desconhecido 

I don't know if that's right or not. Follow the link to the abstract and it reveals that cadences in excess of 90 rpm were not included in the study. That's why I wrote earlier that I wasn't sure about the cadences referred to in the Bicycling article. The article says that higher cadences can be less efficient but the cadences tested were from 40 to 90. That implies to me that somewhere in that range of cadences, efficiency tends to decrease. But then, the author of the paper referred to in the magazine article says that cadences in excess of 90 may be less efficient for recreational cyclists. Hence, my uncertainty.

There was a renowned physicist named Philip Morrison who tried to figure out where the 7000 kcal (maybe more or less) that TDF riders burn in a day goes. Rolling resistance, air drag, normal metabolism, etc. He concluded that all these things didn't account for enough and that a significant amount of energy was used in evaporating sweat -- that is, in keeping the body temperature down. My interpretation of that is that anything which makes your body temperature increase will tend to result in more energy burn. Of course, you can't exercise too hard or you lose the ability to counteract the temperature rise by sweat evaporation with bad, maybe very bad, results. For a TDF rider, the goal is to keep that energy use down and use more energy in climbing hills and overcoming air drag. For a fat guy on a bike trying to increase calorie burn, the goal may be different. Of course, that leads to the question, why does somebody like me not ride the heaviest bike available with worn out bearings etc. That answer is easy for me -- it's much more fun to ride a nice roller. Morrison made a PBS video series (The Ring of Truth) about several different topics, the TDF, I believe, was one episode. I haven't seen them all since, I think, 1987, but all episodes seem to be available on Youtube. I remember they were fun to watch and not too much science for those of us who can hardly remember the first derivative of e^x. Suppose you could say they are sciency.