Pedalling speeds or cadence can seem to go in trends, depending on what the current professional
riders are doing themselves. If we look back to the Lance Armstrong era, he made high cadences
on climbs very popular indeed. But if we look at Jan Ullrich, who won the Tour de France
before Lance Armstrong, he really ground it up the climbs and put it in a big gear. Although
they are both very controversial figures in the world of cycling now. It seems like they
were cheating, so maybe that cancels each other out. Regardless, we thought we'd come
to test this ourselves, because the modern science seems to point towards self-selected
cadence being the most efficient - so whatever you feel is best probably is the best. Simon
behind me is doing our protocol, which is 10 minutes at a 6% gradient going 20km/h.
At the moment he's doing 100rpm which is well above what he would naturally select. Then
when he's finished that, he'll rest before going at 80rpm which is roughly what he'd
do on a climb. We'll give him some more rest and then finally finish with 60rpm which is
below what he'd normally do. Now we're going to do some testing in terms of the oxygen
that he's consuming for each of the cadences. We'll also look at his blood lactate and heart
rate and analyse the results when he's finished.
OK, we're about halfway through the first test. Si, we know it doesn't feel natural
but how are you getting on with 100rpm?
To start with it was really strange, but now after a few minutes I've kind of bedded in.
It's more about the restrictiveness - I'd like to get out of the seat but I can't. I
would never choose this gear for this environment. But it's not too bad.
10 seconds to go now, Si.
2...1...10 minutes is done. Si's done his 10 minutes at 100rpm, so he'll have some blood
collected now. We'll analyse his breath, but we're not going to do all the results until
we've done the other two tests. We'll give him some rest in between.
Shh! He's resting now, he'll be ready soon!
We've just started the 2nd of our 10 minute intervals. This time Si is going completely
on feel, he's not got any numbers to look at, it's just his self-selected cadence which
I can tell you is 90.
90?! What?
Yeah it's 90. We thought it was 80 but he seems to enjoy going at 90, so only 10 beats
lower than the one we did last time, then the next one we'll go down to 60. 50 seconds in, Si.
1...done.
3,2,1, go.
Right, Si has now started a 3rd and final 10 minute block, as you can see at a lower
cadence. Given the gear that he's in, that 6% gradient and the 20km/h it's giving him
61 cadence, so he is currently looking remarkably like Jan Ullrich. We'll see how he's feeling
in just a few moments.
We're now midway through this final 10 minute test. Simon, you're at about 61rpm on this
one, which is a good 25% below what your self-selected cadence was, how is this feeling?
It's weird. It feels hard...when I try and analyse that feeling, my breathing seems the
same, there's no more pain in my legs, it's just less comfortable.
Your heart rate seems to be lower than the other two intervals so far.
I'm quite comfortable, so I wonder whether my muscles are working so slowly and I guess I'm
at the amount of power where I'm only using slow-twitch fibres. Just don't ask me to accelerate!
Right, well you've got 4 minutes to go. See you in a minute.
Don't leave me!
2...1...done.
It's time to crunch some numbers. If we look at the ones which I recorded on the Garmin,
the average heart rate over the last minute of each 10 minute test. The first one, which
is 100rpm, Simon's average heart rate was 177. The second, self- selected, 90rpm, that
was 172, and it was exactly the same down at 60rpm, 172.
Jonathan, please tell us what the results were from a VO2 point of view and the other test as well.
The VO2 is fairly similar between the three tests. If anything, the 100rpm was slightly
lower, round about 49ml/kg. The 90rpm and the 60rpm were both around 50ml/kg, just slightly
over that. There's a fractional difference, but in one subject over that period of time
it's nothing we could really say is significant.
Nothing too significant there, what about the lactate?
The lactate's probably a little bit surprising maybe. The VO2s are quite similar but the
lactate shows some slight differences. At 100rpm, the lactate was higher than it has
been for all three - 2.8 millimoles. At 60 it was 1.3 mmol and at 90 it was 1.6, so there's
quite a big difference there of over 1 mmol between three different cadences.
That is quite a big difference. Let's go and talk to Si who is...just waking up over there
and see how he felt for the 3 different intervals.
You've heard the results, Si. Before we go through them, it is worth stressing that, if you didn't
see the other couple of videos, we do know these aren't officially scientific videos,
it is just Si or myself doing it on our own and just doing one test at each - we know
you need to repeat them to get really good results. But - the results did seem quite
significant, not what we expected. That was a low lactate at 60rpm, almost half what you
had at 100rpm - what do you make of that?
It's weird isn't it? If I'd gone into that blind and you'd asked me the same question,
I would've said without a doubt that 100rpm is the hardest. I did feel that it was physically
uncomfortable. The perception of 60 compared to my self-selected 90rpm, it didn't feel
like there was any difference. 60 felt a little more uncomfortable just because of the greater
force I was pushing on the pedals, but it didn't feel like I was working harder. Really
interesting to see that for me, at this power, slower pedalling did seem to be better.
It's also worth saying, from what I've read over recent years is that the higher the power
output, the higher the efficient cadence should be. So if for example we look at Chris Hoy
back in his heyday producing an enormous amount of power around the track - he's actually
spinning quite a high gear. So perhaps if you're an amateur doing 200 watts against
Bradley Wiggins doing 480, actually you can't copy his cadence because that's not the most
efficient was of doing it.
Absolutely. I think it's also worth mentioning that your cadence is going to vary depending
on the gradient as well. For some reason when you're riding on a flat stretch of road, your
cadence is generally higher than when you're climbing. So I think what we can take from this is
that actually it's still worth training at different cadences, because you're going to
need a different cadence for different situations. If most of your training is done on long climbs,
then perhaps you're going to suffer on flat roads unless you do a bit of fast pedalling.