Cadence & Training
 

Now that wonderful winter is upon us (northern hemisphere) i plan to ride more miles on a Kicker i got a few months ago. I've been doing some of the training sessions from ErgVideo, they are free.

One of the things i am not certain about is what my cadence should be. I've measured my FTP and my first training session was easy so i measured again and found i was about 20% too low from my first measurement. that aside, my first training session i was only spinning at @ 60 RPM. last night i spun higher at about 90 average and it was much more intense. I could only peak at about 120 for a couple of seconds before getting back down to the high 90s.

My question is, what is the general consensus regarding cadence while training (or just riding in general)?

thanks,
scott

Don't worry about it. As your fitness and power improves your natural comfortable cadence will increase. Pros who can ride for an hour at 5-6W/kg will typically have a cadence above 90 RPM at those power levels. Most riders will use relatively lower cadence at lower power levels.

Increasing your cadence won't improve your power or fitness on its own.

It takes time. People are also different.

I tend to lower the lower the power and higher the higher the power as a % of ftp. Very generally stated.

At first try to do the tougher work at a higher cadence and more SS work at a lower one.

No magic formula but 85 to 105 seems to be "it" for most folks. People do all sorts of workouts really slow or one legged and things, just ride man. Ride freaking hard. Your personal body will figure out what it prefers when the chips are down for each situation.

I do vehemently disagree though that cadence won't improve power delivery on its own if someone is way out of range to start with. If you're in the 60/70 range to start with, bumping up some would be a good idea.

Listen to up-tempo music with obvious beats.

At hour power I'm usually around 100. Pursuit power and higher, all bets are off. Could be 95, could be 110. Hill, flat?

Ride enough you can play with it too.

Your cadence should be whatever is comfortable for you. A lot of people go by the rule of thumb that 90 rpm is the only valid cadence, but the truth is it varies from person to person and with different aspects of your fitness. You're better off working to raise your aerobic capacity and let your cadence fall where it may.

Also, this is a great time of year for cross training.

Pedaling at high power and high cadence is a matter of training. As above, that combination is optimal for human performance, but not for all humans at all times. Work on gradually pushing the cadence up. I spend my fall and early winter working on the fundamentals, like pedaling and endurance work.

I think another worthwhile educational point is to be aware of the need for neuro-muscular training. This is nowhere near as magical as it may sound, I see it as simply the aclimation of your body and legs to accomplish pedaling smoothly once the saddle is positioned reasonably well. This is one reason beginners can't cadence fast, because the legs and feet (and core) are not yet acclimated to all fire at their correct moments. It's not just our quads nor just our glutes.

I have to go through this clumsiness for at least a little while every time I return to the bike after a few days off. I used to get frustrated and worried, but now I just accept it.

This is a very good point. A good symptom of good cycling neuro-muscular coordination is the ability to pedal fast without bouncing in the saddle. An experienced cyclist should be able to pedal well over 120 rpm without bouncing. How to do this? Nothing works except practice. Bouncing in the saddle is wasted energy.

i'll agree with the bouncing bit. Last year i spent winter on a CompuTrainer at my LBS and learned a lot. I am so much more steady riding now. when i am training at home i can easily catch up and read technical documents on my laptop if that is any measure. Just need mental scrolling functionality.

I live in Reno, NV so am at about 4400 feet. the air is thinner here but i know others have it worse. i can handle the 90 RPM during a 1:20 hour session easily, no bouncing. I am just not sure at what rate i should be doing it at. i'll stick with the 90 and train up from there.

thanks,
scott

My understanding is that the 90 number comes from human natural gait frequency when running. It's probably coded in our DNA. I like climbing at @~80, flat @~88, hard intervals @~96. But everyone's a little different and competitive cadence in highly trained cyclists will be higher.

I read a recent thread also, about learning to ride fixed on real roads, with holes, gaps chasms, railroad tracks, speed bumps, and all manner of road disturbances. On fixed (versus single) you live these road adventures more fully than on a freewheel bike, as well because if its a track frame its probably steep, skittish, has maximum power transfer (i.e. stiff), and you have to keep pedaling in sync as your front wheel and your back wheel are propelled over the bump independently. Another level of neuromuscular training!

The best indicator of performance is performance itself.

Was your goal to be able to spin in Z2 while reading documents on a laptop, or being faster on a bicycle?

If the former, then you succeeded. If the later, not entirely sure what the result was but I find that this "smoothness" is simply a matter of getting your butt in the saddle often enough and in enough situations that you learn it anyway without focusing on it.

After having to eat, drink, change clothes, bunny hop obstacles, ride no hands enough times out on the road........you learn to ride well enough to do those things.

If you do the right workouts, you'll stress your body enough that it'll figure out the most efficient or "smooth" way to pedal or sit or generate power.

<sarc>yes. that was exactly my goal, to read while riding. next up i'll be training to cook dinner and after that..? who knows...maybe surgery.</sarc>

I'd love to be able to make tacos on a long ride. 🌮

I realize that some of the cognoscenti here crap on my training prescriptions to improve pedaling ability. However none of the said cogs have ever tried it, so as far as I'm concerned, they are "excused from the conversation." Be that as it may, so far BFers who have adopted it found a lot of improvement in their ability and comfort on the bike. We don't just put our butts in the saddle and ride. To the contrary, we do intervals of every conceivable type in pursuit of increased fitness. Why some would say that certain types of intervals should not be done is beyond me, especially since they're never tried them. IMO it's a issue of not wanting to have the facts change one's mind about something.

Anyway, nothing personal here, quite the contrary. I'd invite you to have a go at it and get back to us with your results. Here's what one does: on rollers or a trainer, warm up well for say 15', then put the bike in some low gear and pedal 115-120 cadence in HR zone 2 for 40 minutes without a break - or failing that, until you can't do it anymore. The low effort is important, the idea being that smooth pedaling should actually take little effort. Power is unimportant because the idea is to tease out the simple physiological effort of making the legs go around and decrease that, thus making more effort available for power production in normal riding. One gets better at this with weekly practice - for many weeks.

The leg pain/TSS ratio is quite high and thus this makes a decent recovery effort a couple days after a hard ride. Good blood perfusion in the legs at a low TSS cost. When I was ~60, I could hold 117 average cadence at a 118 HR for 40 minutes, using a 42 X 19 gear on my rollers. Does nothing for short, hard efforts, but makes a difference over a long hard ride, and maybe on an hour FTP test, though I haven't tried that yet.

I do high and low cadence drills on the indoor trainer. No power meter, just cadence and speed sensors to get some confirmation of perceived effort to maintain a given speed.

Assuming a given speed, if I do low cadence, higher effort drills, my legs tire sooner but my heart rate stays lower. When I switch to high cadence at lower effort (again, using the speed sensor as a guide), my HR rises rapidly while my legs don't tire as much.

Pretty much confirms the conventional wisdom about the advantages and disadvantages of both -- see any of the articles in cycling websites that are rehashed about once a year ever since Armstrong made higher cadence a thing for us to debate.

One difference I've noticed since this summer...

For the past couplafew years I just pedaled naturally, which works about to 90 rpm pretty much like clockwork on most terrains. I'll dip into 50something rpm when standing to climb, and peak over 130 rpm on downhills (hard to be sure beyond 130 rpm because my Wahoo sensors aren't particularly accurate at faster cadence).

But I wasn't making much progress on climbs and decided to try lower cadence, harder effort. That coincided with getting an older bike that has Biopace chainrings. I found, as some other folks did, that eccentric Biopace rings lend themselves better to lower cadence. Spinning above 80 rpm felt unnatural. So I geared up and kept the cadence to around 60-80 rpm.

My legs got stronger, and I got a little faster on our roller coaster terrain west of town.

With the good weather we had until mid-October I mostly rode outdoors on the bike with Biopace rings. We had a cold snap toward the end of October and I had a respiratory infection, so I switched to indoor trainer sessions on the bike with conventional round chainrings.

It felt unnatural for awhile. I had lost the knack for higher cadence spinning. And I was very aware of the effort it took to physically lift my legs to spin at higher cadence while maintaining a speed consistent in any gear. When I switched to a harder gear and slower cadence, my heart rate decreased.

To be sure about the results I took the trainer bike on the road a few times recently with all the sensors running. Same results as on the indoor trainer. And I'm only about 0.5 mph slower overall on my 25 lb steel road bike that I use on the trainer, than on my sub-20 lb carbon bike. I just ride each a little differently, partly due to weight differences, partly due to the differences between round and eccentric chainrings.

So it'll take awhile to get comfortable again with the cardio demands for higher cadence. The tricky bit will be retaining the improved leg strength I got from deliberately changing my habits.

In other words, for me at least, exactly what most of the recent articles say about the differences in cadence for the same power/effort. We have to experiment to figure out which works best for us.

There's a good deal of science saying that a self-selected cadence will generally result in the highest power output vs. trying to maintain some fixed ideal cadence. Which is the scientific way of saying YMMV... But, a lot of the tests also show that higher cadence is usually more efficient than a lower cadence and you can train to raise your "self selected set point."

When I put my first bike computer that had a cadence sensor, I found I was a 60 RPM high gear grinder - and Lance Armstrong started winning Tour de France with very high cadence pedaling (and of course, lots of drugs.) There were many articles then about why that (high cadence, not the drugs) was better - I'm not a racer but figured I'd try higher cadence/lower gears and found 70 - 80 definitely felt better: less fatigue for higher speeds on identical rides. I was able to move my self-selected point up.

Flash forward to recent years and workouts on Zwift let you try high cadence/low cadence drills and see power (I don't have a power meter on my road bikes). Going much above 80 on flats, let alone hills, doesn't help me and doesn't feel natural. Bursts of 90 - 100, fine but not for long periods of time for me.

I'm going to try to break this down in the order I highlighted some important points above.

1. We choose workouts that are specific to the type of fitness that an event will require. Specificity. You won't go out and do a bunch of Z2 right before a crit series. You should have done that well before. You'd be doing some VO2 workouts. It's not that people don't pick this because it's thought bunk, it's just not high enough on the totem pole of effectiveness and specificity for what we're trying to accomplish.

2. You state 'zone 2', could be HR or power, then you state 'power is unimportant'. Which is it? For this to be legit, it's either one or the other to be able to accurately prescribe it. You're talking about more blood flow at low power and all kinds of things here. People do spinups for that reason, but otherwise, you're just effectively raising the effort within the power zone by altering the cadence. It's often associated with "active recovery", not with causing adaptations. I choose to do what I want to do for active recovery if I have so much time on my hands I can afford to. Which I usually can't, so instead I do off days instead. Or cross train with some core/yoga or something.

3. You make 'more effort' available by causing physical adaptations and growing mitochondrial densities based on what you want to address. The body has several different ways in which it burns fuel, causing it to adapt to burn that fuel is what you want. 40min of z2 isn't long enough alone for an aerobic workout. If you're totally set on doing this, you'd need to pair it along as part of your endurance rides that are a good bit longer than an hour.

4a. Maybe, if you do higher intensity intervals so infrequently that you're not used to having to hold a good cadence for long periods. If you do the tough stuff pretty often, you can already hold 90, 100, 105, 110 for pretty good stretches and high power levels. If you're targeting a good number on an hour test, all you can eat SS and 2x20's. If you're targeting a good number for 20min, I'd up the ratio of how much your anaerobic contribution is for that effort. Long and hard address two different things, duration and intensity. They're inversely proportional. Research the Cori cycle. Optimizing your conversion of ATP is how you do well on ftp tests.

Lastly, 4b, efficiency increases as power output increases. Take a look at power meter data for any meter that gives it, and you'll see it's true. Not only are pros more efficient (from riding for a living), their power is so much higher than ours that their Z2 might be a joe's Z4 or 5. So they might be vastly more efficient at lower intensities not because they spin at 120rpm for 40min, but because that's just how that measurement works.

The boys used to grind away in the pros because there was no such thing as EPO yet. They were on anabolics and hormones. This tends to cater more to a neuromuscular contribution to power, and thus, lower cadence. Look at the corn cob cassettes of old and how they'd grind up climbs.

Whoa and behold, they get their hands on some dope that effectively raises your aerobic ceiling (slow twitch, higher cadence) capabilities and suddenly folks are spinning up those climbs. Hrmmmm.

The aerobic/slow twitch contribution for most racers from joes to pros is still going to tend towards that side of things.

Again, it's not because we don't believe it does anything.........it's just not the sharpest tool in the box for the job we need to do. So yeah, it probably does help, but not in a way useful to me.

For the most past among equally trained riders, climbing cadence, and cadence in general will vary with VO2 max. IOW riders with better native aerobic ability tend to pedal faster. This is because simply making one's legs go around a circle takes some energy. The higher the cadence, the more oxygen is diverted to this task. The second principle is that higher cadence spares glycogen, so the faster the rider pedals at a given power, the greater the endurance. Up to some limit of course. So that was the reason that Lance started pedaling so fast: EPO gave him a large aerobic advantage. Top riders in the Mt. Washington auto road race will climb at ~95 cadence. Most randonneurs pedal 90-100 on the flat, whatever their VO2max, simply because in their sport, endurance trumps most everything.

Actually the self-selected cadence studies prove that one gets better at what one trains to do. Duh. Lance, too. In my late 50s, I raised my self-selected cadence by about 6 rpm, simply by forcing myself to ride at a higher cadence. After about 3 months, I obviously had more endurance at the higher cadences and they became my standard. It takes a good bit of effort and concentration to train anything and get results. That said, 15 years later my cadence has dropped back to about where it was, possibly because I ride most group rides on a tandem with my wife, and possibly just because my legs don't have that snap anymore. I still work on it though.

As a rider with no great VO2max, one of my training projects has been to reduce the oxygen I need to simply pedal and thus stay with more talented or younger riders.

Yup. He still rides with fairly high cadence, but not nearly the same power. Hard to say what he's really capable of on the road now because he's mostly switched to gravel and mountain biking. He joins group rides here once or twice a year in support of the Mellow Johnny's bike shop chain and still seems pretty strong. But these are just spirited group rides, not races.

Different cadences definitely have different physical demands for me. I can't say one is better than the other for all conditions. So I practice both and apply them as appropriate.

I also tended to avoid standing to pedal, mostly because it took much more energy than seated pedaling. But avoiding it wasn't helping, so now I do standing drills on the trainer, and longer standing climbs outdoors. My outdoor training is mostly fartlek -- I just wing it to suit the terrain, mixing Z1 and 2 efforts for most of the ride, with occasional bursts for long gradual seated climbs and short standing sprint climbs. It's helped me keep up better on sorta-fast group rides where I used to get dropped.

But I haven't worked much on longer sustained efforts on relatively flattish terrain and it shows. I need to work on that as well. I get complacent with around 20 mph on relatively flat stretches and tend to avoid pushing harder. So I'm in a rut. And it shows on group rides when other folks bear down for 1-2 mile semi-sprints. I tend to fall off the back of the lead bunch, and end up solo in the no-man's land between the real sprinters and the stragglers. Not that that's a bad thing. I used to be the caboose on the tail end of the stragglers.

On group rides, I find it most effective to match the cadence of riders around me. That smooths things up. It's good to have a range of effective cadence.

When I used to lead the fast group, I'd tell new riders who were having trouble to just hold the wheel until the blood spurted from their eye sockets. When they couldn't do that anymore, we had cue sheets. It was my observation that most folks had no idea how much pain they could tolerate and still keep going.

I frequently get all my high end work during group rides. We rode our tandem with the group this past Sunday. I use HR as the tandem doesn't have power. I had about 1' in Z1, 20' Z2, 1:30 Z3, and 55' Z4, no Z5. That's a pretty normal distribution for our rides. We go as hard as we can and still be able to finish. I used to be able to do that distribution on rides up to a century, but don't have the endurance anymore. Working on it, though. I'll start getting some Z5 in the spring.

The rest of the week I work on whatever seems to need the most work and which doesn't put me in a hole for the next Sunday's fun. It's like racers say: I do the group ride so I have to train so I can ride it. Gotta get inspiration from somewhere.

This is my favorite cadence video. Lance v Ulhrich time trial. I think we can assume both were doped so let's take that off the table. Jan is much more muscular than Lance but I am sure that Jan can spin any cadence he wants.

One thing we know for sure is that at the same speed Jan will be producing more torque with his legs than Lance assuming that each racer is approximately the same CdA although I suspect Lance's drag coefficient is lower than Jan's.

Lance was dating extremely well at that point in time - Cheryl Crow. Maybe high cadence will increase ones access to better girlfriends/boyfriends too.:D


All I know is that all the coaches I have used have valued the ability to spin fast and leg speed is a great tool to have in ones toolkit. And I have to train to spin faster but I can always elect to spin slower.

That's some throwback right there.

Usually for "all out" stuff I'm in the 100+ range for sure. I'll often average around 100 for a tough hour workout. Sometimes 105 to 110 for 2 to 5 minute efforts or that much for a 20min test.

Just the way I am. I listen to up tempo music and keep it going.

TBH, Lance's position on that bike makes me cringe a little bit knowing the CdA's estimated and known from some Slowtwitch members with similar or better positions. I'd peg that one at well over .230. I'd guess maybe even a .240 to .250. I'm pretty sure if I get my extensions fixed, I could get around .220.

Who would have thought that Jan would end up with more Tour de France wins than L*nce ? :roflmao2:

Just to emphasize the cool factor here.......despite the helicopter noise and announcer talk.........listen to that disc/trispoke combo. Mmmmmmm. Around the 5:40 mark.