Pedal Stroke and generating power

nigelfranklyn

When I first started riding about 2 years ago or so ago, I remember being told that I should try to use the big muscles to push the bike forward, glutes, quads, and hamstrings....... This concept resurfaced a few days ago, Dave Scott was talking about using these larger muscles as they fatigue slower that the smaller leg muscles. I am not sure if this make any sense but I figured I would put it out there to see if anyone can give some guidance....... How do I go about engaging or trying to engage these larger muscles???

kens1964

No claim of expertise here, but I think the answer to your question is that it is a combination of proper bike fit and then practicing good pedal stroke efficiency. This article may help: http://www.bicycling.com/training-nutrition/training-fitness/perfect-pedal-stroke

morpheus

I try to imagine that my lower legs are just 'attached', a structural 'rod' between my driving force of the upper leg and the pedals. If you can 'pretend' that your calves are dormant, then the driving force to maintain cadence and power is predominantly coming from the bigger muscles of the upper legs. The calves are still being used, you won't be able to stop that. I think that the amount of work done by 'scraping the mud off of the bottom of your feet' is supposed to be included, just not the primary 'source of force'!

benvanmarcke

Personally i think it all starts with a good bike fit and for the rest there is no need to overthink it. In an IM you may be doing 25000 reps with each leg, if your rep is not natural i doubt it is possible to even get close to thinking about each rep in depth.

I think a good bike fit will automatically cause you to use the right muscle groups, and the only thing to add to that would be to work on your range of cadence. One of the training drills i often used to do was a 3 mile loop with one side slightly uphill and the other slightly downhill, and ride up on the biggest gear (cadence 50-60) and come back down on a very light gear (cadence 130). I found that to really help with the range of cadence i can ride at consistently, which meant that during racing i always got into a good comfortable and powerful rhythm / stroke.

Coach Rich

I think what you're getting at is there value (ie, more power applied to the rear wheel) in making an effort to pedal in a circle. By this you could say we mean working to apply power across all of the hours of the clockface (imagine your cranks are a clock, with the top of the pedal stroke being 12 o'clock. 

These are my notes and thoughts:

• Our leg muscles are designed primarily to apply force downward -- think walking, running, jumping, etc. To push downward, against the ground and push ourselves up or forward. 
• This push/ downward motion occurs mostly from about 1p to 8p on the clock face. ~8-12p is then mostly about returning our leg to the power phase.

This is/can be done by:

1. Pulling up on hip flexor of the returning leg, and/or
2. The pedaling leg pushing or assisting the returning leg's movement back up to 12p.

My primary thought is this: why worry about engaging a relatively small muscle, the hip flexor, into the work of applying power to the bike (actually pulling up on the pedals from 8-12) when it wasn't really designed for that and I have such bigger, better muscles to focus on and do that work with?

I've seen this with Powercranks, which force you to actually pull your leg up from 9-12: the hip flexor becomes so trashed that your leg learns it needs to rest during the power phase from 1-8p. The net is a loss of power at the rear wheel (and you could say a bit of de-training of those pushing muscles) until the hip flexor adapts to the point where it can pull it's own weight, so to speak. 

The net, I believe, is to just not overthink it. I personally just pedal the bike in whatever manner and cadence yields the most watts to the rear wheel. And I realize that if I see more power because I'm thinking more about "scraping mud" and therefore engaging my hamstring more from 5-8p, the ability to sustain that increased power is ultimately a fitness issue. That is, if I do _something_ different and I see more power...that power isn't free. It has to come from somewhere and the ability to sustain that increased power is ultimately a fitness issue. 

rmiller

I tend to agree with the idea that a bike fit really helps this. My personal case in point - I had a bike refit in the middle of the OS, and noticed a big difference immediately, and position-wise I was much more aggressive, being positioned over-top the pedals (the refit was on a road bike - the fit on a tri-bike even more-so). While it was great to see the end-of-OS power jump, being honest with myself I know that at least half that jump was due to the refit. And since the test was a 20' long segment - that is long enough to have fatigued little muscles. Ergo, the most likely explanation was that I was now engaging the glutes and larger muscles more.

Tom Glynn

I tend to agree with Rich in that the most important thing is to generate maximum power to the rear wheel for long periods of time.

I think it is also important to practice cycling at different cadences, especially if you plan to race over different terrains. I tent to spin naturally around 90 rpm or so, but will practice low cadence work that is required to get up some of the big hills around here.

For all the TP and WKO people, that's the whole point of quadrant analysis. Practice what you plan to race.