Tommasini53 said:In an attemp to increase my strength and time trialing ability, on the advice of a friend, I've been trying a training session every week that consists of several 15 minute intervals in a relatively big gear and low RPMs (65 to 70 range) with my HR around my temp zone (based on the HR calculator posted by Morbius)
These are really difficult for me. Not so much on the day of the training session but the day after I am really wiped out.
I'm curious if others have positive benefits from such intervals. Maybe someone could explain the physiology (not too technical please).🙂 🙂
Firstly, strength has a specific meaning in science, which is: the maximal force or tension a muscle or group of muscles can generate. With that in mind, increasing strength does not increase the sustainable power that can be generated when (e.g.) riding a TT, unless you happen to be very weak (e.g., you're a frail old lady, or perhaps you have a functional disability). The forces involved in TTing (or hill climbing, etc) are actually quite low to moderate, such that untrained, healthy, age, gender, and mass matched people can generate these forces. Additionally, untrained people maybe able to generate higher peak forces than elite endurance cyclists. This latter may occur as a result of increased aerobic ability where increasing aerobic machinery within the cells replaces contractile proteins.
On the other hand, what you'd want to do, to increase TT ability is increase your sustainable power. This would occur from training at higher sustainable power outputs (i.e., those efforts around TT ability)
There is no good evidence to suggest that riding at the same power output in a big gear/low cadence will increase your TT ability. Although the force requirements would be higher (but not anywhere near high enough to increase strength) than at a higher cadence, it doesn't appear to be beneficial.
However, often when people do these sessions (many of them may not have a power meter) they tend to ride the lower cadence sessions at a higher power output, which will increase fitness/TT ability/etc. Thermodynamically, it's more efficient to ride at a lower - rather - than higher cadence, and at a lower cadence your HR will tend to be lower at a given power output. Thus, by keeping your HR constant, your potentially riding at a higher power output (and thus deriving fitness changes from that, rather than the lower cadence). Potentially, it would be more beneficial to ride at your normal cadence at the higher power - as this will be more race specific.
It's my feeling, that people then think that they've ridden at the same power output (as HR is the same) and that pedalling at low cadence is the magic answer for getting fitter.
Of course, on the other hand, there are times, when you need to practice riding at a low cadence, as i explained in the http://www.cyclingforums.com/t359329.html thread. For e.g., on steep hills that take longer than a few seconds with standard type road gears it's impossible to ride at a 'normal' cadence (e.g. 90+ revs/min) due to the physics and the resistance of gravity. Here, though, it's probably just best riding up the hills at your desired effort at whatever cadence you can manage (for me, where i live, my cadence on climbs with a 39 x 25 can vary from 30 - to - 80 revs/min due to the severity of the grades) rather than manipulating it in a large gear on the flat.
Ric
