We all know about the advantages of fast cadence and a recent article in Cycling Weekly drew attention to different techniques in terms of using the ankles – Armstrong and Boonen use their ankles a lot, Pantani did a bit, and Anquetil kept his ankles stiff and his toes down.

Little however is written about direction of pedalling – well, it’s obvious isn’t it – straight down and straight up again, or as straight as you can do while pedalling in circles! If the force of your pedal stroke isn’t all going straight down onto the pedal, you’re wasting energy.

Next time you go out on your bike and there’s no traffic about, look down at your legs – are they going straight up and down, or are you riding bow legged or with one leg going straight down while the other knee flicks out near the top of the pedal stroke, as if fending off imaginary wasps? If you’re not sure, or don’t want to ride head down, get your best friend to ride behind you and ask for a report on your style.

We pedal as we do because of a phenomenon called muscle memory. If we learned to ride a bike and straightway started pedalling ‘straight down’, we are likely to have continued to ride that way. If we learned to ride a bike that was too small for us we may well ride bow legged. If we flick one knee out, who knows why?

East German cycling coaches discovered a method by which a rider could, in many cases, overcome these faults in technique, and would you believe it, it involved using a turbo trainer, and, what’s more, in the dark. You might have tried riding through Kelmarsh tunnel and panicked as you became disorientated, resulting in your parting company with your bike – it’s happened to me. The theory of the turbo in the dark is that you get a beneficial effect from disorientation in that it reprogrammes your muscle memory to the most effective movement – which is straight up and straight down.

I haven’t tried a turbo session in the dark, but I have tried closing my eyes for several minutes while using my turbo and it certainly had a disorientating effect. Mastercoach Dave Le Grys, who told me of this discovery, describes doing a whole turbo session in total darkness as ‘a weird experience’ – and I can well believe it. If you currently pedal like a donkey but want to pedal like Lance, it’s worth a try. It certainly makes more sense than lashing out on an Ultegra 10 speed when you have a perfectly serviceable 9 speed.

Training for speed

The point of training during the racing season is to be able to race faster, be it in road races or in time trials. The way to do this is to train at a higher intensity for short periods than you could sustain through a race. This gradually enables your body to adapt to enabling you to go faster throughout a race.
If you’ve been racing, you’ll know that it’s very hard work – it might even hurt. Here’s the crunch – if you’re going to go faster, you’re going to have to train by working even harder, and it will hurt even more, but for short periods.

There are various ways of doing this training:

If you can make it, I’d recommend the Thursday night chain gangs – riding in a group which will include riders faster than yourself. They ride a 10 mile flattish circuit and the strongest ride 3 circuits. It would be excellent training just to stay with the pace for one lap. If you’re intending to join the chain gang, they meet on Thursday evenings outside Church Langton School at 6.30 until the end of May and at 6.45 thereafter, but check the time on the club website to be sure.

A road ride where you ride easily for about 15 minutes to warm up, then into a gear that you can turn on the flat at 95-100 revs and ride flat out for 1 minute, then ride easy for 2 or 3 minutes until you feel recovered, then another minute flat out, and carry on alternating flat out bursts and recoveries until you’ve done 8 to 10 bursts, then ride easily home.

Replicate session 2 on a turbo trainer

Very short fast bursts on a turbo – warm up for 15 mins in low gear, then go onto big ring and into a gear that you can pedal, eyeballs out, at 115-120 revs per minute (or even higher) – ride it for 15 seconds, then ride 30 seconds easy in a low gear, then back to 15 seconds as hard as you can, followed by 30 seconds easy, and keep alternating for 10 minutes – which will give you 13 hard bursts. You then pedal easily for 5 mins and repeat the session, and if you’re still in reasonable shape, take another 5 minutes easy and repeat again, then warm down.

Observing club time trials

I’ve marshalled at a couple of events and have watched all the riders pretty carefully. Here are a few of my observations:

The fastest riders all ride at a high cadence – this is particularly so in the case of Alex Wise. I would have imagined it was higher, but he tells me that his cadence is mainly between 95 and 100 but may go up to 110 in places.

Riders who go into a tight corner in a high gear and at low cadence often drift wide and are unable to accelerate rapidly out of the corner.

When you’re riding into the wind, never get out of the saddle – to do so instantly makes you less aerodynamic – any extra force you might put on the pedals is more than cancelled out by the poorer position.

When you ride into the wind, choose a gear that you feel comfortable with, not the gear that you think you ought to use in a time trial – i.e. nothing lower than 53x15. There’s nothing wrong with using the 39 ring – a gear that keeps your cadence high is always best.

You’ll notice that sessions 2, 3 and 4 above are all about fast pedalling, and if you try to ride at low cadence on the chain gang, you’ll drift off the back of the group on the first gentle incline.

Dave Birch
May 2005