DonRocinante

DonRocinante

Johno59

Nobody who has the remotest interest in performance uses flat pedals . Forget about the pros and trackies who would die laughing if you suggested they use flat pedals. Nobody but nobody.
Straps, done up good and tight as they should be, are not for the open road...... period - your collar bone will thank me for that. Get some cheap clip on pedals (they usually come with a set of cleats included) and some proper road bike shoes.
A start point is lean on a wall, sit on saddle with your race shoes on and touch your race shoe heel on the pedal with your leg fully extended. That is your seat height.

Clip in both feet, rotate cranks to the horizontal 3 o'clock - 9 o'clock position . Drop a long weighted shoe lace down from your knee cap and it must pass thru the pedal spindle axis . Move your seat back or fwd to get the lace to reach this position.

On the hoods your arms should be slightly bent so best to avoid road shock.
With difficulty you should be able to remain sitting up when you remove both hands from your hoods. If not your bike is too long and your back with hurt.

Look down at your front hub. Your cross bar on your handle bars should obscure it. Adjust the stem length to make it so.
These positions are just a start. We are all different but move just one thing at a time a cm either way and you should be getting pretty close to your ideal position.
It is important to remember under motion and under power(what matters most) these positions may be considerably different and require an observer to tell you how much so.

63rickert

Yes, muscles for pulling up your foot on backstroke are puny. Not the point. Studies designed by those not clear on the concept are worse than meaningless.

You can start practicing lifting your leg on flat pedals right now. I do it nearly every time I ride my flat pedal town bike. Just lift your leg. If you overdo it on a flat pedal your foot comes off the pedal. Like a millimeter or so.

The ideal is to apply power around the entire 360 degrees of pedal circle. Always applying power at a tangent to that circle. That's the ideal. No one achieves that. Everyone gets power on the downstroke and some get power for short arcs here and there in the rest of the pedal circle. The rest of the time what you want is to be loose and to get out of your own way. Repeat, you need to get out of your own way. So try lifting your leg just once on your flat pedals. Experience lifting your foot marginally off the pedal. Before you did that, before you did something positive to get your leg up, how do you think your leg came up? It did, how did it happen? Maybe you are just a natural and have the most amazing coordination and you pedaled perfectly right from the start. If you were not born perfect what you do when you pedal is you push down on both pedals. The pedal coming down is pushed forcefully enough to lift the leg on the other side. The leg coming down lifts the dead weight of the other leg and overcomes the resistance of the other leg. This is somewhat inefficient.

I don't care if you believe me. This was taught to me by greats of the sport half a century ago. I did not make up any of this. Try pedalling on flat pedals as suggested just once, for a couple hundred yards and see if it makes a difference for you. Put theory and studies somewhere else and try it for a couple hundred yards. If it doesn't work for you when you try it then it may as well not work at all.

Johno59

Without clips and or straps how do you keep the power on the tops and bottom of the pedal stroke? If you keep the power on thru this segment of the stroke without an attachment, your feet will slide off at the tops and bottoms of every half revolution. If thus your power from both legs will only come on a much smaller segment of the crank cycle.. Hence the flat sided square analogy.
I have plenty of single foot experience. I suggest you do it on a single flat pedals going uphill and then do it uphill with a clip ons. I can guarantee you will notice a huge difference in power transmission where the rubber meets the road.

63rickert

This is the problem with the internet. I am suggesting to Don Rocinante that he try something on the pedals he has now. I would suggest that you try it too. Previously I suggested to DR that he get some clipless pedals. Of course being secured to the pedal will make climbing easier.

As for applying power at top dead center and bottom dead center it is possible, not likely anyone is applying much. Top dead center is usually pretty easy to float through. Most lose lots of power at bottom dead center. Legs and feet are a series of reciprocating levers and creating power on a circular path with that setup is not particularly easy, it is not straightforward, there is nothing obvious about it.

DR claims to have done above 33mph already on his flat pedals. I believe him. He didn't get that far without doing a lot of things right.. He is a rank novice, he has a lot going for him.

Afraid attempting to discuss any of this on social media may be purely Quixotic.

Someone above claimed that riding clips and straps leads immediately and unavoidably to broken collarbones. How does any discussion go forward when any commenter throws in any bizarre red herring at any time? For the record I have 400,000 miles in my legs, most of it on toeclips. I broke a collarbone exactly once. I was on SPD at the time, and that had nothing to do with the fall. It was an MTB race, falls happen. Any discussion anywhere anytime comes to a swift end when someone claims Danger! Danger! Danger! I am a senior citizen, if I fall I will break something. In two hours I will be out on the bike, on toeclips, on fixed gear. And safe.

Johno59

If you choose to push down only you don't need your straps tight. If you choose to keep power on during the complete cranking cycle you need them tight to stop your shoe coming out for at least half the crank cycle.
Stopping for whatever reason whilst strapped in tight requires some seriously fast work on slackening the strap buckle before you smack the road with your shoulder.
That is why track bikes have no brakes and clip on pedals we're invented for the open road.

DonRocinante

Salamandrine 

LOL, don't get offended. A lot of these subjects have been bickered about for years. For example, flats vs clipless vs toe clips.

Anyway, yeah, going with clipless pedals or simply getting clips and straps will absolutely make a difference. At the very least, they are helpful in achieving a very high spin. There is a reason that all racers have strapped in or clipped in for generations.

Oh, and it really isn't a big deal to use straps and clips on the road. You simply reach down and flick the buckle open with your thumb while coasting to a stop. Becomes quite instinctual. It's a bit trickier with a fixed gear. BITD we'd leave them loose around town while warming up, and tightened them up when we got to the open road. That said I prefer clipless pedals for comfort, though functionally they're pretty much the same as clips and cleats.

due ruote 

davester

I do not agree with these old cyclists tales. For folks with a very average length torso in proportion to their upper and lower leg length and bikes with typical amounts of fork rake and trail these very old rules of thumb sometimes work out. However, even slight deviations from "average" make these rules of thumb complete bunk. the KOPS (knee over pedal spindle) measurement is completely dependent on the ratio of upper to lower leg length which has nothing to do with where your seat should be positioned. The handlebars obscuring front hub measurement is affected by way too many variables, including torso length, handlebar shape, neck length, position of eyes on head, etc, etc, etc. so is completely useless.

I do agree with your other point (seat height estimation), though would modify it by suggesting that you should be able to pedal backwards without your hips rocking with your heels on the pedal.

Salamandrine 

I think the old rules of thumb are a great starting point. They will get you in the ballpark. IMO the newbie is much better off setting up a bike using them than by doing it "by feel", as so often happens. I see a lot of whackadoodle positioning going on these days, often because someone read on the interwebs that KOPS was bad, etc. Yes, there are variations in body proportions, but they are much less than the variations in newbies guessing at where something should be.

There's another old ROT for stem length: if you put your elbow against your the nose of your seat, your fingertips should just brush the back of the handlebars.

davester

I do agree with this if you have nothing else to go on. My post was primarily reacting to johno's statement that the string from the kneecap "must pass thru the pedal spindle axis." I think it is much more smarter to completely ignore this and adjust the fore-aft saddle position back until you have no substantial weight bearing on your arms. KOPS doesn't reliably produce this result.

DonRocinante

63rickert

Let's back up. Cycling shoes are a good thing. Not the same as any other shoe or athletic shoe. They have stiff soles for power transfer. Cycling uses feet hard, cycling shoes have a lot of support. As hard as the OP is riding it is time for proper shoes. Everyone who tries them likes them.

As hard as the OP is riding he needs some kind of foot retention. Toe clips would work. Problem is there is a learning curve and the era of toe clips is past. Most modern shoes have stuff and 'features' on top of the vamp and won't even slide under the strap. Then you get to cobble in a cleat. I've had enough trouble with that I am back to using 1970s shoes intended for toe clips. It is way easier for someone new to get clipless.

Also if using toe clips you will cope with endless kibitzers who sling non-factual nonsense. Mostly from people who never used clips at all. Sometimes people who did use them and made every possible mistake. Plus wholly original and unique mistakes no one else ever made, but they are sure if you use them you will have the same strange problems they created for themselves. It's an uphill fight a new guy don't need.

Clipless pedals have probably a 99% satisfaction rate. There have been a few systems that were dogs. Those didn't sell well and you probably won't see them.

Good shoes coupled with decent pedals will be an instant improvement. You will be faster.

If OP wants to PM me I've a set of scruffy Time ATAC Carbon pedals, with cleats. Free. For road use the cleats should have another 20,000 miles and last I checked new ones were still available.

OPs bike looks fine. Good saddle setback, good saddle angle, nice drop from saddle to bars, good angle on bars, good placement of brake levers, Cg will be fine when someone sits on it. Would need to see the bike being pedaled to know more.

Johno59

The old school setup rules are purely designed to prevent poor bike setup injuring a noob before he or she can work out what best works for their unique body shape.
They are designed to eliminate busting a gut on a frame too big or too small, too stretched, too compact, too wide, too high or too low.
All of these mistakes can prove disheartening for a noob and or injurious - especially if they are already doing over 30 mph on flats!
We have all hung on to bikes that we loved but realized they were the wrong fit for our body geometry.
Every day I see probably 75% of riders struggling into a headwind with a poor to ridiculous setup that 20 seconds and an allen key would alleviate 50 % of their wasted effort.
Sitting on the toilet belongs in the little room not on the road. Mind you having said that I'm amazed
​​​​​nobody has yet designed a loo roll accessory for MTBs - coz they definetly should never be allowed out of the WC unless your in the woods being chase by a bear who was taking........ ok.... ok.... OKAY! I'll take a chill pill and relax.
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Johno59

That is a very small frame. One aspect of racing bikes that may not be obvious is that when you come to a halt you dismount. You do not remain in the saddle when your feet are on the ground. If you can do that your setup is way off.

63rickert

Sean Kelly won hundreds of pro races while sitting on the toilet. It was the unanimous opinion of the community that he sat too low. He was fully aware of that opinion. He just figured he kept winning so best to leave his saddle where it was. When he finally put his saddle up very late in his career he kept on winning at about the same pace. Everybody who said he sat too low was probably right. Kelly was right to move his saddle when he was good and ready and not before.

Do what you want with coaching opinion.

Kelly is not the most outstanding example of a legendary racer who won in spite of doing it all wrong. That would be Freddy Maertens. Freddy had absolutely beautiful form and could read a race better than anyone. What he did wrong was to race drunk. He drank during races. It's really hard to win hundreds of races when you frequently can't even manage to stumble to the starting line. Someone else's proven formula for success does not necessarily work for you. Do not fill your water bottles with Lanson Champagne, not even if Lanson gives it to you.

due ruote 

Johno59

My toe is about 2 or 3 inches from the ground whilst seated. If I am slackening my straps My toes are 2 or 3 inches away from the ground. If I am slow releasing my straps I am already falling quite fast and quite far and the from up there the impact with the ground is harder and faster than a lower foot position. Even without straps, remaining seated and getting a foot down safely can be difficult.....for me at least.
Some folks pedal with a horizontal foot and some with a considerable amount of toe-down. So the position under motion can also determine the frame size regardless of the inside seam length.

63rickert

If you can't get a foot on the ground, solidly, when you come to a stop you are just sitting too high. Basic safety. Riding a bike does not require contortions or acrobatic skills. Normal operation does not require constant risk-taking. Riding a bike is easy. If it ain't easy it ain't safe and it certainly isn't safe in traffic.

due ruote 

Johno59

There isn't a single pro road racer on the planet who could put a solid foot on the ground when seated. If a pro needs the benefit of a high seat the rest of us most definitely need it if we are hoping to maintain the average speeds the OP is hoping to achieve

63rickert

If you stick around you will meet some pros. They are not that remote. They ride their bikes on public roads. They started racing in the same clubs the rest of us belong to. When the traffic signal turns red and they need to stop there is not a little gnome who hops out of the follow car to hold them upright until the light is green. Neither do they dismount or teeter on a single tippy-toe.

Johno59

When you stop you slide off the seat and straddle the cross bar......like these idiots.