Harvieu25

My comfortable cadence is from 100-110, anything lower feels like I am mashing and anything higher feels like I'm not doing anything. My questions are:

Does a lower cadence help develop torque?

Does a higher cadence help develop lean muscle (or no muscle)?

What are the benefits of each and how do you take advantage of various cadences and utilize different muscles?

Doctor Morbius

Beyond a certain level, cycling isn't a good method for building muscle. Of course, if one is living a sedentary lifestyle and they start riding they'll develop some muscle, but nothing significant. And if a person is involved with long distances (grand tours) they may, in fact, lose muscle mass.

The best proven method for building muscle is progressive resistance training using full range movements. Increase your training load over time and you will build stronger and larger skeletal muscle tissue. In most cases, cycling is detrimental to maximizing these types of gains.

CrippledKonaBoy

Within the limits that cycling DOES develop muscle, it's more tone than mass. Higher cadence develops tone AND circulatory efficiency. Lower cadence, much like leg presses, works the muscle groups, just not to the same extent.

I usually pedaled at an 80-85 cadence over the last 15 years; my resting pulse dropped about 15 beats, my calves got ripped, and my thighs grew about an inch around (big already). All I can do now is maintenance; I'd guess my cadence now at about 75, tops.

Rotator cuffs suck.

CbadRider

Moved from General to Training & Nutrition.

chaadster

Yes, lower cadence helps develop torque, particularly in the sense of getting comfortable working with higher torque, more pressure on the pedals.

It's good to have high cadence capability in the tool kit, but in order to be a fast rider, one needs to be able to put pressure on the pedals across a wide range of pedal speeds. The other big pitfall is getting accustomed to doing only high cadence/light load (i.e. low torque); you've gotta be able to put rpms and torque together to make big, sustainable, watts.

I also think that for many people, lowering cadence from 100+ to 85-90rpm range would drop HR a bit and facilitate recovery, and if you can do your 200w at either cadence easily, why not 'pocket' the extra bpm for higher power efforts?

Training with a power meter makes the pedaling speed/power relationship clear, and coupled with an HR monitor, would really help maximizing your training effort.

Carbonfiberboy 

Asking these questions means you should ride more hills. If you don't have hills, ride more varied cadences for training. See what happens. "Comfortable" is not necessarily good. A fave saying is, "If it didn't hurt, we wouldn't be doing it." If you can, find a decent but shallowish hill, at least 10 minutes, and include it in one of your usual loops. Try riding it in different gears while timing yourself up it. See what's faster. You could do a set of 3 repeats on it, all different gears. A confounder is that one gets better at what one trains to do. Therefore what you experience now isn't necessarily what your best experience could be.