How best to Pedal

richard36

Hi

I've done a search and can't find the answer I'm looking for.

I'm riding a bike with something on the pedal that I don't know the name of (!!) but it's like a plastic cage that you put your foot into - I'm sure you know what I'm talking about!

I tend to find that when I'm pedalling instead of my feet (and therefore pedals) being horizontal with the ground they tend to point downwards and apart from making my toes a bit numb I'm wondering whether this is the best way to pedal.

I find that by pedalling in the way I do I can pedal a bit harder whereas if I try and pedal horizontally my muscles ache a little more.

I hope my post makes sense and would appreciate your comments.

Thanks

Richard

LeighB

The position of your foot is governed by the seat height and what feels comfortable. There are different methods to calculate the correct seat height but I have used the following; with your leg, the seat tube and crank arm in line you should be able to touch the pedal with your heel. From this seat height adjust up or down in small increments until you find a comfortable and efficient position.

CrookedCucumber

I guess you're talking about toe straps or something like that? Most cyclists these days prefer `clipless' pedals (that interlock directly with cleats on your shoes) but I generally prefer old-fashioned straps, which is what yours sound like.

I also don't know the `right' way to pedal with straps. I've always `ankled' slightly, that is, pointed my toes up at the top of the downstroke and down at the bottom. I was taught to do this 30-odd years ago because it was said to allow the use of the lower leg muscles. But I think most cyclists these days just keep their feet horizontal, whatever kind of pedals they're using.

FWIW I find that after about 15-20 miles in straps my toes go slightly numb, but taking my shoes out of the straps and giving them a wiggle usually fixes it.

I keep toying with the idea of clipless pedals, but so far I haven't seen a compelling reason to change. But you might want to think about it also -- their are plenty of folks around here who swear by them ( and at them )

neeb

Ideally the angle of your foot should change as you pedal. Just before you reach the highest point (9 o'clock to 12 o'clock) it should if anything be pointing upwards, as you are trying to push the pedal over the top (like rolling a barrel forwards). From 12 o'clock onwards your toes will start to point down more as you push downwards through the ball of your foot (this is by far the most powerful part of the pedal stroke), and then near the bottom (for a really efficient pedal action) you should be pulling backwards a bit, as if you were scraping mud off the bottom of your shoe.

You want to adjust the position of the clips on the pedals and the tightness of the straps so that the ball of your foot is over the pedal.

If your toes are getting numb it might be because you have the clips too tight - perhaps they are adjusted so that you can't get your foot far enough in? In that case you might be having to keep pushing forwards to keep your foot on the pedal / in the clip, thus causing numbness? What sirt of shoes are you wearing?

Rich Hcp

If you have a cage or clips, you can push your toes in to the end of your shoes when you pedal, this can make them numb.

Clipless means that doesn't happen.

As said above, you need to get the adjustment right.

redddraggon

Clipless pedals are a revelation - however once you start using them you might find it difficult to use normal pedals again.

Last time I forgot my cycling shoes, I had to use flat pedals and I was getting passed by all sorts of slow people - no matter how much I tried not to I couldn't stop myself "pulling up" on the pedals.

If I was you I'd seriously consider going clipless, once you get over the initial falling off period they are amazing.

AndyChud

I also don't know the `right' way to pedal with straps. I've always `ankled' slightly, that is, pointed my toes up at the top of the downstroke and down at the bottom. I was taught to do this 30-odd years ago because it was said to allow the use of the lower leg muscles. But I think most cyclists these days just keep their feet horizontal, whatever kind of pedals they're using.

I was taught to do this too, but I was taught 5 weeks ago by a very experienced triathlete (top in his age group in the whole of the Netherlands!), he also said it was to use the muscles in the lower leg and make your pedalling more efficient.

Alex_Simmons/RST

neeb wrote:

Ideally the angle of your foot should change as you pedal. Just before you reach the highest point (9 o'clock to 12 o'clock) it should if anything be pointing upwards, as you are trying to push the pedal over the top (like rolling a barrel forwards). From 12 o'clock onwards your toes will start to point down more as you push downwards through the ball of your foot (this is by far the most powerful part of the pedal stroke), and then near the bottom (for a really efficient pedal action) you should be pulling backwards a bit, as if you were scraping mud off the bottom of your shoe.

How do these myths about pedalling perpetuate?

Get properly positoned on the bike, consider shoes/pedals that best suit you (fit, adjustability if using cleats, price, looks, compatability with pedals, durability etc) and are comfortable for riding in for several hours. Then the pedalling action will take care of itself through plenty of riding.

Attempts to make a more "efficient" pedal stroke by "pulling through", "scraping mud", moving toes up/down/whatever at various points, trying to pedal "in circles" etc are all distractions from what makes a rider go faster - and that's pushing harder on the downstroke (and doing so quickly and reguarly). Anything else takes away from that.

The fastest riders have the highest peak torques on the downstroke relative to the whole pedal stroke, and not those with the "smoothest" torque curve.

CrookedCucumber

Alex_Simmons/RST wrote:

neeb wrote:

Ideally the angle of your foot should change as you pedal. Just before you reach the highest point (9 o'clock to 12 o'clock) it should if anything be pointing upwards, as you are trying to push the pedal over the top (like rolling a barrel forwards). From 12 o'clock onwards your toes will start to point down more as you push downwards through the ball of your foot (this is by far the most powerful part of the pedal stroke), and then near the bottom (for a really efficient pedal action) you should be pulling backwards a bit, as if you were scraping mud off the bottom of your shoe.

How do these myths about pedalling perpetuate?

Well, that's an interesting question, in general. I suspect in this case it's very simple -- it just seems intuitively obvious that if you can recruit the gastrocnemius into the downstroke, you'll get some extra oomph. The gastrocnemius is a very powerful and well-trained muscle in most people who spend any time on their feet.

Whether it actually works or not is difficult to establish. It's no good trying to compare people who ankle against those who don't, because the differences are likely to be small compared to all the other variabilities from one group of individuals to another. You could, I suppose train a person to ankle with one leg only, and then measure the power and enurance of the two legs separately

I think that since we don't really know whether ankling works or not, over-enthusiastic ankling is probably best avoided, as it puts a heap of stress on the achilles tendon.

neeb

I'll happily defer to those with more experience, but I certainly notice a slight increase in power on the indoor trainer when I'm concentrating on "ankling", especially on simulated hills. Obviously the vast majority of the torque is coming from the downstroke though.

In practice I find it hard to think about how I'm pedaling when I'm really trying to go fast.

CrookedCucumber

It seems to me that if there wasn't _some_ measure of ankling going on in cycling, we'd all now be using pedals that clipped in at the heel. This would avoid a lot of problems, in particular the need to wear really stiff shoes to get good energy transfer. It would also take a lot of stress off the achilles tendon.

The fact that we don't see anybody promoting heel clips seems to me to be a good indication that at least some ankling is beneficial.

Steve_F

If you do decide to go clipless watch out for your toes catching on your front wheel when it's turning.

Size 11 feet and a medium frame bike means I'm having difficulty adjusting to this. Had to switch back to straps to train myself to balance at lights and make sure I don't turn the bars too far at low speed as it knocked me off a couple of times.

Still intend to go clipless again tho as I did notice a difference as soon as I put them on.

Alex_Simmons/RST

CrookedCucumber wrote:

It seems to me that if there wasn't _some_ measure of ankling going on in cycling, we'd all now be using pedals that clipped in at the heel. This would avoid a lot of problems, in particular the need to wear really stiff shoes to get good energy transfer. It would also take a lot of stress off the achilles tendon.

The fact that we don't see anybody promoting heel clips seems to me to be a good indication that at least some ankling is beneficial.

Well it would generate terrible front wheel overlap for starters, not to mention other safety concerns, so I'm not surprised. To avoid that would require a frame with vastly inferior handling characteristics I'd say.

However we do see quite a bit of promotion of mid-foot or arch cleat placement. I don't see, from a physics POV how it is any better than the normal cleat placement but it ain't any worse it would seem, otherwise the women's world road TT champion wouldn't have won her title using such a mid-foot cleat placement. The lower leg muscles are mostly about stabilisation of the foot for power transfer and not so much about direct power production themselves.

I will be a case of just such a strange combination of cleat under heel position on one side and normal cleat position on the other very soon. Having suffered a below knee amputation last year, when I start cycling again (hopefully in the next few weeks), my prosthetic cycling leg will in effect have a cleat positioned as if it was directly under my "heel" (it will be at the end of the pipe section extending from my leg socket). My other foot will be normal cycling shoe/cleat arrangement. I will be using normal cleats/pedals (Campag Profit) on both legs.

I use power meters extensively, so I'll be able to get some indication of leg imbalance through one legged pedalling* but in reality I would need to rig up a very high inertial load weight on the opposite pedal so that the impact of the upstroke is not artificially impacting such analysis. I really don't need to do it as the analysis has already been done by others but it might be a bit of fun.

* one-legged drills are a waste of time too. Unless you ride/race one-legged a la Michael Milton, then not much point training that way.

It's like the other myth that low cadence hill climbing efforts build "strength". What a load of twaddle.

dennisn

I would have to agree with Alex when he talks all these different pedal stroke types
being more "distracitons" than anything else. However, I also think that changing
the type of pedal stroke you are using, every once in a while, for short periods,
can actually be somewhat helpful in that it helps rest the main muscles that you are using, if only for a moment or two. Sort of like every once in a while you need to get out
of the saddle, stretch, use a few different muscles, and then sit back down and go at it
again.

Dennis Noward

CrookedCucumber

Alex_Simmons/RST wrote:

However we do see quite a bit of promotion of mid-foot or arch cleat placement. I don't see, from a physics POV how it is any better than the normal cleat placement but it ain't any worse it would seem, otherwise the women's world road TT champion wouldn't have won her title using such a mid-foot cleat placement. The lower leg muscles are mostly about stabilisation of the foot for power transfer and not so much about direct power production themselves.

I would think that if you don't actively use (that is, flex and extend) your lower leg muscles, then you ought to have the cleats as close to your heel as you can, allowing for geometry limitations, as you say.

Since your lower leg muscles won't be contributing to power development (if you're right), then the energy consumption involved in holding your ankle joint at constant angle, against the power of your upper leg, etc., muscles, must be considerable. And that is all energy going to waste.

I suspect that, if there is a benefit to ankling, it is mostly going to be to those people who don't use clipless pedals (like me). Perhaps it allows the power stroke to be extended slightly? If you can already power the upstroke, the small extra effort generated by the lower leg might not even be noticeable. Dunno, really.

As for developing `strength' by cycling up hill in high gears, well... the human neuromuscular system trains in a highly specific way. By doing this it `learns' to push against a high resistance at low(-ish) speed. Whether that's useful or not, I don't know. It's not something I propose to try, since my ageing knees won't stand it.

nolf

Isn't big gear pushing on the flat thought good for building power?

I'm not talking about strength, as weights are for strength and strength is all relative, but for just building base power won't doing intervals pushing a bigger gear help with this?

Interestingly recently I've been trying different pedalling techniques and have come to this conclusion as well. During harder rides it is nice to sometimes scrape along the bottom a lot more as it allows me to stay in the same position and work slightly different muscles, but I find it make no difference to my speed and is just annoying.

Also as I usually pedal at around 100rpm it's very difficult for me to keep the concentration level up.

CrookedCucumber

nolf wrote:

Isn't big gear pushing on the flat thought good for building power?

I'm not talking about strength, as weights are for strength and strength is all relative, but for just building base power won't doing intervals pushing a bigger gear help with this?

If you mean `power' in the sense that an engineer would use it, then the simple answer is `no'.

Power is the amount of work done in a unit of time. If you're travelling at constant speed then you need to do work to overcome friction and wind resistance, and raise your weight if you're climbing a hill. That amount of work is not dependent at all on your cadence. It's purely a matter of the working environment. If you pedal half as fast you do twice the work per pedal stroke. Provided that your speed remains constant, you're doing the same total work.

Actually, it's a bit more complicated than that, because when you're cycling your also doing work against the elastic resistance of your own body tissues. But these effects are not large except at the extremes of cadence.

Having said all that, I'm not sure that when athletes use the term `power' they actually use in the same way an engineer would. I suspect that many people use it in a vague sense to mean `strength which can be exerted over a short time', or something like that.

jedster

It's like the other myth that low cadence hill climbing efforts build "strength". What a load of twaddle

That's interesting. Why is it twaddle? I'd have thought it was just like high weight/low reps and low weight/high reps in the gym - don't you need high resistance to build muscle mass and strength? And isn't it big powerful quads that give you sprint speed?

BTW, I'm not claiming that I know anything about this topic. So I'm not attacking what you're saying just trying to understand.

J

Alex_Simmons/RST

jedster wrote:

It's like the other myth that low cadence hill climbing efforts build "strength". What a load of twaddle

That's interesting. Why is it twaddle? I'd have thought it was just like high weight/low reps and low weight/high reps in the gym - don't you need high resistance to build muscle mass and strength? And isn't it big powerful quads that give you sprint speed?

BTW, I'm not claiming that I know anything about this topic. So I'm not attacking what you're saying just trying to understand.

J

I once thought the same too but when I investigated this and with the help of some people who really know what they're talking about, it is actually quite simple to see why it's twaddle.

Quite simply, the forces involved in pedalling are too low to induce changes in strength (maximal force exerted by a given muscle group). Low cadence/high force pedalling is still no more forceful than walking up stairs. Hence the resistance required to induce hypertrophy can't be gained by riding a bicycle, even going hard at sub-normal cadences, say for example ~50 rpm. What weight would you choose to lift in a gym if asked to do 50 repititions per minute (actually that's 50 reps per leg per minute, so 100 reps/min) for 5 to 20 minutes? I bet it wouldn't be much.

Now strength is closely related to muscle cross-sectional area, and if you want to increase your muscle cross-sectional area, then you'll need to lift (big) weights.

However, that is most likely to be counter-productive to cycling performance* (excepting perhaps for elite track match sprinters and kilo time trial riders).

Spint speed is partially dictated by strength (maximal force ability) but is also strongly influenced by neuromuscluar factors. That's why there are lots of weightlifters who still couldn't sprint if their life depended on it. They might be strong, but are often slow.

Sprint speed not only requires the ability to generate high forces on the pedals but also the ability to do that very rapidly. Hence sprint speed is about high force generation at the joint angles and velocities that occur on a bike. To train that, guess what? - you ride a bike. Fast. For brief periods.

The other factor sometimes cited for the use of such low cadence efforts to promote muscle fibre type changes and/or to recruit different muscle fibre types. This is also not supported when you look at the what's really going on.

Best however to read this article on the topic as it explains it far more eloquently than I could:
http://home.earthlink.net/~acoggan/setraining/

* Our physiological limiters for cycling (a primarily aerobic endurance activity) are related to our VO2 Max and cardiac output, mitochondral and capilliary density and power at lactate threshold. These are not enhanced by lifting weights. They are enhanced by riding our bike in sufficient volumes at the right intensities.

jedster

Thanks for that and, yes, it makes sense. I was thinking along those lines. I guess that weight training must be of some value to sprinters having seen photos of Chris Hoy's thighs...

Anonymous

When I pedal I try and rotate my ankles abit, its abit hard ot describe, I also try and keep a level foot, but have tried having them facing down abit but I just cant get used to it. I dont quite know if I am used to clipless pedals yet too.

And when I go up hills I get into the lwoest gear possible usually or the lowest one I feel comfortable spinning in, usually run out of gears and start to struggle, I was to use hills to build strength, surely pedaling slower on a high gear would help as you are having to push harder?