Originally Posted by
Hermes
I do not do cadence drills or pedaling drills - not on my prescription. My take is that when one practices something to improve or get to the next level there must be materiality. Okay, doing one leg pedaling drills for an hour - that is material. Two minutes seems too short. The same is true for cadence drills. Go on the track and ride a 40 minute warmup in a smaller gear with fast guys. That will spin one up and if one can complete the workout be material.
For new riders, sure, pedaling drills, cadence drills and etc make sense. For advanced riders - meh.
Wow! You can pedal continuously with one leg on the trainer for an hour? I bow, your ARE incredible.
I also think that if it doesn't tire me out, it's not worth doing. It is way easier on the road because the crank inertial load is much higher. On my old ABS drum rollers, that load's almost zero. I purposely choose a gear which limits me to an absolute max of 2' for the OLP before I start getting a momentary slack chain. I use a much larger gear for the 50-55 cadence than the 80-85. I'm trying to mimic strength training in the gym, where ~30 reps to exhaustion takes me between two and three minutes, depending on the exercise. Even advanced riders benefit from strength training.
For the FastPedal, I do it until either I can't do it perfectly anymore (no chain slack) or 45', whichever comes first. For me, pedaling near 120 in a low gear for a long period does tire my legs out, but really once I can to it for 45' what I'm getting is reinforcement for my ganglia. My challenge, other than the time, is keeping it in HR zone 2, which would mean that I've become adequately efficient. I've tried not doing these drills for a year and found that my climbing suffered. That's because I try to do one of those drills once a week for about 28 weeks.
A decade or two ago, when I went out with our moderate group for the Sunday ride, I'd drop to the back of the pack and do the climbs one-legged, or I'd ride in the group and drop my cadence into the fifties. Either way I'd get to combine a moderate aerobic workout with a tiring strength and pedaling workout. These drills are all designed to fall outside the normal pedaling envelope, which is why I do them. Working my legs harder than I'll ever have to on a usual road endurance ride is a good thing and the whole point.
And that's the reason I persist in doing this stuff on my light rollers - no flywheel effect. IMO the addition of flywheels to trainers to give them a more road-like feel is a mistake. Why not just ride on the road? For me, the purpose of a trainer is to train, not to have what most riders might call fun. Though I suppose if one were unfortunate enough to live in a area with no hills, also having a road-like trainer or just one with a variable flywheel effect might come in handy.
Anyway, that's the reason I posted this pedaling stuff on a strength thread, because the way I do it, it's strength training. As I say, if it's not hard, I wouldn't be doing it.