero. Those are facts.

A funny thing is that there's another link in that thread which shows by experimental evidence that tires pumped to higher pressure are faster on rough roads than those same tires pumped to lower pressure. I've known that for many years, from running down opponents under those conditions, yet the CW says exactly the opposite.

Experiment, young man, don't take anyone's calculations as gospel. Or anyone else's experiments. Do your own. Experiments have to be repeatable to have any validity.

Carbonfiberboy 

The trainers whom I've followed say about the same thing I'm saying. Why do we ride rollers in the winter? To smooth up our spins. Does it work? Yes. How can a rider with lower VO2max compete against those with higher? By riding more efficiently. You are saying none of this works, when every good rider I've ever known and my own experience says it does.

Reductio ad absurdem: why don't you compete in your next race with platforms? They'd be even better, because they'd make sure you didn't do anything except push down, and that's the best, right? In fact all racers should rock platforms. I bet they could make carbon platforms a lot lighter than those metal clips and no one would get foot fatigue anymore. Yet there've been clipless pedals since 1895. There's some cognitive dissonance.

Carbonfiberboy 

Hey, somebody has to do it . . . I never was that much of an art formalist, being much more inclined to take radios and clocks apart as a child than to use art materials. Which is odd because as an adult I realized that I was just an artist who didn't realize he'd found his medium. I'm the sort who dunks the rubber in the ice water. So far I have not put nitrogen in my tires nor have I ever been committed. Yet.

frantik

I ride a *very* heavy bike at low speeds for 8-12 hours on the weekends. it has definitely helped build muscle mass and stamina.

lots of weight turns even small grades into giant hills. you probably need to drag around a couple hundred pounds before you would notice much difference though

asgelle

Then you need to read this paper. https://www.recumbents.com/WISIL/Mart...%20cycling.pdf

asgelle

Not as absurd as you might think. The problem with platform pedals is keeping the shoe stable on the platform, but I've ridden with a broken Speedplay spring so the shoe was fixed in the plane of the pedal but there was no retention normal to it. Except at very high cadences, there was no noticeable effect.

gregf83 

As would riding a light bike for 8-12 hrs on the weekend.

Carbonfiberboy 

We seem to be getting down to ever smaller nits, which might, to the forum reader, seem to have pretty much nothing to do with the question on the floor, which is are heavy bikes of any use in training.

This nit seems to be does rim weight affect climbing performance, you saying no, me saying yes, this being an add-on to you saying that climbers are faster if they surge their pedal forces, me saying that pedaling round is faster. Which is based on whether or not a heavy bike forces one to pedal round, me saying that it does and is beneficial, you saying that not only does it not, but even if it does that's detrimental. Is this a fair summation?

This paper which you have presented is much better, IMO. In the limited realm in which the theory was tested, it seems to hold up well. However the questions that we are pondering do not seem to be addressed by this paper at all. I think you offered this paper in defense of your contention that wheel rim weight and thus wheel kinetic energy is a very small, almost negligible term in determining the cycling power required to climb. Since this paper is attempting to model steady state high speed performance on level ground and correlate it with experimental results, the term for wheel kinetic energy probably zero, though no calculation is shown. In any case in this use it would be vanishingly small. A meaningful calculation and experimental validation would be to run such a test with different rims and tires on a steep climbing course. In the investigation reported in this paper, all riders used the same wheels and tires, making this even more of a non-investigation of the effect of rim weight on performance.

The Coyle paper you offered earlier had an investigator wondering aloud if it would be possible to design a biofeedback device to encourage cyclists to peak their pedal pressures, rather than pedal efficiently, since this was the takeaway that the investigators were pushing. Such a device exists. It's called rollers. The whole idea of rollers as a training tool is that the inertia of the system must be kept low. Light rollers, light rims, light tires. By doing this, changing pedaling forces during the pedal stroke are made immediately evident to the rider as a change in sound of the roller/tire system.

For a century, roller riders have been told to smooth up their spins by listening to the sound and trying to make it a steady whir, rather than a RRRrrrRRR, varying during the pedal stroke. It's a simple and effective biofeedback device. I've gotten pretty good at that after 15 years of practice. However you are saying that what we've been told for a century is wrong, that we should attempt to peak our pedal force on the downstroke and purposely create that varying sound on the rollers, and not only that, but that heavy wheels don't slow climbers, even if they only hammer the downstroke and specifically try to create in inefficient pedal stroke.

I don't believe it. My personal experience is that this is wrong, the personal experiences and preferences of racers over the past century seem to agree with me, and the findings of these investigators does not support that view, at least so far.

I don't have any experimental data to support my view, either. What one might look at, however, are the films of racers in action. Those who do a pronounced hammer on the downstroke also bob their upper bodies when climbing, due to Newton's Third Law. As we might recall, this was something of an issue in Stage 21 of the 2001 Tour. "Ram" of the 508, the best rider with whom I have ever ridden, has an utterly still upper body. I've tried to copy his technique, though I can't copy his talent.

gregf83 

This is incorrect as you can't tell, from watching a film, how much force the rider applies through the handlebars to counteract whatever pedal force is being applied.

As has been discussed earlier the pedal force of riders peaks at around 2 times the average force and this occurs around 3 o'clock. No amount of riding on the rollers will significantly change this or produce any meaningful power on the upstroke. It's not difficult to keep a still upper body while pedaling with uneven force.

Riders may vary a little in how they apply force through a pedal stroke but they basically all look like:

Carbonfiberboy 

I was working out on the aerobars tonight and hey, I can't pedal worth a nickel on the aerobars, either. All I can do is push down and pull back a little, too. These guys had their shoulders 5cm higher than their hips! I can't even get close to that position. My thighs hit my ribs long before that. Having the right body structure for TTing is part of the talent. I'd like to see a plot of some Diesel and climbing specialists on the road, too, to see if their plots look any different.

I can guarantee you that the Ram doesn't pry on his bars unless he's sprinting. That's actually a little funny. Who has calories to spend on that? The muscles in his upper back and arms don't move and his butt doesn't rock, either. All that happens is his legs go around. I leave it for the reader who's watched a lot of video to decide whether our champions pedal round or not (unless they've been on a solo break all day in the mountains).

I've found it helpful to ride the rollers in front of a mirror. Oddly, I do have a bit of upper body motion at low effort, but that mostly goes away at higher efforts. I guess one gets good at what one practices.

This upstroke thing is a silliness. It happens that the national champion, subject A, has a lower peak force and does pull up. I think that's pretty odd, but hard to argue with success. As I've said about a zillion times in various threads, the pulling up business is a red herring. Of course it's better to push down with the 180° opposite foot. The important thing for climbing is to keep a constant torque on the bottom bracket, which is the opposite of pulling up, which would only increase the pulsing. Nonetheless, champions do pull up sometimes, typically in the final shootout for a mountaintop finish, when they are digging for every watt.

One needs to look at total instantaneous BB torque, rather than one pedal, which I've never seen done. I don't think it's as important at high cadences, say over 85, because the accelerations become so slight as to be irrelevant, but one does what one practices.

No comment on it being a really good idea to make one's spin on the rollers less smooth, eh?

frantik

hours is probably no a good measure, because i probably ride fewer than 20 miles during that time.

go ride a bike weighing close to half a ton for a mile and then get back to me

asgelle

An extreme example being Alex Simmons. A perfect example of how lack of pulling up on the pedals does not have to limit power production at all.
https://alex-cycle.blogspot.com/2008/12/swiss-watch.html
https://alex-cycle.blogspot.com/2009/...-training.html

gregf83 

Assuming the riders pedal with approx equal power in each leg you could just take the data for one leg, shift it 180 degrees and add it to the other leg. It's clear that any way you slice it there's not a lot of force being applied when the pedals are vertically oriented.

I'm not sure what you're referring to but using the rollers to smooth out your stroke so you don't bounce at higher cadence doesn't have anything to do with supplying constant torque throughout the pedal stroke. Bouncing on the saddle occurs when you're still pushing down on the pedal when it's at the bottom.

gregf83 

On the contrary, time is exactly the correct measure of how much training stress you are incurring.

Presumably that heavy bike is geared appropriately so even though you're not covering much distance you're pedaling at a similar cadence with similar loads (on the pedals) that you would have with a lighter bike.

BloomBikeShop

I'm pretty sure that's more about money than anything. No sense thrashing light, less durable, and super-expensive wheels on a day-to-day basis.

hobkirk

Excellent post! LOTS of useful information. I like the way you encapsulate 10 years of experience into three paragraphs on this subject.

Of course, then you go on to use techniques I had to look up - TRIMP & MTI! I just turned 66 and carry an excess 45# to reach Carmichael's "minimum" standard for bike riders of 2.5#/inch of height (82# for his 2#/inch minimum for climbers). Group rides provide dramatic evidence of the weight penalty (3 sec/km/kg on a 5% slope, per Carmichael, or 1 minute per km in my case). My personal observation on aging is that it seems like I started deteriorating (strength and endurance) significantly about age 55.

Out of curiosity, was it difficult for your wife to adopt your cadence? Is she involved with your MTI (I think this implies using big power at slow cadence while maintaining good form).

Carbonfiberboy 

As I aged, I had to adapt my training from year to year to stay competitive with my group, trying to train and ride smarter. Almost every year, I had to do things a little differently. I held it off until I got to be 63. I still ride just as hard, and being on the tandem lets me off the hook for not being on the front on the climbs. So it's all good.

Wife always rode about the same cadence I use. We work out together and train similarly, do a spin class, lift weights together, etc. She does lack enthusiasm for any structured intervals, so we don't do them on the tandem, making up for it by using somewhat varied techniques and targeting and recording our time in zone on group rides. We are still getting faster on the tandem, most of that increase coming from Stoker. She enjoys it when we make the big bike go.

I've always been about 2.4 lbs/in, overweight for a cyclist. I never climbed really well, but could put up a decent average over a long day in the mountains.

oscarelworthy

If you are riding in a bunch it will be a lot more effective as you will be struggling much more to stay on the group