Metieval

Your example of going to the gym and adding more weight can be reversed.
As in.... Your geared bike is like going to the gym and then taking 30 lbs off because you're feeling lazy, aka gearing down for the day on your geared bike. Its fun to create a scenario that proves your point?

Your last bit is so far out of context. But you know this. Because the op wasn't seeking the magic key to cycling strength.

Let's see if you can read screen shots?



The answer is yes it did!

rsbob 

Absolutely did my single speed make me faster. Going from a 38 lb balloon tired paper bike to a Schwinn Varsity made me feel like I had wings.

Have ridden track bikes on the local velodrome and that helped with performance gains on my Bianchi road/racing bike.

Metieval

Pushing your limits will generally make you stronger.

With ss you often don't have a choice, but to push limits.

On geared bikes most riders will just gear down, and take the easy ride.

79pmooney

When I ride hills on gears. I often limit my low gear to higher than comfortable. I've been swapping FWs and cogs a long time for that day's ride. Knowing I am going to see a 1000' climb on a 30-26 (as a 70 yo) puts a solid 'focus" on the ride. In my young (and perhaps foolish) racing days, I rode much of New England on a 42-19. Toughest "muscle" climb I ever did? My routine training long ride from Boston to Mt Wachusett with my training partner who had ridden the club race the night before and had no legs. The two post Wachusett climbs I pushed her. Seated in that big gear, riding one-handed. (It was that or drop her 40 miles from home to get back to the commitment I had.) OMG hard!

Yes, I also ride triples with 24 tooth inners. Up to 28 tooth cogs. Long rides. multi day events, rides with not a ton of miles on my legs that ring is a ride-saver. But the rides I live for and make me feel fully alive? The hills are taken with a lot of out of the saddle riding on gears that aren't easy. And the rides that are my fond memories; the same. So for me it is a choice. Do I want to be a boring spinning machine or live fully in my element?

Maelochs

So ... again I say ... it is how you use the tool, not the tool @meteival says "most riders" but if a rider wants to push hard, that rider can push hard ... with 12, 22 or 1 speed. it is choice. Sorry you are lazy on a geared bike, Meteival ... not everyone is. The pro peloton seems to be doing pretty well riding and training on geared bikes exclusively.

And Mr. 79pmooney ... i have a two tons of respect for you but you are wrong here.

You prefer the rides which you find challenging and you like to be challenged to ride hills on a slightly over-geared SS ... Super for You. You know what you like. But that was not the question.

The question, which you emphasized so well, was "Do your singlespeed miles make you stronger on all your bikes?"

Riding single speed (or fixie) does not MAKE anyone anything. HOW you choose to ride those miles determines whether you get stronger or not. If I rode singlespeed, and came to a tough hill ... it would make me stronger, you seem to claim. Unless, of course, i felt like the effort required was too high, my lungs or knees or heart couldn't manage,and I decided I was safer w3alking (You protect your head after multiple head injuries? I protect my heart after heart failure.)

The idea that being on a particular type of bike makes a rider stronger is so obviously wrong I cannot believe people cannot accept the fact that it si How you ride, not what you ride.

All the people here so far have said that they Push harder on a single-speed----get it? They Choose to Work Harder. It is the hard work, not the bike, which gets them the gains. The could ride a 22-speeed and push just as hard. They would get the same gains.

As I said, the pro peloton trains and races on multi-geared bikes. It doesn't seem to make them weaker.

People who Choose to ride SS And Choose to push harder rather than ride easier ... gain strength. People who ride multi-geared bikes who Choose to push harder also gain strength. it is the workout, not the workout tool.

The type of riding you most enjoy does not determine they way others ride nor the gains others make from riding.

Please also note: while we are posting in large type and being snarky:

I never said a particular person could not gain more strength using a particular type of bike over another. I just said that the generalization that riding SS or fixie made one stronger was not accurate. Anecdotes are not data and all that.

I never said it didn't work For You or for anyone else. I said in general you could get just as strong riding any type of bike. If you want to get snarky, ("Let's see if you can read screen shots") at least aim at what I really said please.

If you don't respect me enough to have an honest conversation, that is also fine. I still respect you.

terrymorse 

Does anyone remember in the "old days" (20+ years ago) when folks would do their pre-season base training on SS or fixed-gear bikes?

I never understood the reasoning.

Metieval

Throwing personal insults, And then you say...

Respect and throwing insults is two different things. On the topic of being "honest" and all.

Is this an April fools joke in October?
Yea, I never will respect you after this one.

RH Clark

I ride my bikes like single speeds with options. I figure why change out of a perfectly good gear. I'm not a fast gear changing keep the cadence kind of guy. I do ride several style bikes and think that the skills learned on MTB bikes can be helpful to mostly road riders and the other way around. I think any change up is good as long as you are getting a workout without injury.

50PlusCycling

No, but it made me a better walker. The hills around here are too much for a single speed, and the 3 speeds on my old Brompton weren’t enough to get up them without getting off and pushing.

Trakhak

I was going to ask if he was a C.R.C. of A. guy but then did a search. Wow! One of the few guys still around in the '60's who had been a record-setter 30 years earlier. (Don't know how I remembered he was associated with the Century Road Club.)

Trakhak

Yes, I speculated on that point earlier in the thread. I agree - it never made sense, since you could do all the same training on your road bike, and be more specific about the workouts. My guess is that it started in Europe for winter training, because fixed-gear bikes are easier to clean after a ride on wet pavement.

It's like the similar claim that roller riding improves your balance and your bike handling. It certainly trains you to ride rollers - I'll give it that. But anyone who can ride 50 feet in a straight line on a bike without falling over already has all the necessary handling skills. Beyond that, it's just learning what you should and shouldn't do in group rides and mass start racing.

PeteHski

What if you gear down and increase your cadence and power? Roglic used a 42T cassette on the Giro mountain TT but it didn’t look like an easy ride to me.

A geared bike gives you both easier and harder options. I sometimes do hill repeats in a very high gear and very low cadence for strength work. Sometimes I spin a low gear for cadence training. Gears just give you more options.

Like Maelochs said, it’s all about how you choose to ride. A SS forces you to ride in a certain way. A geared bike can be ridden however you choose. Pushing your limits is a personal choice and sometimes it isn’t even the best way to get faster.

Metieval

If something made me stronger, but it wasn't the best way. Did I still get stronger? Yes!

I have already posted a comment about "strength" isn't necessarily "faster".

And ss wasn't my only bicycle, and sometimes ss wasn't just training rides, sometimes it was just base milage. And sometimes it was just about enjoying my time riding, no different than when I ride one of my two motorcycles .

God forbid it wasn't the "best: way according to the trolls on the interweb.

zandoval 

If ya don't have the gears... You do the MASH!



Monster Mash

Of course, he would probably ride an E-Bike for sure...

88ss

Another thing my single-speed did for me was made my upper body feel much better. Climbing grades steep enough to warrant standing and pulling Hard on the bars for extra power is a whole-body workout. I had problems with my shoulders hurting after tearing some tissue in both of them, and the workout from riding up hills while standing has made them feel so good I usually forget they ever hurt at all. I also had trouble with carpal-tunnel in the past where I was wearing a wrist brace, and not any more, have not had a problem with that either this year and I don't even know if I could find that wrist brace. Sure I could have done therapy at some medical facility to rehab my shoulders and wrist, but the single-speed hill-climbing did the job and was more fun than most anything a human can do.

I am converting an old Nishiki into a fixie now so I can have that facet of cycling too.

88ss

Right, I know since I am in my 60s, I need to do weight training to compensate for losing muscle-mass from head-to toe, but I just love cycling so much I will always choose to ride over any other sort of workout. Lucky for me going up a steep grade on a single-speeder and pulling up on the bar while pushing down on the pedal is like dong a knee-bend and a dead-lift all at the same time, I just can't think of a part of my body a long ride on a single-speed does not exercise. I can do it all on my single-speed road bike, I can go 20mph for quite a few miles by spinning it up, and 5% grades are entirely doable on it, I have even done some 8% grades, but thankfully they were no longer than a city block or I would have got off and walked. And yes I have got off and walked up some grades, but I like walking too, and I like the cross-training opportunity. If I come to a big grade towards the end of a ride and want to have something left for other activities later in the day, I have no problem having a nice walking segment in the ride, I am sure it makes the workout much more balanced and healthy than never doing anything but riding.

79pmooney

Many of us did exactly that in the Boston area in the '70s. I had 2000 fix gear miles in my legs before the season started. (I did ride the frostbite series, March into April, on my race bike and did enough on it to be ready.) These were completely "base miles" building a strong foundation to a year of 9000+ injury-free miles (barring crashes!). It worked. Also made me a better smoother rider, appreciated by my competitors. (Rollers got mentioned above. We all appreciated those who rode them. They were safer and easier for us to ride around.)

Trakhak

One teammate rode rollers all winter. Very smooth when he rode in the saddle, but you didn't want to be behind him when he got out of the saddle. His bike would lurch backward several inches every time. I don't think we ever managed to break him of that habit.

Thinking back, other than that guy and his quirk, the guys who bought rollers were the most seriously committed riders and invariably had already put in enough miles to be safe in the pack, with or without roller time.

I did my first 4 years of racing on my fixed-gear bike, including velodrome (occasionally), road, and criterium (mostly), starting at age 13, in 1964. I was strong, to the point of annoying a couple of my older teammates (so I was told years later), who had a little trouble keeping up with me sometimes. Pretty sure I'd have been just as strong if I had a road bike.

Carbonfiberboy 

"No, not at all". to the OP's question. I organized a group ride series one winter for SS or fixed bikes. Most of us rode geared bikes and simply didn't shift. I used a 42 X17 gear. We rode our normal hilly 50'/mile routes, including climbs up to 10%. I was curious about that old saw that riding SS or fixed in winter would be great prep for the spring rides. None of us noticed the slightest difference in our times or abilities in the spring. It turns out you push on the pedals and the bike moves. Not that complicated. That said, I think everyone can benefit from doing both high and low cadence intervals, but there's no need to do 60 mile rides like that, and these intervals are more easily done on geared bikes.

I normally ride a lot on my resistance rollers in winter, do my intervals, etc. on them. The difference between rollers and the usual trainer is that rollers have very little momentum in them, so what you get is low crank inertial load, like you were climbing, all the time. I think that did improve my climbing by improving my ability to generate smooth, continuous power. The ideal on rollers is that you hear only a steady hum, not RR....RR....RR. That decreases one's maximum muscle tension which seems to improve climbing endurance. Average speed on a ride is much more dependent on climbing speed than on speed on the flat. I see trainers advertised as having "natural road feel" i.e. high crank inertial load. Not my preference. When I train, I'm not riding for pleasure, huh-uh.

PeteHski

High end trainers with “virtual flywheel” motors can simulate both high and low crank inertial load to simulate hills, flats and descents.

PeteHski

Well I never suggested that it didn’t make you stronger.

But nobody “needs” to ride a SS to get stronger, which is what you were implying with your comment about most geared bike riders taking the easy option. That would be their personal choice, not some limitation of their geared bike.

Eyes Roll

I think it should and it will make you stronger, unnoticeably, because you rely on yourself and do all the hardwork pedaling forward with your legs, especially when riding inclines, without the assistance of the gears. With multiple gears, you have more options and your legs can relax a bit by shifting gears when riding uphills.

Single Speeds give me the ease of maintenance and peace of mind - no rear derailleur, no front derailleur, no multiple cogs in the rear, no multiple cogs in the front. You can't go wrong with it much. I ride a geared bike, currently. However, when my geared bike broke recently and I was fixing it up, I rode a Single Speed and Fixie. I thoroughly enjoy riding all three systems, and don't mind hopping on any one of them, any day.

Metieval

I stated "why" ss can make people stronger.

More exhausting than a ss up a hill is communication with a narcs.

PeteHski

This says more about you than me.

Metieval

I have no shame in being exhausted. You will also fail in trying to shame me. Quit trying.