livedarklions

And sometimes I'm completely full of crap.

livedarklions

I've had a pet theory for a while now that a lot of current trainers really got their views of things and decided best practices during the EPO/blood doping era. Mashers were more common during the anabolic steroid era, which ended first.

I probably shouldn't post this....

GhostRider62

The smallest inner chainring was also a 41 and the standard FW was 13-18 and 13-21 for hills.

My 1971 Masi Gran Criterium has a 13-21 and 44/55 set of rings. Not choice but to mash.

guachi

The study, IIRC, is a meta-analysis of other studies. It doesn't debunk other professional views, it's a summation of them. The professionals are the scientists studying this stuff not the trainers and athletes.

Maelochs

To also make unnecessary noises .... a lot of "research" into electrolytes and hydration was funded by Coca-Cola after the brand bought Gatorade .... in order to commercialize it Coke added a ton of sugar and set up an astroturf foundation which funded a Ton of research, all which---shockingly--showed that people needed to drink tons of Gatorade or they would die.

ofajen

My high school chemistry teacher used to tell us that people who eat pickles die.

Otto

livedarklions

Eventually, yes.

rsbob 

I couldn’t agree more. Now I just have to deal with my fake tired legs.

O.P. I live in the Seattle area and have no love of cycling in the rain in my 60s, but I still do it occasionally, but I have plenty of rain related clothing to make it tolerable, including a bike with fenders though. I did a rain ride yesterday..

In my 30s riding in the rain was considered macho and hardcore, but I got over myself. Before ZWIFT and Wahoo (fake workouts, like the one I did today) I used a cheap wind-trainer (yet another fake) and put YouTube cycling videos on would ride with those. Can’t tell you that after days of rain and cold, I could spin with other cyclists all over the world enjoying sunny summer skies, climbing mountains, doing gravel trails, crossing beautiful landscapes and magnificent scenery courtesy of YouTube. When you get there, just enter cycling videos. I cycled Ireland, Germany, Spain the Swiss Alps, the U.S. and all over under sunny skies. It was like a mini-vacation. Try it, and you may not get bored if you do a different ride every day.

livedarklions

I think it's great that people do the fitness activity they enjoy. It wouldn't work for me because I hate the whole feel of a stationary bike for reasons I can't necessarily explain. Can you hook up Zwift to an elliptical?

himespau 

I think you need the jarring motion of a step down so you'd need a treadmill and not an elliptical if you want to run on Zwift.

PeteHski

Yeah, I'm still reading it. The scientific research appears to be pretty thin on the ground, while pretty much all pro athletes are using active recovery in their routine training. I use it myself and find if nothing else it boosts my energy levels on recovery days after a hard training block.

livedarklions

I support using it if you find it helps. I even suspect the pros really are getting some benefit out of it, although I wouldn't have any idea if it's physical or mental. All that research shows is that the reasons people give for how it's supposed to work are likely untrue.

I think what gets lost in these discussions is that the scientific knowledge of how things work in this area is generally really poor at a very basic level. We really don't know what causes post workout pain, and we really don't understand why and how the body hypertrophies muscles. We have really effective methods of developing muscles, but we really don't know why they work. I don't think it would be at all surprising if trainers and athletes hit upon a method of controlling post-workout pain that works for a substantial number or majority of athletes while completely misunderstanding the mechanisms of how it works. On the other hand, there's also plenty of training techniques that used to be articles of faith that are now believed to be harmful. (stretching a cold muscle, for example), so who knows. But it's hard to imagine any scenario where a cool-down cycle is going to hurt you, so experiment with it and see if it works.

Also, generally, I find "the pros do it" piss-poor reason to believe that something will work generally. In my case, they're not 60 y.o.men who don't have all day to work on their general conditioning. I have no idea how much of what they do would be sustainable at my age and level of activity, or whether the zillion more hours a month they put in it than I do requires different in kind and volume of recovery routines.

PeteHski

I agree. Much of the research in this area appears to be empirical and often with a fairly narrow range of participants. So not easy to get clear scientific results. But modern training programs on the whole are still very effective and improving all the time.

cyclezen

I did this often (wearing full length legwarmers to bed), back when I first became aware of this through the 'regurgitation publications', like Men's Health, etc...
until 2018... I brought a pair of quite 'loose' PI leg warmers along on my Everest BC Trek - along with supplements like C, Ca, Mg, K and a few others...
Didn't really need them until I hit 15K ft elevation. Had a tough day getting to Loboche (16.5K+ - the trek is a huge amount of constant gain/lose/gain of elevation - all very steep)., so I pulled on the leg warmers before going to bed. By 10:30 PM I thought my heart was gonna jump outta my body !!! Pulled out the SPO2 meter - SPO2 was a ridiculous 72 and heart rate was 135 !!!
Sweating like a hog - temps in teahouse room were 24F= -4C, no reason to be sweating at all !!! / Crazy!
Didn't know what to do... Earlier that day, at lunch stop at 16K altitude, 2 of our party had decided to turn back because they were showing signs of HAPE... I was hoping I wasn't that...
... so I pulled off all clothes including the leg warmers - sat with the sleep bag wrapped around me... within 3 min my heart rate had gone down to 95 and SPO2 had gone up to 76...
pulled the clothes back on (dry versions) but not the leg warmers... all good until 5:30 wake-up - I put the leg warmers back on, to luxuriate in the warmth of the bag, before getting ready ...
Heart rate SPIKED again, as did the SPO2 drop !!!! Realized the full compression of the legs had caused an undue stress on the circulation and HUGE stress on the heart !!!
Full leg compression may be good for leg recovery - at normal altitudes - but certainly puts increased stress on the heart and circulation...
Gotta be better ways to get recovery, without blowing up your heart !
Ride On!
Yuri

AmandaKY

Riding the bike at a professional level can affect your leg muscles.