Hi, I am Joe Friel. I would like to talk to you a little bit about how to pedal a bike today. This is Ryan Bolton, Ryan in on the 2000 US Olympic team in Triathlon. Ryan's here to help me today to show you some of the things that have to go into how you pedal a bike economically.
The first part of this really in peddling the bike is, learning to pedal the bike horizontally. That sounds strange I know, but usually we think in terms of doing this peddling the bike vertically. We think about the pedal is going up and down, or we think about them going in circles, and really what I want you to think about doing, is thinking about the pedals going horizontally on the bike.
Why don't you stop peddling for a minute. Actually what we look at here is how to pedal a bike horizontally. Really what the foot is doing is, moving forward to the top of pedal, and moving backwards at the bottom of the pedal stroke, as opposed to trying to push the pedal down, and pull the pedal up. So really trying to work on these two horizontal aspects of the peddling movement. The one way -- there is actually about three ways to work on this, three mental queues you can use. The first is the concept of pushing your toes forward in the shoe at the top of the stroke. So from this position here, the feeling that Ryan would be trying to get as he is peddling the bike, is that he is trying to touch is toes to the end of the shoe.
When he does that, that means his foot is actually pushing forward, so we get this horizontal movement of the foot and ankle against, instead as opposed to the, just strictly this up and down movement of the foot and ankle. Or another way of doing this, is to put the pedal at the bottom of the stroke, and think about this position down here scrapping mud off the shoe. So if you have an old fashioned scrapper by your back door, and you have muddy shoes, you would simply scrap the mud off back here, and so the movement like he is doing right there with his foot will be coming up and backwards. So again, we are working on the horizontal aspect.
Some people find they pedal better if they think about this as opposed to the top portion. Yet another way of doing this, is to think about the knee cap being thrown over the handle bars as the leg comes up. Some people like the notion of the feeling that gives them that movement of this very top portion of the stroke right here, like they get a sensation of the knee cap about to be thrown over the handle bar. So by doing some combination of those or working primarily on one of those, at first you would be able to feel of trying to pedal the bike in these horizontal manners, instead of in vertical manner.
Now there is some drills you can do to work on these. On of these is Leg Turning Drill, and all you do is unpedal unclip one foot, you can put on a chair or a box or as Ryan is doing here on the trainer behind you, and you just pedal with one leg Ryan. And all we are going to do is pedal for like thirty seconds, and concentrate on one of those techniques I just mentioned, either pushing the toes forward to the top of the stroke, pulling the foot back to scrap the mud off the bottom, or like feeling of throwing the knee over the handle bar, as it comes across the top. Those are some drills you can work on to improve that technique.
Flip back in the other foot now Ryan. There is also another aspect to try and pedal economically I want to talk about, and that is the position of the foot when it is on the pedal. What we really want when the foot is in this position, and actually all the way through the stroke, is that the heel remains slightly above the pedal. We don't want to the heel to be sagging down in this position as your foot goes through the peddling stroke. We are trying to keep the heel slightly above the pedal all the way through this pedal stroke. So Ryan if you pedal like that, you will notice that his heel stays elevated. He is not dropping his heel to any place during the stroke.
What he has done by doing this, is he has actually rotated the crank arms slightly forward, which makes it easier to pedal through this horizontal position at top. So this little movement that is left in the heel adds a little bit more economy to the peddling of the bike.
Another aspect of peddling the bike economically has to do with your pedal cadence Ryan has got nice cadence going here, he is probably somewhere in the low nineties, which is very economical for most riders we have found. If you get your cadence down very low, let's say it is84 or lower, which is not unusual finding in some cyclists, especially in triathlons I have found who tend to get in bigger gears and push big gears and sometimes cadence, you start wasting more energy.
What we really want to do, is we want to learn to pedal with a highest end of your comfort range. Ryan's comfort range probably brings him into around 110 to 102 rpms. That's quite the upper end of his comfort range. If we can get him comfortable in that range to move it actually to the lower down his comfort range, so he has a higher comfort range, we can make him more economical. One way to do that is to work on a drill I call, Spin-up Drills. What we are going to do over the course of thirty seconds, is spend up from his normal 90 some cadence up to as fast as he can with his legs, until eventually he is bouncing on the saddle.
So let's try that Ryan. Let's go 30 seconds and let's start right now, bring your cadence up gradually, just keep bringing it up, and bring it up, and bring it up even higher, and higher, and higher. Let's get up to like 130, 140, just keep bringing it up, and what you will notice is, we hit his top end, when he get beyond his economical range, his hips start bouncing. When we hit back, we want to slow the cadence back down again, until it just stops. When it just stops, we are now economical again, pedal there for a few seconds, and then slow back down to your normal cadence again.
Transcription by:
Scribe4you Transcription Services