The Time-Crunched Cyclist Podcast by CTS
Coach Adam Pulford delivers actionable training advice and answers your questions in short weekly episodes for time-crunched cyclists looking to improve their cycling performance. The Time-Crunched Cyclist Podcast (formerly The TrainRight Podcast) is brought to you by the team at CTS - the leading endurance coaching company since 2000. Coach Adam pulls from over a decade of coaching experience and the collective knowledge of over 50+ CTS Coaches to help you cut throught the noise of training information and implement proven training strategies that’ll take your performance to the next level.
The Time-Crunched Cyclist Podcast by CTS
Episode 183: The Science Behind a Great Pedal Stroke, with Coach Charlie Livermore
Key topics in this episode:
- How power is produced through the pedal stroke
- The muscle used for producing power on the bike
- Torque effectiveness and the creation of an effective pedal stroke
- Synchronizing the top and bottom of your pedal stroke
Resources:
- Youtube video of this episode (includes visuals described in audio version)
- Articles:
- Research:
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Guest: Charlie Livermore
Charlie Livermore first worked in Pro Cycling in 1989 with the Wheaties-Schwinn Cycling Team. Then he worked with Chris Carmichael at USA Cycling before spending three years with the Coors Lite Cycling Team, and finally seven years at the helm of the Volvo/Cannondale Pro MTB Team. In 2004, Charlie founded and operated a cycling performance center in Northern California. In 2006 he co-founded Continuum Sports, the management company of the BMC Pro Cycling Team. He joined CTS as a coach in 2011.
Host
Adam Pulford has been a CTS Coach for more than 14 years and holds a B.S. in Exercise Physiology. He's participated in and coached hundreds of athletes for endurance events all around the world.
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From the team at CTS. This is the Time Crunch Cyclist podcast, our show dedicated to answering your training questions and providing actionable advice to help you improve your performance even if you're strapped for time. I'm your host, coach Adam Pulford, and I'm one of the over 50 professional coaches who make up the team at CTS. In each episode, I draw on our team's collective knowledge, other coaches and experts in the field to provide you with the practical ways to get the most out of your training and ultimately become the best cyclist that you can be. Now onto our show. Welcome back, time Crunch fans. I'm your host, coach Adam Pulford. Cadence it's a simple thing, but it has its complexities and it plays a huge role in cycling performance. It's measured in RPMs, which stands for revolutions per minute. Some athletes prefer low cadence, some prefer high, while research always has its own suggestions To develop the case for good pedaling and why we need to develop a wide range of cadences. I've got with me today a longtime friend and fellow CTS coach, charlie Livermore. Charlie, welcome to the show.
Speaker 2:I think it's great to be here. Adam, Thank you for inviting me.
Speaker 1:Yeah, totally no, it's awesome to have you here. I think our audience is in for a big treat today as we talk about Cadence bikes and all things training. For our audience, who may not know you as well as I do, can you tell us a bit more about yourself?
Speaker 2:Yeah, oh man, it's a long story. I'm old. I started probably about 35 years ago and I got into cycling because I watched Alexey Greirwald win the gold medal in LA 84 and I started riding bikes after that. I got into it. I just loved it. It was a long story. The interesting part of the story is that three or four years after that I became pretty good friends with Chris because, remember, chris was from Miami, I was also from Miami. Then I ended up working when Chris became the national team coach. I worked with him for all the way up to the Barcelona Olympics.
Speaker 2:That period is when I really got into understanding performance and being exposed to some really good coaches and some really good physiologists. When that ended, I ended up working with a bunch of professional cycling teams. My exposure was to the best people. We were all the way to the BMC team, which I worked with for 14 years, volvo Cannondale before that. It was a long time. I had my own brick and mortar training center in Mill Valley, california, moved to Colorado and started working with CTS. That was like 10 years ago already. Unbelievable. It's a long story, but I love coaching. It's my full-time job. It has been cycling. It has been my full-time thing for a good 30 years. Now, here I am, finally I'm doing a podcast for the first time. This is your first podcast. I didn't know that. This is my first podcast, yeah.
Speaker 1:You're looking pro today. You're looking pro as always, charlie. We actually haven't done a podcast on cadence or pedaling before. I'm really excited for this one. The idea for this started when Charlie and I were in Mallorca recently for a training camp. We had a really good discussion about cadence and training, cadence and all this kind of stuff. Charlie busted out his go-to presentation. I was like all right, we need to get you on the podcast and talk more about this. We have so much to talk about. We're actually going to split it up into two podcasts. Today is going to be a little bit more educational, showing what the research says as well as what Charlie and I, as coaches, deploy to our athletes. The second episode is going to be more of that application. This is going to be a good one. Definitely tune in this weekend next to get the full scoop of everything. Charlie, you ready to dive in?
Speaker 2:I'm ready.
Speaker 1:All right, let's do it All right. Charlie, when we're out there as coaches, we watch riders and we say ah, she's got a good cadence, she's got a bad cadence, he's got a good cadence. What does that mean? What does a good cadence look like to you?
Speaker 2:I like to think about it in two parts. One is the pedal stroke, because the cadence is really mostly the speed, it's the revolutionist per minute, as you said. I like to look at it because you can have a person who has an ugly pedal stroke and is pedaling at 110 RPMs. They have good cadence if they're applying it at the right time, but they are not very efficient. That's a very unusual thing at that, but let's say 90 RPMs. So really it's the pedaling that I look at.
Speaker 2:That's what I kind of like know with a lot of when I do camps, for example, because we're remote coaches and we don't see the athletes until they come to the camps and so, and you know, I haven't seen. So I've been coaching an athlete for 10 years. I've never seen him, period, and so I don't know how he pedals, and so we see them and then you know you can tell when somebody is pedaling smoothly and you can see when they're not. You know, and then, and then the other part is you can see when they're applying the cadences at the right times or not. And so we'll talk about both of those things because you know they're both relative.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and that's it. And I think this is a little bit of a like a confusing thing. When we say, oh, he's got good cadence, what we actually mean is he's got good technique of pedaling and the cadence is just the RPMs, and that's that's what I want to clarify with that.
Speaker 2:Right, right, that's exactly right. And so you know. It's like. You know the French word for the, you know the suples, you can tell when somebody you know has a beautiful pedal stroke. In Mallorca we were, we had the privilege of riding with Johann Linares.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 2:I mean, you know, olympic track champion, world champion, and we rode all day with that guy and I just I just sat behind him and just watched his pedal stroke and I was like, yeah, that is just so beautiful and it's just, it looks so easy.
Speaker 1:It was incredible and that's what I, you know. I consider that a beautiful cadence, right, a beautiful pedal stroke, yes, and to give some context to this for our audience, very decorated athlete with Johann and 10 time world champ, multi-time Olympic medalist, I think the gold medal, and anyway he rides his bike for fun now, but that technique is never gone and it's beautiful to watch him ride, for sure, and that's what we're talking about with, with where we're going with his conversation, right, developing that efficiency and that that kind of like dance on the pedals.
Speaker 2:Exactly.
Speaker 1:Exactly so, Charlie. We know we can see that as coaches being around bikes and athletes as long as we have, but what does the science suggest about developing good pedaling technique?
Speaker 2:They're basically. So. There's been a couple of a couple of studies and I got my notes here so I don't mess them up because I can't remember that well but you know there was one study that looked, you know, looked at 11 active Spanish. You know no part, you know no coincidence. Base pros that you know were GC guys or time trial guys, classic guys, and they all had an amazing Palmar. So either one, you know, a classic, I mean, they were the top guys and and they have, you know, different ranges of VO2 max aerobic capacities, and what they found in this study is that the ones that had the lower aerobic capacities made up that kind of difference by being more efficient in the pedal stroke and the smoother, and so the riders with the relatively low aerobic capacity were able to compensate for the handicap by being much more efficient, resulting in their requiring less energy to generate a particular power output. And so that's that's really what we're. You know, everybody wants that. Everybody should want that.
Speaker 2:Another interesting, another interesting this came out in 2016,. Garcia Lopez was that they wanted to, you know, finally say okay, is there a difference between world tour riders and, let's say, elite riders? So, maybe, like domestic pros or you know U23 guys, or you know up and coming juniors. You know it's like what were the difference? Because they're all great and they they did this test intran, interestingly, at 200, 250 and 300 watts. So you know, that's, that's all, mostly.
Speaker 2:Zone two, you know a little bit higher. You know it's not really big, but what they noticed is that there was a big difference in the way that the pro tour riders pedaled other than the other ones, and the difference was that the professionals had higher proportion of positive force through the entire pedal stroke not the entire pedal stroke, and we're going to get into the, you know the amount that you can do so they had a better duty cycle, they were making torque in a greater part of the duty cycle or a greater part of the of the pedal stroke, and they also had tendencies towards a lower maximal torque than the elite and the club riders. That means that, you know, along the pedal stroke they were actually making less peak powers than the others to make the same power, and that's because they were starting early, earlier, and so they didn't have to make as much power through the big power zone which is, you know, but let's say, two to four o'clock, if you know, if you want, if you will, on the clock, and they followed through, you know, through the bottom. So they had a bigger duty cycle, which then led to a need to make less big powers in that 2 to 4 area.
Speaker 2:And, as you know, when we're making big, big power, the more power we're making, more muscle we're recruiting and more energy we're doing. There's more fatigue in that, and so that's probably why and the study doesn't go on this way my theory is that that's probably why the Protor guys can do a monument. And you take some of these other cyclists that we were mentioning, the elite guys, and in an 80 to 100 mile race they could probably hang in there pretty fine. But then you go to 150 miles and it's a big difference and I think at that level the pedaling efficiency makes a big difference.
Speaker 1:So to recap some of that with some of the terminology duty cycle? Not too sure, but you're referring to the time period where the cyclist is producing power. They start to produce power and then they end the production of power throughout the pedal stroke. That's the duty cycle.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's when they're making torque.
Speaker 1:When they're making torque and then the pros. So in the period of the duty cycle where it like what? Like three to five, where a lot of people tend to push more, it seems like recreational riders have a bigger torque or bigger peak power through there and the pro riders have less and that's simply made up for in a kind of a longer duty cycle. Is what you're saying?
Speaker 2:Exactly that's what the study showed. Yeah, exactly, there's a, there's a, there's another, and this is here's a quote. Greater power production associated with increased duty cycle likely occurs because the extension phases for the whole leg, ankle and knee and hip joints generally started earlier in the pedal cycle and continued later into the cycle. So that's that's exactly what we're talking about. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:And we've got, I think we have a slide that we're going to show a little bit, you know, in a little bit, but yeah, so you know. So I think that there's. You know, I've been thinking about this for a long time. You know, I'm not a gifted cyclist by any means. I don't have any good genetics. I have a very low VO too, but I but you know. So you know, and I but I love technique and anything that I do. You know, when I was a skier, I wasn't like I didn't care about going fast, I just wanted to carve perfect turns. You know both edges and I'm the same, I'm a geek. But when I go out riding my bike, at the end of the day, when I come back, you know, I'm happy when I had a good pedal. So I think about going out of my bike and like going out and getting and pedaling really well. So I go for a good pedaling and and I think pedaling is a place where a lot of people leave, you know, performance on the table.
Speaker 1:I would agree with that for sure, and it's it's something, because it is so simple, like it's a very fixed sort of motion that we all have to, you know, pedal through, like get on your bike. We teach kids to ride a bike when they're very, very young, right, um, because it's so simple. I think that good technique is often overlooked. So, if you want to now, charlie, we can go into that presentation, because I like to, I'd like to learn and teach our audience how power is actually made and then get into some of the specifics of pedaling technique. So, with that audience, if you're on YouTube, bring up your uh, definitely, watch now, because we're going to share some visuals, um, with you. If you're not on YouTube, what we're going to do is do our best to visually describe what we're pulling up. So, as I pull up this first slide, I'll turn it back over to Charlie and we'll look at how power is actually made.
Speaker 2:Okay, you know, this first slide is really, you know, kind of a case, um for cadence. It's not so much about the pedaling technique, but it's making a case, you know, for cadence and you, you know you want different cadences to manage, you know the force requirements of the intensity that you're making. And this simply just shows you that when cadence goes down at a fixed power, when cadence goes down, the force comes up. And so at 200 Watts, you can see that at 40 RPMs, uh, 21 newt meters is, you know, approximately equal to, you know, 46 pounds. You know it's pretty small on my screen, but 40 something pounds. And then you can see, as you go up in cadence, that force requirement really becomes much less. And so now you're at 100 RPMs. At 200 Watts, you're approximately, at, you know, 28 pounds that you're moving. Those are not accurate numbers, but they're made to demonstrate, I think, that the curve is correct. Um, and so you know the. And I'd like to just make one.
Speaker 2:One side thing here is when you're making 50 Watts, or if you're sitting in a group and you're and you're making a hundred Watts or 75 Watts you shouldn't really be, you know, spinning and having high cadence, um, and when you're making big Watts, you know, and you're putting a lot of force on the pedals, you should be increasing your cadence. So the training of cadence, which we're going to get into in part two, is about, you know, training the athlete to have a wide quiver of cadences that they're comfortable with, that they can pedal really well, make good torque, with a wide range of cadences. Um, you know, that are appropriate for the demands of what they're doing in the moment and and as you know, in cycling it's very stochastic. Uh, you know you could be like, you know, pedaling along and all of a sudden, you know you got to accelerate and you got decelerate and you got to accelerate. So, you know, being able to put torque, you know, along that spectrum is what we're, you know, hoping. You know to kind of show you how to practice this.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's and that's a good way to put it, charlie, because it because it's like we do this a little innately and I think that when you've been along the sport as much as you and I, um, that's a pretty simple thing to identify with. But for a new person jumping into a group ride, if you're focused on like cadence and you're like you hear this podcast, I'm like, okay, uh, coach Charlie said 100 RPMs. That's not the thing to focus on, um, because, as you said, that the nature of these things is very up and down. Right, we need to get to a point where we instinctively, um, and you know, subconsciously, can feel and know what the cadence is, at the right speed and the the right uh output, and that's what we're going to get to here.
Speaker 2:But essentially, for all of our listeners as well, uh, what's what we're demonstrating is is this uh presentation to kind of show the extremes of cadence as well as force output, which should then kind of translate into well, you got less force per pedal stroke at higher RPMs, and this is aerobic over time, but we'll get there too 15, 20 years ago, when I was, when I was advocating for and back then I was wrong, by the way, but I was advocating for circles, and now I'm not advocating for circles but I'm advocating for half circles, but anyway, um, and and you know, and people was like, no, it's just like, just pounce on the pedals, it's pounce on the other pedals and, uh, you know, it's from two to four. Two to four, you know, that's all you need to do. Well, from two to four. If you look at, at, at this kind of, uh, you know this um, this diagram here for our listeners.
Speaker 1:here we've got a diagram of a of a complete pedal revolution and we're essentially we have numbers that are correlating with, like the kind of the top of the pedal stroke, um, all the way back around, so one, two, three, four, five, six, with six being kind of the the very back of the pedal stroke, at the upper end. So visually that's kind of like what to think about as you're listening. But hop on YouTube because this is a good thing to go through.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so. So basically this is just showing the muscle activation around, you know, the, the entire pedal stroke, and actually the numbers at them are um, are related to the, the actual muscle groups, um, and and so if you look at from two to four um, if, if you, there's not really a two to four on here, but if you kind of visualize that, you know, two o'clock to four o'clock is mostly where the red is, where number two is, which is your quadriceps, and so I think people generally tend to use their quadriceps as their primary mover, you know their founder right, because they're, because at that point your hip is already pretty much extended as much as it's going to extend, and so now we're just extending the knee and then that's all the quadricep does, is just extends the knee joint, and so we want to use two joints. We want to use the hip joint primarily and then the knee joint, um, as a, not secondary, because it's very powerful too, but we want to use them together. So if you look at the, at the circle, if you can start to produce some kind of force really early, you know you can start to produce some kind of force really early and you can see the shoe at the very top is just behind 12 o'clock. It's almost behind 12 o'clock and we can kind of like slide it over by using the glutes. Now you can see that from that 12 o'clock almost to one, that first part of the pedal stroke, and this is what that study kind of said.
Speaker 2:This is like extending the duty cycle. You can see that it's all glutes, it's all hip extend, it's not just the glutes, it's the hip extension, let's say complex, but it's big glutes and your glutes are probably the biggest muscles in your body. You've got so much meat back there. If you have developed glutes and they're very powerful, All you have to do is go into a to prove that is, go into a gym and see how much you can squat, and then go and do a leg extension and see how much you can extend the knee, and so the glutes are big and so the glutes are involved, and then the glutes and the quadriceps is involved, and then you start to get into a lot of the posterior chain.
Speaker 2:Well, the glutes, the posterior chain as well. What I really like about this slide, you know, you can kind of like really look at and see where everyone kind of starts to. You know, all the muscles start to activate in the pedal stroke. But what I like to point out is how much more the pedal stroke is a posterior muscle chain action than it is an anterior. And so when we push, it's anterior, when we do it really well, we're mostly it's mostly a posterior muscle chain action.
Speaker 2:Meaning the backside of the leg, the backside of the leg, exactly, yeah, exactly the backside of the leg. And you know, and even if you were thinking mostly about pushing on the pedals and thinking about the quads and your quads, you know, start to get acidic really, really quick. You know there's a really good case to like, you know, let's, let's recruit some glutes and some hamstrings and some calves, and you know, and, and, by the way, the calves, if you notice, it's really in the sweep, it's not plantar flexion, it's mostly just, you know, sweeping back, and so it's really it's, it's really kind of like pedaling from the hips. That's what. That's what I like to think about is like pedaling from the hips, not pedaling from the knee joint.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and this, this visual demonstrates it well. And I think, and again for listeners, hop on YouTube. If you didn't know, we're there, check it out. But this is kind of like the educational part of it, so go ahead and do that. Should we move on to the next Charlie?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think so, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:Okay, and I think this is probably my favorite one, because this, this drives, this visually, drives home really what we're talking about in the way of kind of a good pedal stroke. But, charlie, I'll have you describe everything that's going on here for both our visual learners and our audio listeners.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so you know this is a an equation around torque effectiveness and you know the definition of torque is the effective rotational force that is applied to the pedals during each pedal stroke. Effective rotational force, that means that there's no radial forces, it's all tangential forces, so it's applying force in the shape of the of the pedal stroke, if you will. What I like about this is that the make no mistake, nobody will. I would never argue that the area to make the greatest power is definitely two to four. You know, because that's the thing that I keep getting. You know, push back on when, when, when. You know, I talk about this and you're right, it is two to four, you're right. But you're not totally right if you're saying that you know it's like and so what, what?
Speaker 2:And then the other, the other thing, that this, the other myth that this kind of clobbers is.
Speaker 2:You know the whole, you know circles, and that's you know, and I was a, you know, I was a circle guy many years ago and really it's half moons because if you, if you look where, when you're, when one leg is going through the top, the other leg is coming through the bottom and so there's no force on the back of the pedal stroke.
Speaker 2:You know, all you're doing is unweighting your leg, just getting it out of the way, making sure that you know you're not weighting it so that you're not, you know, carrying that weight with your other pedal. You probably want a little bit of dorsiflexion on the back there, but all that is the dorsiflexion is just to get your foot in the shape or in the angle to be able to slide it over the top. Because if you, if you kind of pull over the top and your ankle angle is really open at the very top of the pedal stroke, you're not going to be able to, you know, put that little bit of force that you can see that little shade of blue that starts, you know, before 12 o'clock and then a big duty cycle. So this shows two things how what a maximum duty cycle should look like, and it also shows you know where the peak power is really made, which is, you know, when you're both glutes, hip extension and knee extension are happening at the same time.
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly. And for the audio people, just as a summary, if your crank arms are a clock and you've got noon at the top and six at the bottom, these are the numbers that we're referring to. And really that duty cycle or the starting point of that force production kind of started at 11, 1130. And then catching through yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:And pushing through with the maximum power. You know, kind of between that two and four, which, as Charlie said, no one can argue that there's a lot of power production being, you know, produced through there. But the kind of the new thing is it sweeps all the way down to like 630 or seven Right. And then you know I think that and this is something that I've been preaching forever is like don't worry about the backside, because if you're pedaling properly, that leg just needs to get out of the way as the other leg is doing its work and focus on making those half moons, half moons half moons or half circles, and the thing is, you know when you're.
Speaker 2:the thing is, you know you are pedaling circles because you have two half circles. Each leg is producing a half circle, right, and so in a way it is a circle because there's torque constantly on the crank. There's always one crank that is in the production of torque, you know, and so, and if you get the synchronization right, that to me is where you know the light bulbs go off. You know, like, and we're going to. I think the next slide is the sink slide, but I love this slide because it really shows what a maximum duty cycle is. It's like a half moon, half circle. It shows that, yes, the biggest power is from two to four, but you can like get some momentum, you know, over the top so that you don't have to put as much peak power. And that's what the that study that Garcia did showed.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, exactly. So let's let's take a look at the synchronization, because that is the next piece of the puzzle, in my opinion, to having a good pedal stroke and having good technique to feel that even tension throughout. So Charlie described this. This what's going on in this next slide?
Speaker 2:Yeah, you know, this is how I, you know try to get people to practice. You know really good pedaling, because we're already great at producing power from two to four. You know we, you know because we're walkers, you know we're really good at, you know, throwing our legs straight down. You know and, and so when, when we're pedaling, we don't need to focus on something that we're really good on. We should focus on the parts that we're not good at, and so what I what I try to get folks to do is is to really just focus on these two parts of the pedal stroke when they're pedaling, you know, early describe that these two parts of the pedal stroke.
Speaker 1:For those just listening.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so the the area from?
Speaker 1:We describe is like 11 to one ish for the top.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, that's okay. So, from a clock perspective, what we're looking at here is we're looking at a Portion of the pedal stroke that's from about 11 to 1 on the, on the leg that's coming over the top, and and then the leg that is actually, you know, has been through the big part of the of the, you know of the power, and is sweeping through, which, by the way, it's the leg that has the most momentum, and so really, you know you should use that momentum as much as you can. The that is going to be from, let's say, five to seven. So if you look on a clock, they're exactly the same. How would I say that's Adam, they're exactly the same Places on the clock and just opposite parts. You know one is, one is here and the others is here.
Speaker 1:Metrical. Yeah, it was symmetrical. Thank you.
Speaker 2:And so what if you can get both legs to actually Create force here? It's an unbelievable how fast you can accelerate when you can get this going. And this is where the practice to me happens is just thinking about you know the. You know Pedaling from 11 to 1 and pedaling from from. You know five, or, yeah, five to seven. The rest is going to be Natural because you know we all do that from the rest of the part of it the last little part of this may be.
Speaker 1:It's really the feeling to go out and practice, just starting to activate the muscle just a little bit sooner. And then the backside. And I don't know, charlie, how do you do that yourself? Or how do you describe to do that? You're, you're, yeah.
Speaker 2:Well, you know the technique for that and so you know how do you get your, your cleat, your foot to, you know, go through this perfect like spot on the pedal stroke, on both the top and the bottom, and that's the key is, how do you control your. You know how you move your legs on the bike and you know before we start to get into that, you know we have to say that you got to be in a really good bike fit to be able to do this. You've got to be a, you've got to be sitting on your bike in a way where you're your falker and your lovers. And we're gonna, we're gonna. I'm gonna show you a really primitive slide that I made that shows in here it is you know that you're basically, you know, controlling a lever which is the femur, the primary lever, and cycling is the femur and the primary fulcrum is the hip joint, you know the greater trochanter right. And so if you're sitting on your bike correctly, these two joints, that there were these two fulcrums and those two levers, that the other fulcrum, by the way, is the knee joint, will be going around the that circle. That is fixed because the bike, you know, because of whatever bike you're on and whatever crank length you're on, and all that. You can't manipulate that. So the only thing you can manipulate is is your position around it and that is in a really good bike fit. And so if you're a really good bike fit, you got a really good hip hinge and you're sitting on your bike really well, you're, you're, you know you're, you're planted on the saddle really well, then you can really control your, your, your, your levers much better than if you're not.
Speaker 2:And so what this slide shows is that most people on the right side of this slide we're looking at how most cyclists over flex, so they kind of like you know, they're trying to make power on the backside and they over flex, they bring the knee up too high and they then, on the downstroke, they take the knee, the knee down too far, they go too far, and so it creates a radio force at the top. That's one problem, right, because now you're at 11 o'clock or so, when you're on the bike or so, when you want to start to put power on the pedals, you're actually still pulling it up and your ankle joint is really open, and so you can't really slide over the top. You can't really. You can't have an early application or force or a big duty cycle over the top, likewise on the bottom we need some.
Speaker 2:You know, humans need some kind of Signal of when it's not time to take the next step when we're walking, and that's when we hit the ground, and and so you know, generally most Cyclists are waiting to feel that signal from that radio force that they're putting at the bottom of the pedal stroke before they start to pull back. Because there is no signal otherwise, you know so, and so that causes, you know, big problems with cadence and and Because you're putting radio forces on on the pedals.
Speaker 1:So so it's really like when we're running, for example, it's the concentric muscle action and the eccentric muscle action that we have for that, like that feedback, so like a pushing, slightly pulling, and we only have concentric in cyclins push, push, push like right right, you know, in, in. So when we're talking about push a little sooner In and then push a little sooner on one side, push a little sooner on that side, that's that little extra Nudge that we're trying to encourage and that's what this this charts kind of shown over the top.
Speaker 2:And so when we're running or walking, we know that it's time to take the next step. When we hit the ground, and in cycling, we're waiting for some kind of signal to start to, you know, the flexion part of the pedal stroke, if you will, the bottom part, the sweep through the bottom. Generally they're not sweeping through the bottom, they're going straight down until they get the signal and then they start to come back. That's the big problem with the extension part, which generally is a bigger problem than the flexion, but that's the big problem with the extension. And when we start talking about high cadence, you know, when we start to kind of like, you know, you know, start to bounce in the saddle and do all those things, it's really a problem of, you know, flexion and extension. You know it's over flexing, overextending. The timing is everything. And so if you look at the range of motion, adam, of that knee joint compared to the range of motion on the more correct way of pedaling, where you're not really reaching the bottom and you're not over flexing and you're using a little bit of dorsiflexion to get the foot in the proper position to be able to push across the top, you can see that the range of motion is significantly different from.
Speaker 2:You know a really compact, nice pedal stroke suplease than you know this big. You know long, overextension, over flexion, and when we're talking about high cadence it's easier to, you know, move anything over a short period of time or short, you know a short distance. You're going to be a faster peddler just from the fact that you're not moving your levers as much as you would when you're overextending and over flexing, and so it's really the lever control and that's like you can decide how you know how high you bring your femur up and how low you take it down. You know you have that control and to do that you can't just like sit on the pedals. You can't just lay on the pedals and allow, you know, the pedals to kind of like dictate where you're going. You have to have the control from the hips and that's where you know pedaling from the hips is, you know, to me the key to this it's kind of like the core and the hips and it's up high and really the you know the pressure on the pedals is always kind of the same. You know, throughout the. You know throughout the.
Speaker 2:You know the half moon.
Speaker 1:No, that's really good. I mean, I haven't seen it done better myself in the way of like a cadence, like technique demonstration, rather than some of those slides that Charlie just went through. But it's all, especially in this, I would say, platform of education and communication, and in a podcast. It's a little tricky to always do that, and now we're like. Now the question is, how the hell do we do that Right? So listen, you know hearing what they just heard from you, which was very rich, how can they take that and go apply it to their bike? What do we focus on?
Speaker 2:There's a couple of things we can focus on is is really think about when you're pedaling. Is pedaling from, with your the leg that is about to extend is just to think about the pedal stroke from. You know 11, maybe 1130, just before noon, before 12, and you know to one and at the same time thinking about four to six and just doing that and trying to synchronize that. And now you can't do that when you're doing intervals. You can't do that when you're, you know, when you're doing high cadence drills and we're going to get into why high cadence drills actually help this process of learning. This, you know, without having to think about it too much, but it's really just kind of like that in the bottom, the top, in the bottom, the top in the bottom, and just focusing on that. And the best time to do that is when you're on these kind of long.
Speaker 2:You know your coach says I want you to go for an easy zone to ride, and they're like, oh, it's so boring. You know it's like I, okay, I got something for you, you know, to focus on that's going to make it a lot less boring. I want you to try to do this. And then I go through a kind of a little bit of a progression I want you to try to get. I want you to, just one time, as you're doing this, you know, try to try to control your, your femur, in the pedal stroke and and, and, and try to just get that synchronization and and you know, try to get it one time.
Speaker 2:One time, you know, and then try to get it two times and try to get it, and then just really focus on that and and you know, when they start to, you know being able to do it for 30 seconds. It's incredible how, you know, their cadence goes up, naturally, because now they're not hitting any corners, they're not hitting any stops. It's really good torque, it's all tangential forces and so, because there's no resistance on these, you know radial forces, you know, all of a sudden your legs just start moving much, you know, much more freely. So it's really about going out and doing 11 to two, and you know five to five to seven, 11 to two to five to seven, and just trying to do that. You know one leg and the other, and just you know, and seeing how that works.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I agree with that. I think endurance is the place to start with that inside and out, inside much more controllable and it's a good little like mental, like technique to use. And I like to say try to you know, feel that even pedal stroke when you're coming through and coming down the bottom, and it's a super, super weird I don't know a better way to describe it other than what Coach Charlie said but that synchronization between the two and just work on that. It can be 30 seconds at a time, a minute at a time. If you're an amazing Focusser and you can do it for five minutes at a time your first time, that's great, and then you just play around with it.
Speaker 1:I don't have a recipe and I also encourage people to just use whatever cadence that feels natural. I wouldn't manipulate that. When you're first trying this technique, use what feels good. But I guess Charlie too like because I don't even think that this is old school, because this is just like teaching Technique but do you know of any technology out there that can give you the feedback immediately To see if you're having a beautiful pedal stroke, like what we described through some of the research like an at-home sort of technology?
Speaker 2:Yeah, there's, there's a. You know I I have a Watt bike and you know, at home, and you know the Watt bike has a really nice, you know, pedaled efficiency screen.
Speaker 1:And is it like the spin scan from compi trainer that they use?
Speaker 2:It is, except it doesn't. Yeah, except the spin scan seemed to be more like a key nut and you know it's like the Watt bike seems to be more where it's oval.
Speaker 1:Yeah, beforehand we were talking about Leomo as a portable cycling cadence Analysis tool. I haven't worked with that personally, I don't know if you have, but I know that there's. There's a little bit more technology there than Than I know of.
Speaker 2:anyway, from from that aspect, yeah, that's the only, that's the only technology that I know of that that you can actually use outside. So you know it has these, these sensors that you put in certain parts of your shoes. And I listened to all that because you know I'm so interested in pedaling. I've listened to a lot of the podcast and Adam Hansen the X, you know, the ex professional cyclist Was doing work with Leomo and he would do a lot of education on, and I listened to a lot of those podcasts and it's pretty robust. You know it'll show you, you know it actually show you the forces that you're putting. You know the tangential shows you, your, your, what that gives you like a dead spot score. And the dead spot score is really what we're trying to eliminate. You know it's like where do the? You know it's like we don't want any dead spots in the duty cycle. You know in that half moon, as you know, as little as possible. And so I think Leomo super interesting. I've never used it, but but I think that's really interesting.
Speaker 2:Another interesting thing is Velocity and and I'm not sure about this because you know this is Robbie Ventura's what would you call that indoor cycling group cycling platform. It's got some really cool Features where a teacher, you know the, the leader of the class, the coach of the class, can actually do some Games that show and it shows up on the screen. The coach will challenge you, let's say, to have a perfect pedal stroke or to keep look, you know the watts really really steady Throughout the entire pedal stroke and and to do that you got to have really good torque all the way around and constantly being the exact same torque all the way around. That was my favorite part of the velocity thing. I think that's what really sets it apart from you know other you know platforms. It has some really cool features and you know that's another Indoor application for that.
Speaker 1:Yeah and oh, man, this might be the spoiler alert if we keep it in the air, Charlie. But CTS a lot of that is a new offering that we're going to push out very soon. I think it's an in soft launch format, but, yeah, robbie Ventura over at Velocity has created a pretty cool platform with that and CTS is going to be a part of that More to come. But there are tools in there that help you to Effectively work on this technique and I you know the reason I bring up the, the technology, even though I don't know a ton about the technology is there's other things to give you feedback to work on this technique.
Speaker 1:I'm not saying and you're not saying to go out and spend Thousands of dollars on Leomo or go back to the old coffee trainer setup or anything like that, because what we're talking about with feeling the pedal stroke a little bit sooner, a little bit later, don't worry so much about that like that big push motion, because that's going to happen naturally, and incorporate it into your endurance rides. Start there from an application of how to improve your technique and I think you'll start to feel and notice quite a bit in the way that you pedal for the, for the good, yeah. So I'd say to wrap this thing up, charlie, because you know, for time crunched coaches and time crunched cyclists, we've gone a little long here, but I really wanted to take the time to set everything up for next week, because we're going to be talking all about how to do this, how to incorporate it with different drills, rather than just thinking or feeling about it In an endurance ride.
Speaker 2:We'll have some workouts, some key workouts to do and some specific drills, but, outside the summary that I just gave, anything else that you want to add to that before we depart, and the only thing I would add is that you know the longer you've been riding and you know if you if, let's say you know you've been riding a long time, you're and you have habits and your duty cycle is not as good as it can be, it's going to feel a little strange. You're not going to have your best performance, so you don't want to. You know, if you're performing, you know, stick to what you're doing until you feel really comfortable, or if you have some break in your body Until you feel really comfortable, or if you have some breakthroughs, and try this, because it's not going to feel easy at the beginning, because if you're doing something different, you're using different muscle actions, different muscle patterns and they're not as trained as your normal muscle patterns are. So you know you got to be patient. It's a lot, you know.
Speaker 2:It's a process, you know. You know the first thing is really to get the aha moment so that you believe in it, and then that's the synchronization. For new riders I'd say, like you know, just start doing it as much as you can, because you don't have any bad habits, or you know, or different habits. I don't want to say you know bad, different habits and it's going to be easier for you, you know to start Fresh with this, then to actually, you know, change where you've been doing for a long period of time. But be patient, you know, give it a shot and, and you know, we'd love to hear some feedback.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's, that's true, and you can give your feedback by heading over to train right comm back slash podcast and there's a little button there that says ask a training question and you can submit anything there. You can submit a question to me or directly to Charlie On some questions about this, this episode in particular, I would say if they've been pretty if it pertains to actual training and actual like, intervals and stuff. Wait, listen to next week, we'll get into that. But also, if you go over to that same website, I've included different articles and other research journals Citing a lot of the information that coach Charlie and I discussed today. So if this kind of like cues you up to investigate a little bit more, I do have some really good stuff In there. Like I said, anything from research journals to articles from Selena Yeager and and other experts in the field. So with that, charlie, thank you for taking time today to talk to us about a beautiful pedal stroke and can't wait to Discuss with you more next week.
Speaker 2:Awesome, awesome, rob, thank you.
Speaker 1:Yeah, thank you. Thanks for joining us on the time crunch cyclist podcast. We hope you enjoyed the show. If you want even more actual training advice, head over to Train right comm back slash newsletter and subscribe to our free weekly publication. Each week you'll get in-depth training content that goes beyond what we cover here on the podcast. That'll help you take your training to the next level. That's all for now. Until next time, train hard, train smart, train right.
