Pedaling technique ... (1)

Triathlon Forum
1

In view of some of our previous somewhat heated discussions regarding pedaling technique (some of it PC related and some of it not) I just saw a web site that I think discusses (and illustrates) some of this pretty well.

I think this page illustrates well two things that come up regularly that everyone may not understand. 1. Why “ciruclar pedaling” is more efficient and what is meant by “circular pedaling” (at least according to some) and, 2. what is meant by ankling and good ankliing technique for various conditions (something I don’t think I understood before)

Comments?

Anyhow, here is the link

http://www.perfectcondition.ltd.uk/Articles/Pedalling/index.htm

2

Thanks for the link Frank, I was wondering why my thighs were sore but nothing else. I am pedaling mostly toes down, I thought it was just the new bike.

5

What did he get wrong? He has photographs of several elites that seems to demonstrate their use of his “proper” ankling technique suggestions. Where is there a better page to illustrate this?

7

This is interesting, in that it shows you don’t even have to completely lift the rear foot in order to have a positive affect on the power to your pedals. Any lifting reduces the negative input that the front leg has to work against.

Interestingly enough, I have noticed the advantage to training on PowerCranks, because you have extra power to call on if need be when racing normal cranks. Riding perfect circles is not what our body and brain want to do, so the instant you stop riding on PCs the “detraining” starts. However, in a race you can call upon that “extra” power you have developed by consciously thinking about pulling up on the cranks.

Anyone can do this, but when you train on PCs, those muscles are capable of putting out an extended effort because they have been doing it every ride that you used the PCs. If you have the mental fortitude to think about this 100 percent of the time, then you could ride normal cranks to the same effect as PCs. I seriously doubt that most people can, especially in a race, but when you need it, it’s there.

This isn’t just my “feeling” either. I have been using a power meter for a couple of months and in club races when I consciously try to spin circles my power leaps my 30-50 watts.

I have also raced a 50K duathlon leg on PCs and eventually the hip flexors give out—maybe at some point in the future that won’t be the case, but for now racing on PCs is out.

Chad

P.S. Thanks for sending back my crankarm in a timely manner, Frank.

9

I have to admit Mr. Rip you are really a tough nut to crack.

I post a link to a website that describes how one might look at the forces on the pedal to analyze what is more efficiient than not and describes the ankling technique of some pretty elite cyclists.

Anyhow, you write he doesn’t know anything about bicycle biomechanics. So I ask you what he got wrong, and you reply that “one cannot determine what forces are being applied by looking at photographs” OK, but that didn’t answer the question. And then you post a reminder that a week or so ago you posted a link to a study that showed negative forces on the upstroke were negligible.

I take it from these replies that you think it is entirely natural for people to pedal with no back pressure on the upstroke so it is silly for others to emphasize this technique or teach others or that it is silly for people to try to get better by emulating the pros technique even though we don’t know what the forces actually are (maybe the “proper” forces will follow if one does the technique, or maybe not).

Anyhow, your posts just seem so negative towards anything that doesn’t fit in with your view and the view of your very learned friends even though you don’t seem to be able to articulate what your view is.

Frank

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Yesterday, I went for a 60 mile ride. I rode the first 30 into the wind, very hard, my quads were cramping a little at times. Then, I turned around. On the way back downwind, I did a LOT of nothing but picking up my legs with my flexors…for long sections at a time…at one point, I was motoring along at 30 mph seemingly not pushing down one bit (it was a good, stiff wind).

After a little while, my quads had recovered, and I started motoring along in the upper 30 mph range. That ability to rest the quads by using hip flexors exclusively for a period of time is another reason PC training can benefit. If I were to have been in a peleton, I could have worked hard at the front for a while, gotten my quads a bit too tired, dropped back into the pack and drafted while using mostly hip flexors and resting my quads, then resumed pushing hard again. There are many variations on this theme that non-“round” pedallers just don’t have.

Oh, one more thing…my heartrate never exceeded 160 even when I was pushing hard, and my rpm’s never dropped below 80. My max HR is at least in the high 170’s, so I don’t think I was at maximum cardiac output, and yet, my muscles were decreasing their ability to put out power after a little over an hour and a half of riding. This is one of the reasons I don’t think Cardiac output is THE limiting factor in endurance events. I’m also reminded of the few times I’ve “bonked”, at least two of those times my HR was never higher than 145. There are factors other than sufficient cardiac output that limited my muscles’ abilities to continue putting out power.

11

Chad,

Of course it is not necessary to completely lift to make the pedals go around. That is the norm. However, the more you lift the better off you should be, regardless of what RIP says. Don’t worry, the PC endurance will come, at least if you stay with them. Next year you will look back on that failure and chuckle I suspect. It was good that you tried to race on them because you learned your limits, at least for right now, for racing intensity and learned you have a lot more work to do before you can see the BIG benefits on regular cranks AND you have that extra power when you need it and can think about it.

Frank

12

I like to employ the method best described by Eddy, to go faster just press harder on the pedals . . .

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However, the more you lift the better off you should be

This is the leap of faith by which all is based. This statement has never been proven, and to me, doesn’t even really make sense. It is true that if you use your hip flexors to lift the rising leg, more of the opposite legs power gets delivered to the wheel. To take this fact, and then say that using your hip flexors therefore results in more power though, is quite a leap.

I have the ability to generate over 3 times as much power with my drive leg for short periods of time, compared to maxed out for an hour. There is more than enough power there for some of the power to be used to lift the rising leg. What limits me is my ability to remain somewhere in the vacinity of my LT when doing so.

The rising leg has to rise. That is always accomplished by a combination of the same side hip flexor and the opposite side quad/gluet. To say that using your hip flexor is more ‘efficient’ than using your opposite leg, is a big statement. It’s not as if using your hip flexors lets you lift the leg for free. You still have to do the work to do so (the exact same work…). To be more efficient, one would have to define efficiency. You could say that it is more efficent because for a given amount of energy the hip flexors can do more work. If that’s what you are implying, I’d love to see the study that backs that up. You could say that using the opposite hip flexor helps to stabilize the pelvis in a forward orientation, making the quad and gluet on the other side work in through a more ideal arc (or set up a better angle for the iliacs traveling to the legs thus improving blood flow). You could say a lot of things in favor of it. You could also say a lot of things against the idea also. You could say that hip flexors, even in someone who rides PC’s exclusively 20k miles a year, have only a tiny fraction of the power that the quads do. You could argue that, given that the closer a load is to the muscles maximum load, the more fast and hyper-fast fibers are recruited, any work you shift from the quads to the hip flexors must be less efficent.

The bottom line is you can say pretty much anything you want. You can come up with pretty much any explanation you want. The truth is, no study has ever shown that people who pedel pretty circles are any better than those that don’t (in fact if you read the studies without your brain, they suggest the opposite…)

My dream, beyond world peace, is that some day all the threads all over the internet extolling the benefits of RC’s and PC’s will some day just boil down to 'we have no idea what the mechanism is by which they work, or even if they do work for everyone…they might though, and people will do just about anything, and spend just about any amount of money to make up for a lack of genes and hard work, so just try them".

Scott

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I am trying very hard not to get involved in this difference of opinion, however, I have to say that I am seeing things on both sides of this arguement that I agree with.

So with out getting specific, about the individual opinions, let me say this. There is more than one way to accomplish a given physical goal. Look at Lance (slowtwitch’s favorite topic) his body position is so out of line from what is considered the “norm”. But who is argueing with the results? Now Frank has come up with a way to train a muscle group that a lot of cyclist under use. Good. Rip says you do not need these apparatus to accomplish this. True. I teach muscle related skills for a living, martial arts. I need to teach a 15yr old girl how to do a side kick, I can do that. I need to teach a 50 yr old man how to do a side kick, I can do that. The two lessons at their core will share only the basics, the rest of it is based on what I have to work with, and the end result will be different. The young girl will kick high and fast, but lightly (generalization)the 50 yr old man will kick lower and slower, but with more power. Are both performing a side kick? Yes. Who wins? We find that out on race day.

The point to all this is, it would be more constructive to agree that you disagree and move on.

There is more than one path to enlightenment. MR JIM

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smartin wrote: The rising leg has to rise. That is always accomplished by a combination of the same side hip flexor and the opposite side quad/gluet. To say that using your hip flexor is more ‘efficient’ than using your opposite leg, is a big statement. It’s not as if using your hip flexors lets you lift the leg for free. You still have to do the work to do so (the exact same work…). To be more efficient, one would have to define efficiency.

I agree with the first two statements. I think you have “more efficient” confused with “more power to the chain”. WebSwim, I think it was, pointed out that the bicycle crank is like a see-saw. Use whatever force on one end of the see-saw you’d like, and removing weight from the opposite end makes the see-saw move faster. Removing the weight at the other end is what PC’s require one to do. It results in more power to the chain. SIMPLE. Obvious. Think about this simple idea until you have it, then move on to questions of the relative efficiency of removing this weight from one end of the see-saw.

Efficiency…I don’t care if a hip flexor is not as efficient as a quad, the same efficiency, or even more efficient. It isn’t germaine to the discussion. Let’s say the hip flexor is LESS efficient than the quad to raise the leg, and you burn X number of additional calories per hour by using the hip flexor to lift the leg rather than using the more efficient quad. So what? So, your body burned more calories per hour because you recruited more muscle to the activity…that doesn’t negate your quad’s ability to work just as it normally would. You have plenty of cardiac output reserve to supply blood to the supposedly less efficient flexors. But, during this hour of exercise, the see-saw has been moving faster…there is more power to the chain, you moved along the ground at a faster rate.

Or, you could take this same scenario, firing supposedly less efficient flexors to allow the see-saw to move faster, and decrease the force used by your quads so the see-saw doesn’t move faster at all, now, you’ve decreased the energy being burned by the quads per hour. At the end of the hour, you still would have burned more calories (because you’re using the supposedly less efficient flexors to do the job the extensors used to do), but, your extensors aren’t as tired, so, you can ride longer at this pace.

Total calories burned by the entire body isn’t important except in Ultra-distance events lasting perhaps weeks. What is important is: how much energy is consumed in each respective muscle group in relation to the energy that can be stored in each muscle group, and how much additional energy can be brought to each respective muscle group by the blood stream (as well as removing waste products and providing oxygen). In “normal” endurance races, like Ironman and less, maximum cardiac output isn’t called for by the body, because maximum blood flow isn’t needed to adequately supply oxygen and nutrients to the various muscles being used at endurance race speeds.

See how the relative efficiency of one group of muscles over another doesn’t matter in the discussion? You have cardiac output reserve available to provide the extra blood flow that might be required to run these less efficient muscle groups. Recruiting more muscle to do a job is “more powerful”, or “spreads the workload out”, even if it is “less efficient” as far as calories burned per hour. Any unweighting of the see-saw is good. If you can remove the weight from the see-saw, and even add force to the rising end, it is even better.

18

If this happened, you’re a freak. Abnormal in many respects, at least with regard to how you pedal, and your ability to hold high power output at low heartrate. Tell me, why did you stop? Run out of highway? Run out of local muscle energy function? It certainly wasn’t an exercise session limited by cardiac output, assuming your maximum heartrate is much more than 100. At such a low heartrate, I guess your muscles didn’t even get fatigued at all, since you say cardiac output is the limiter to exercise.

Actually, as far as the discussion regarding pedalling, you don’t score any points with your fictional story. It is funny, but not very. I’m not saying that hip flexors are BETTER than quads at producing pedalling forces. Nobody is saying that.

19

See how the relative efficiency of one group of muscles over another doesn’t matter in the discussion? You have cardiac output reserve available to provide the extra blood flow that might be required to run these less efficient muscle groups

Well, not really. If I’m working at LT, I have no reserve left. If I’m working at a workload such that I have reserve CO available, then it’s a moot point, I’m not working maximally, so who cares if I use other muscles, or just use my main ones harder?

Scott

P.S. My intention was not to debate which method is better, because I don’t know. My point was that nobody knows, people have opinions, sometimes based on muscle physiology, sometimes just based on faith. Regardless of what it’s based on though, it’s still just an opinion. There are no facts in this debate.

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smartin wrote: If I’m working at LT, I have no reserve left.

What is your HR at LT when you are biking? Is your cardiac output at maximum when you are at LT when biking? No. Is your cardiac output at maximum when you are at LT when running? It’s closer to it than when you’re biking, but, the answer is still no. You have cardiac output in reserve when you are at LT in these activities, therefore, it isn’t cardiac output limiting your LT. Are you at maximum cardiac output when you are wrestling? Perhaps…but, we’re talking about biking, running, and swimming, not wrestling.

Look at it another way, do you think as long as you stay below LT, you can exercise all day at the same power output? Do you think as long as you stay below maximum cardiac output, that you can exercise all day at a given power output? I’ll wager that your power output will decrease during a period of a several hours of sub-lactate threshold exercise and that your cardiac output need not ever be higher than 75% of it’s maximum. Would that prove to you that maximum cardiac output isn’t the limiter to endurance exercise? You can even define “sub-lactate threshold exercise” any way you want, as long as you have to stay conscious to perform the exercise…you can even describe it as sitting up in a chair…at some point you will fall asleep, and the exercise will be said to have ended, with SLEEP as the limiting factor in this case, not cardiac output.

It is certainly true that if you contract a muscle at power levels in excess of the local capillaries ability to provide blood flow to the muscle, that your muscle will decrease power rather quickly, but, that’s not an example cardiac output limitation in an endurance sport effort, that’s an example of local factors in the muscle tissue, and/or a non-endurance sport power output requirements.

Rip Van Wanker may disagree with my assesment of the situation in endurance events, but that doesn’t mean there are no facts here. There are facts on this subject, but, they certainly can get lost in the rhetoric.

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Vinokourov is happy to drop his heel below his pedal. Maybe that’s why he lost the tour last year?

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This site lost its credibility by having a photo of Armstrong there. When he climbs, he is “toes down”. So when the author says “Toes-down pedalling with little or no ankling is quite effective on the flat and at high revs. It’s very limiting uphill or at low revs and it puts a lot of strain on the thighs”, he doesn’t sound credible.

Ken Lehner

23

I know almost nothing about this “ankling” stuff. In fact, in my thought experiments I am not sure I would chose this technique as being optimum. However, I posted this link as it is the first time I saw an explanation that really told me what people are talking about. I am sure I was not alone. Plus it talked some about why unweighting the recovery leg more than not is more efficient.

Frank

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Yeah I was a bit grumpy this morning. I agree that we should strive to unweight the opposite leg. Its interesting to look at but the word “perfect” on the page got to me.

Its tempting to spend more time analyzing the pedal stroke and less time training, when the obvious benefits come from riding and not from thinking.

Mark

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Seems to me the “obvious benefits” come from thinking about how to train the best technique, power, endurance, etc. etc. (depending upon the needs of the particular sport) from the time we have to devote to training.

Going out and putting in training time and getting the HR up, without regard to technique may prevent heart attacks, but it doesn’t do much to help one maximize their competitive potential. If one wants to get good, one needs to do both.

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What is your HR at LT when you are biking? Is your cardiac output at maximum when you are at LT when biking? No. Is your cardiac output at maximum when you are at LT when running? It’s closer to it than when you’re biking, but, the answer is still no. You have cardiac output in reserve when you are at LT in these activities, therefore, it isn’t cardiac output limiting your LT.

Not that it matters, but my HR at LT on the bike is closer to my max than when I’m running, but that’s because I’m a biker now and train it more on the bike. When I was doing Tri’s, it was the same. LTHR as a percentage of maximun HR/VO2max is very trainable.

Anyway…when I said there was no reserve left, I meant there was no functional reserve left. My point is that the only time the ability to get more power to the chain is a limiter, is in the first few pedel strokes in an all out sprint. For any duration longer than a few seconds, my ability to produce power is limited by me. If I’m in a 30 minute race, I know how much power I can make if I want to maintain a constant level. I short races (TT’s up to 40k) I’m limited by the net gain of lactate. In longer races (long road races), I’m limited by my ability to take in food and manage my limited glycogen stores.

If I’m riding in a TT just above LT, of course there is reserve cardiac output. But tapping into that will incur a tremendous metabolic cost. 15 minutes into a 30 minute TT, I could put the pedel down and double, or even triple my watts for a minute or 2. I’d be toast though after that. For any timed event, the idea is to ride/run/whatever, at a level such that when you cross the finish line, you are totally spent.

I’ll wager that your power output will decrease during a period of a several hours of sub-lactate threshold exercise and that your cardiac output need not ever be higher than 75% of it’s maximum

Well, the only way power would drop off would be if fuel stores are becoming depleted. You can still exercise when out of glycogen, but it isn’t pretty. As exercise intensity goes up, glycogen provides a larger and larger percentage of the fuel source. A trained individual can exercise at LT for about an hour, at which point they run out of fuel. That’s true for me and Lance Armstrong. The difference of course is the power produced for that hour. As intensity goes down, fat provides a larger and larger percentage of the fuel. The biggest physiologic adaptation that endurance training provides is shifting this curve more towards fat at higher intensities. At the begining of the season I could ride for 90 minutes at 90% of LT, now I can ride at that level for several hours. So yes, there is reserve cardiac output, but as I said before, nothing is free.

Anyway, again this is away from my point. This is all just intellectual dribble. I personally do think that PC’s have the ability to make some, perhaps even most, bikers better. The reason why that is true though, I think is impossible to say at this point. I think that trying to state as fact, a physiologic reason why PC’s work, when there is no data to back it up, hurts more than helps the cause.

Scott