Originally Posted by allout1

Well, what kind of pedals do you have?

You need the broad, wide mountain bike pedals first of all, and you'll need the metal spikes poking up all over them. The reason for this is you want as many metal pokes from the pedals as you can muster over as many square inches of your shoe soles as you can manage. The reason is that when you're back stroking the pedals and up stroking the pedals, you want those metal pokes to remain in your sole the whole stroke.

I learned to feather cling my shoe soles into the metal pokes and the back and up strokes, and I poke my feet down more in order to get better purchase of the pedals and crank mechanism. It takes some practice. There's a perfect balance.

Also I dip from the hip joins in the pedaling, so that I'm also using my abdomen. This also takes practice and prime muscularity to reach the perfect balance.

By the way, I wear foam soled Sketcher shoes, and the metal pokes grip that very easily. I'm betting harder plastic shoes or slick soled shoes would not work as well.