Pedal Technique

Photo from: Bicycling.com
Perfect Pedal Stroke

With time trial season coming to a pinnacle in a couple weeks, this is a good time to be adapting to the different position.  Getting the most power out of your pedal stroke for a given heart rate is vital to being efficient.  Efficiency is a hidden gem of time trialing.  Here are a couple of exercises you can do on the bike to help you become more aware of your pedaling action and hopefully identify strengths and weaknesses.

Bicycling.com has a nice article about pedal technique with a great picture and description.  But how you approach this is another item altogether.


Focus on the technique and practice activating the muscles mentioned, here is a simple protocol to help you learn.

On your next easy/recovery ride, try these drills out:

10min: start at a low rpm gradually increasing to around 80rpms

10min - One-legged drills ~80rpms:  One minute each leg for 10 minutes.  Some recommend unclipping one leg at a time and doing these drills.  I think that works well if you are starting this for the first time, but only do this at low intensity and for less than two total minutes.  If you have done these before and know how to activate the muscles throughout the pedal stroke, stay clipped with both legs.  Let one leg go limp and let the other do the work.  This takes a bit more concentration and will help you isolate and separate one leg from the other in your mind.

5min light spin ~120+rpms, LOW POWER... remember this is a recovery/easy day.

To do these next two drills correctly you only need to think about one leg at a time in the pedal stroke, you'll want to choose a hard gear to help isolate the muscles and have enough time to think about what you're doing.  Watch your heart rate and make sure you stay below 80% of your Threshold HR.

10min - Upstroke only 40-50 rpms:  Try not to put any effort into the downstroke, focus on the ankling technique. At 6 o'clock toe down, feel your heel in the back of your shoe.  Feel the pressure in the saddle the hamstrings activating.  Around 11 o'clock flatten out your shoe and relax your quads. Remember you're not trying to pull your ankle out of its socket, if that is happening, you might have too much toe down.

10min - Downstroke only 40-50rpms:  Beginning around 11 o'clock think about dropping your heel and kicking a door open.  Drive down with your heel really feel your hamstrings tighten and activate.

All together now.

10min - Alternating Upstroke/Downstroke 50-60rpms: In your mind split this up by doing  Left-leg Downstroke/Right-leg Upstroke as one motion, then Right-leg Downstroke/Left-leg upstroke as another motion.  This is the real brain teaser.  It's like trying to pat your head and rub your stomach.  While one leg is doing the down stroke get the other to do the up stroke.

Homebrewed Nutrition

As much as I love real food, sometimes having a quick mix smoothie after a long ride is really nice.  Four to five hours of riding, the last thing I want to do sometimes is cook a meal.  Here is a way to mix up your own batch of recovery smoothie mix, with links and price breakdown.  Next time you purchase a large tub of sport drink mix, save the tub and mix your own into that.  Here are the things you'll want:

You will need these two appliances...
Coffee Grinder  and Digial Food Scale, if you don't have one it is a great investment for cooking and baking they are usually around $10-15 online.

And these Ingredients
You can probably find these things around town at a grocery store in the bulk foods section, here are some prices I usually pay here in Tucson.  I'll be doing the recipe in metric...

1. Soy Protein Isolate - if you can find this in the bulk foods here are some links to a company I buy from.
• 4lbs @ $22 + $4.50 S&H = $6.62/lb | $14.60/kg
• 44lbs @ 161 + 4.50 S&H = $3.76/lb | $8.29/kg <-- I get this and store it through the year.
2. Corn Sugar ~ $1.50/lb | $3.30/kg
3. Cane Sugar ~ $1.00/lb | $2.20/kg
4. Powdered Cinnamon, Ginger, and Vanilla ~ $1/oz | $35.25/kg
5. Salt ~ $1/lb | $2.20/kg

* If you have course salt and sugar you will need to put them in the coffee grinder to make into a fine powder.

This recipe comes off the back of the Cytomax Muscle Milk Naturals Vanilla which tasted good but $48+S&H for 32 servings (~$1.60/serving) is more than I would want to spend consistently.

Time to bust out the scale...

1. 515gm Soy Protein Isolate = $4.26 
2. 200gm Corn Sugar and 100gm Cane Sugar = $.66 and $.44  (remember to grind sugar to powder)
• 2:1 ratio of corn sugar:cane sugar yields the same calories from carbs just not a sweet.
3. 3gm Salt ~$0.01  (remember to add the salt to the sugar when you grind)
4. 16gm Ginger = $.56
5. 8gm Vanilla = $.28
6. 8gm Cinnamon = $.28

Total = $6.50 or $0.20/serving.  Serving size is 1/3 of a cup.

Put all ingredients into the tub and shake until mixed thoroughly.

If you like chocolate you might substitute vanilla with cocoa powder.  I haven't tried it myself, but the next batch I am going to see how it works.

Rest and Recovery Rides

Rest and Recovery is the secret to getting faster.  I see so many riders stagnate in their training because they fail to rest or recover properly from their workouts.  So what does a proper recovery look like?  There are many good examples of excellent recovery rides.  But generally speaking you want something that doesn't deplete your muscle glycogen stores while applying just enough stress to your aerobic system.

Here you can see a typical recovery ride, one that could follow a 100-160km ride, or 3-5 hours saddle time at medium to high intensity.  This ride was completed a day after an intense 5hr ride, and is 1hr30min in length.

The target wattage, in red, should be in zone 2.  I'll define the watts for zone 2 to be between 55 and 75% of your Critical Power at 60minutes.  For the majority of the time you will stay in this range.

While also staying within zone 2 for heart rate (dark blue).  Heart rate zones are similar to Power Zones.  I'll use the word "Threshold" to mean your average heart rate during the last 30 minutes of a 60 minute all out effort.  HR Zone 2 is between  65 and 82% of Threshold.

In the graph, HR zones don't show up, the wattage Z2 is shown in the purple.  You can see that this ride was in the middle to high end of the wattage zone 2.  Power was slowly increased through the ride to illicit a heart rate response.  Around 1hr10min a combination of cardiac drift and an increase in power caused too much of an increase in heart rate.  Thus you see that power was reduced slowly, allowing heart rate to go back into zone 2.  Toward the end of the ride a small increase in effort caused heart rate to skyrocket up, implying the ride should be ending soon.

Analysis such as these take skill, attention to detail and full grasps of the concepts.  You too can get this kind of level of detail in a recovery ride, using my coaching services.  I outline the zones to each of my athletes and teach them how best approach the training regimen I have planned for them.

*Note to self: make a post about cause and affect of cardiac drift.

Planning a Training Ride Using Your Power Meter Data

When it comes to the money thrown down in the sport of cycling, a power meter is the number one thing I recommend.  In terms of helping you to ride faster and longer there is no better tool.  If you are serious about competing at a high level, you can go a long way on your own with a power meter.  Even further with my help :)

Today I will focus on one concept to help you analyze a training file, let's take an example of this ride file from July 24th, 2013 and the energy output.

Energy Consumption for that ride was a total of 2695 kJ (kilo Joules).  The kJ is the amount of mechanical work that was completed.  We can then convert this mechanical work to the amount of food energy that we would need to consume in order to complete this activity.  Which corresponds to 644 Calories, note big C not little c.  Calculations and information about the conversions can be found here.

What this means is that during the 4hrs of ride time, I would need to replace about 160 Calories per hour, you can see further explanation using a similar but different approach from Chris Carmicheal of Carmicheal Training Systems.  Both methods yield nearly identical results.

Because of my familiarity and knowledge using power, I can predict with certain accuracy what nutritional requirements I will need for the days' training.  Anticipating about 200w average for 4 hours, I knew it would be about 3000kJ and 720Cal day.  So I brought roughly 180gm of carbs,  1gm of carbs = 4 Calories, 4*180=720Cal.  With the average temp of 35C or 95F, fluid intake would also be important, which means about 1.5L per hour, 8 bottles and 6L of water.  One bottle at double concentration 60gm carbs, and 4 bottles at 30gm each were mixed and loaded.  When the 4 bottles run out, I stop and refill, splitting the double concentration into two and the rest with water.  Normally I bring a protein snack on rides like this but ended up leaving it behind.  Not the best move but not terrible either.  On rides such as this and over 3 hours I like to chew on something.

A Beginners Guide to Golden Cheetah - Ride Data Analyzing Software

GoldenCheetah - 100% Free and Opensource, developed for Linux, Mac and Windows.  It is also very easy to customize.  There are many components, some you will use and other you will not.  This is designed to help you review your ride data.  For good reflection on past workouts and performance, I recommend at minimum you are collecting at least four metrics if you don't have a power meter.  For example: heart rate, speed, cadence and distance would help you to compare data from workout to workout.

Download GoldenCheetah Here

Once that is installed, you can follow along with my setup video tutorial, on you tube, just follow the link below.

Golden Cheetah First Time Set Up

The Art of the Time Trial

My favorite activity performed on the bike has to be the Time Trial.  It's just you versus the clock.  Some concepts and definitions needing some explanation before going into this further. 

Critical Power or CP - the power you have or predict to sustain for a given time interval. Here you can input values and adjust a CP curve.  http://www.twowheelblogs.com/critical-power-calculator.

Functial Threshold Power or FTP - this is a subset of CP and it's your CP for a 60 minute interval.
A lot of attention is focused on your FTP mainly because a 40kilometer time trial is completed in approximately 60minutes.

CdA - Cd is your drag coefficient while riding and A is your cross sectional area apparent to the wind.  Without getting too technical lets assume you CdA can be calculated as a single value without units, like .32 for example

Power:CdA - P:C - this is the concept that allows you to go faster in the wind.  Either increase your power or decrease your CdA or both to go faster, it's that easy.

There are so many things that go into a successful TT that I'll probably miss a few items in this outline.  This is the order of importance I feel needs be address in order to excel in this specific discipline.

Pacing is a huge topic and the one I think deserves the highest priority in order to get your best time.  There are several considerations for pacing a good time trial.  Course and environmental conditions are most apparent.  What the course profile looks like has the most bearing on your pacing, second to that is the conditions of the day and then your CP. I really can't say things much better than Alex Simmons, Associate Coach, RST in his paper Quantifying the Effective Application of Pacing Strategies in Cycling Time Trial Events: The Pacing Optimisation Index (POI)


Data Analysis is one way to improve your time trialing abilities.  This is how you learn pacing for the course and ways to target your training.  Here are a few tools you can use to help you record and analyse data for later.

Cycling Computers - There are many different kinds that record various degrees of information.  What you want is something that can record at least three metrics.  Distance and Time plus you'll need heart rate or power.  If you go all out you can record; cadence, temperature and elevation.

Strava - You get the app for your phone and record many of the above metrics that cycling specific computers can do.  It's a good tool for comparing time trial data with your cycling community.  It's useful for many different things, but also not very useful. I like it because you can create your own segments and compare your data with others in a nice easy to read format.  Currently this has the cycling community buzzing.  It is not very accurate at calculating your power so it hasn't got to the point of replacing your power meter.

GrEEEEEEN Smoothies

If you haven't tried a nutrient rich greens smoothie you don't know what your missing.  They are packed full of so many good things you might want to throw away your Flinstones Vitamins.  The basic recipe is as such:

A handful of Spinach, sprig of Parsley, banana, heaping teaspoon of peanut butter and water to fill.

Into the blender it goes and visions of goodness travel through your head.  AHH! nutrient rich snack.  There are many differnent variations of this interesting treat.  Here is one I made on nutrition data, my friend Keith likes to call it "Swamp Juice".  Basically you take whatever greens you have on hand, instead of making a salad, put it in a blender and you got a drink that will last you about two hours.