I am by nature an experimenter. I experiment with everything, including my body and what it does. For guidance, I read a lot and for the physical side of things, I read studies. So of course I experiment with my bicycles and everything on them, including myself. I designed my own fit and in my early 70s decided to go and get a pro fit. And amazingly enough, my fit was correct by his numbers. Of course. Experimentation is where those numbers came from. How I and some others pedal is simply a result of that same mindset.
By its nature, this sort of experimentation is a slow process. It can't proceed any faster than our body's ability to adapt and our body's ability to sense such adaptation, neither of which as we all know by now, is particularly fast. One of the issues with setting up these sorts of experiments is feedback. Is our back pain due to bike fit or just a weak back? Do our hands hurt because of our saddle or gloves or something else? And why do my quads hurt?
Here's the quickie method for pedaling:
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles...013.00035/full