Cadence and the learning process

The common learning process for pedaling a bike is flawed.  People spend the first year of their lives leaning the motor skills for walking and standing, and a whole lot of time after that practicing just that.  It’s a motor skill that doesn’t work well for cycling as walking of standing puts all of the force at the bottom (where your feet meet the ground). Looking at force vectors of cyclists it’s clear they are trying to use a motor skill that doesn’t work well.

My method of teaching pedal stroke is to first determine which muscle groups contribute power, then limit their use to where they are effective. Humans have two large muscle groups which fight gravity - glutes and quads. There are other muscles that can move the cranks, but glutes + quads produce 99% of the power and few people waste less than 30% of that, so that’s what I focus on.

Understanding what a muscle does and actually teaching how to use it are two very different things. Some muscles are easy to actively fire, others are reactive. Quads are easy to fire - try to push down on your foot and your quad fires. You have a lifetime of reinforcing that. Glutes are more reactive. Think about firing your glute and nothing happens. Stand up out of a chair and they extend from the hip. To learn how to use the glutes you have to find a position and motion which will cause them to fire.

To go along with a flawed learning process there are set rules for variables.  Cadence is a variable.  There’s a lot of advice out there that your cadence should be a certain number or range. That advice comes from people who don’t understand the pedal stroke or the two very different muscle groups used to produce power. Quads are designed to produce foot speed. It’s a long muscle with a very short distance to the attachment point along the tibia, just past the pivot. The quads are a very wide muscle group with equal attachment distances. Quads generate leg speed, glutes generate torque.

My way of teaching use of the glutes involves gravity. Given the earth’s gravity, your cadence limit for isolating the glutes is going to be around 82 RPM.   I will stress that this is a teaching method. My goal is to teach riders how to generate force in the right direction by limiting how and when the large muscle groups are used. I can’t do that at 100RPMs, you don’t learn at full speed.  Once you understand the concepts of pedal stroke and learn the motor skills you can use them any way you wish.