Originally Posted by Carbonfiberboy

I don't know why you think strength work is not material. The FastPedal drills can take more time than most strength workouts, but If I'm holding a cadence which is as fast as I can spin at low load, when I get off the bike I can hardly walk even though it was just HR zone 2. [...] Depending on the drill, either a lot more resistance, or a much higher cadence. It's supposed to take you to your absolute limit [...] The high cadence drill isn't obvious strength training, but it does take muscle to jerk our legs around like that, following a specific circle and those muscles have to fire in a very specific sequence. The faster we jerk them around, the more force has to be applied to achieve the desired leg acceleration.

Originally Posted by PeteHski

When we do very high cadence drills at very low power, it takes a lot of muscular effort just to suppress the pedal force applied on the downstroke. We are basically working directly against our own leg mass and inertia to keep the pedal force low enough to avoid bouncing in the saddle. The hard work involved in achieving this is exactly what the paper I cited earlier concludes that we shouldn’t attempt to do within our normal pedal stroke. While it reduces mechanically inefficient radial force at the end of the downstroke, it comes at the expense of using additional muscle force to oppose it.