Cycling is a sport that's loaded with variables. Courses have varying terrain, and your cadence will tend to be higher in the flats and lower when you climb. Athletes vary quite a bit. More muscular riders may find that they perform better using lower cadences, even at endurance-length distances.
Lean riders often find that they perform better using higher cadences, opting for a more aerobic efforts. However, these are not hard rules. Despite your body type, you may find that you prefer mashing over spinning, or vice versa. Unlike determining your current cycling FTP , there isn't a cut-and-dry test you can execute to find your ideal cycling cadence. The best advice is to intentionally train using both higher and lower cadences. You want to develop the ability to hold high cadences for long periods of time, and you also want to keep your fast-twitch muscle fibers engaged by training in harder gears at lower cadences.
Like doing cycling-specific strength training at the gym, it's important to mix it up and to remain well-rounded in your fitness. Finding your ideal cadence largely comes down to feel, once you've adapted to training at different intensities. Why track cadence at all when it's perception based?
First off, without tracking you lose the ability to precisely train at low and high cadences. Secondly, you can choose to ride by feel, but when a workout or race starts to make you tired, you can intentionally switch to maintaining a high cadence, which will be more of a workout for your heart but will keep you from deeply fatiguing your muscles.
SportTracks gives you powerful tools to create custom workouts for cadence training, and to deeply analyze your cadence data afterward. In the Training Options of your account, you can easily create custom cadence zones for cycling. Your cadence depends on your leg strength. Beginners may have to start at a cadence lower than 50 if they feel uncomfortable pedaling faster. The key to improving your exercise health benefits is to ride regularly so that you can improve your fitness level and leg strength.
Gradually work up to a cadence of 70 or more. The best way to learn how to ride a bike efficiently is to try to keep your cadence between 80 and 90 pedal strokes per minute. However, you may not be able to do this yet. Most experienced bicycle riders do best when they chose gears low enough to allow them to pedal at this cadence. You will learn to anticipate increased resistance on your pedals. You do not wait for your cadence to speed up or slow down.
Eventually when you feel that the pressure on your pedals is going to slow you down to a cadence below 80, you will lower your gears. When you feel that your cadence is going to go faster than 90, you will raise your gear ratio. As you improve, try to keep your cadence between 80 and 90 for at least some of your ride. If you want to go faster, you may have to lower your gears so that you temporarily increase your cadence above 90, then go to a higher gear and put more pressure on the pedals to keep your cadence above You can use this technique to pick up the pace when you want to catch up with a rider ahead of you.
Serious riders should be able to hold a cadence between 80 and 90 for most of their rides. Since aging reduces power and strength, older bicycle racers are weaker and will use a lower cadence during races than younger riders Med Sci Sports Exerc, ;42 11 :pp If you want to be able to pedal faster and ride faster, you need to strengthen your legs. The fastest bicycle racers exert the greatest downstroke power on their pedals. However, most bicycle racers do not lift weights with their legs because it causes their muscles to feel sore and limits the amount of hard riding that they can do.
Instead, you can practice climbing hills as fast as you can. To strengthen muscles, you have to damage them, which you can do by putting enough pressure on the pedals to make your muscles feel a burning sensation while you ride and muscle soreness on the next day.
You can do this very effectively by standing up and climbing hills at a fast cadence. Also once or twice a week, ride shorter distances very fast and hard, spinning your pedals more than 90 times a minute. IMHO, there is a single right answer to this question.
It has nothing to do with leg strength, endurance, weather, wind, or anything else. The answer is always More or less. The problem here is that people think of bike riding as pedaling.
It is not; it is spinning the pedals. When your body performs high cadence work, your body communicates contraction and relaxation of the muscles involved out of sync and rhythm. This increase in neuromuscular communication is due to co-contraction. Co-contraction involves the two sets of muscles that surround a joint, flexors and extensors, and their simultaneous activation trying to shorten.
An example of co-contraction would be flexing your bicep elbow flexor and tricep elbow extensor at the same time. Both muscles are contracting, but the lower arm is not moving.
We can relate this to a cycling pedal stroke. When pedaling a complete revolution, your muscles are not working independently.
Leg muscles including the quads vastus lateralis and medialis, rectus femoris , and hamstrings biceps femoris long and short head , semitendinosus, and semimembranosus are all working together to produce smooth movement. If they worked independently, your motion would be very stiff and jerky. As the quadriceps lengthen and produce force into the pedals, your hamstrings shorten and produce a pulling movement against this force.
If you can improve your neuromuscular coordination on the bike, then you can ride harder…. Incorporating cadence builds, cadence drills, and high cadence holds frequently in training can and will improve your neuromuscular coordination.
This increase in coordination will improve your power across all ranges, not just the top end. No one ever rode faster by riding less efficiently. Looking to incorporate some cadence drills into your own training? Try some of the following below:.
The experience of juggling athletic goals with collegiate and career responsibilities has taught Mac that peak performance is achievable even for those who cannot focus exclusively on training. While concentrating on exercise physiology in an academic setting, Mac competed at the World Championships, Pan American Championships, and World Cups on both the road and track. Thanks for the clearly stated info on cadence.
Simple and easy to implement.
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