How to run 50% faster without external energy (2020)
science.org
science.org
I'm surprised it wasn't mentioned that 2 recording breaking marathon runs were by athletes wearing the Nike Vaporfly shoe.
The shoe was ultimately banned due to the giving too much "bounce" (free energy) to the runners.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-athletics-shoe/nike-proto...
I've used them (as a ~3:00 marathoner). They probably are good for a few minutes off your time. But what I noticed most was that the next day I said to my wife, "I don't think I ran hard enough." Oh, I ran hard enough, but the shoes do so much better at keeping the legs from getting trashed. Normally, I'd take the day off the day after a marathon. Instead, I said, "screw it, I'm going for a short run."
And the VaporFly has little to do with this proposition, other than using a spring-like device.
I made a mistake in shoe choice for a vacation one year, before I knew how much my wife absolutely insists on walking at least 10 miles a day. That was 8 years ago and I still have pretty severe pain almost every morning.
I basically had to stop any recreational walking for a year. I tried the Vibram FiveFingers and I think they helped (yes, I know about the lawsuit: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-27335251), but my equation for recovery is rest + time then gentle strengthening (and luck I guess, in the case of my plantar fasciitis). And ergonomic everything wherever possible to prevent future issues before they occur.
Mainly, though, is they're $250 a pair. That's a pretty pricey experiment without some bit of evidence, even if anecdotal, that they might work for your problem.
Good luck, though. I know plantar fasciitis is a tough one to treat.
An ideal spring (or a capacitor) should not absorb any energy.
1) Kuru tennis shoes with an insert for PF are excellent. 2) Oofos slippers by my bedside even today. They provide such good relief 3) aleve > other pain meds 4) the PF splint which stretches out your foot cN work wonders
I ultimately had to get my plantar fascia released, my inflammation had just become so severe there was no other option. I’m really glad I did it though, it’s been completely gone ever since. My foot feels fantastic now, though the recovery was a little long. I was walking around after a few weeks but I didn’t feel 100% until probably eight or 10 months out. I still use all of the above and it has yet to return. But they were also incredibly effective at managing my pain/inflammation. I just had them recommended too late in the process.
What does this mean?
It’s an old procedure at this point that different doctors have different opinions on. In my case, I had a second opinion from a doctor who thought he was going to tell me no, but then he looked at my history of treatment and went “yeah at this point, you have no other option. It’s this or live with what you’ve got and I would say go for it.” Considering he was going in prepared to tell me no that was actually very encouraging and I’m glad I did it. But it does not mean it is for everyone, I highly recommend if you are considering it to get two or three opinions on it, and to exhaust all your other options.
By that point I had pretty much integrated every single piece of equipment that could give me a relief and had done multiple rounds of steroids - both oral and injection. It would always get close to getting better, then would start re-inflaming. I’m 18mo out now and doing great.
Tendons and ligaments do not adapt at the same rate as muscles. Nor do articulation patterns.
(Still, your mileage may vary, I included lots of exercise specifically for the transition. And still run in Altras.)
[edit] Unable to find the one i searched but found this article claiming a 2-3x times bodyweight impact on the legs when wearing shoes.
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2010/01/barefoot-runn...
[edit]
Another great study found while searching
> A large majority (68%) of runners participating in the study experienced no new injuries after starting barefoot running. In fact, most respondents (69%) actually had their previous injuries go away after starting barefoot running.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S209525461...
I suppose that different activities require different footwear.
Thanks for the recommendation, might give em a try. Tested some brands so far, stayed with Vivobarefoot.
[edit] Disclaimer: Repeat customer
The only solution that worked for me was stretching. When you are standing on a step, let your heel hang down as low as possible one foot at a time. Do this for both feet and do it with straight legs and bent knees multiple times a day. It only takes about a minute and does an amazing job of curing plantar.
In my case, I needed shoes with more support around the mid-foot so the feet didn't rotate in or out too much. The flip side is that as soon as I wear the wrong kind of shoes my feet let me know within a couple of workouts.
I also wear superfeet insoles in all my casual shoes.
The brand that works for you may not be the same as mine but Hokas work well right now and Saucony ProGrid Omnis worked really well too in the past. Saucony unfortunately keeps changing the names of their shoes but I think the current "Grid" type shoes are similar.
Asics, Mizunos, Brookes, etc. were all useless to me.
So, I would say keep trying different pairs of shoes.
I'm usually a big fan of sports medicine and physical therapy, but in this case those fields were pretty clueless about deducing the cause beyond general platitudes.
Edit: To add, my symptoms were first caused by wearing the wrong kind of shoes because Saucony stopped making the ones I was used to and I tried another brand on someone's advice.
I have Brookes right now. They felt good when I first got them, but they just didn't hold up. I think my local shoe store must have too many Brookes shoes. They push them really hard every time I go.
1. Max stack height of 40 mm 2. Only one carbon plate allowed per show (Kipchoge's had 3)
My personal opinion is that the bicycle is already invented and its excellent energy efficiency is hard to beat.
Seriously though, if you don’t have your helmet adjusted about as far forward as it can comfortably go, there are a number of angles at which you can take a header where part of your face touches the ground. If you’re lucky nothing hits but helmet. Less lucky, a bit of road rash. Less lucky still, maybe some loose teeth.
The higher speed collisions I heard about mostly involved back injuries, which is less fun than artificial teeth. Younger people try to face plant.
As much as I want to imagine people chasing down cheetahs, without empirical testing I have to admit I am skeptical of their claims.
The original claim that if someone were to be able to move at these speeds that they would suddenly need to be heavily bogged down in safety gear is flat out ridiculous. Comparing it to other sports where we move at similar speeds should be more than enough evidence of that.
Biking at 45-48 MPH is rare, dangerous, and free of tripping hazards which I think are a much larger concern. Further, people also add extra protection for downhill MTB such as a back protector, thick gloves, goggles, helmets with neckbrace, padded clothing, and knee pads. Yet it also has similar benefits from being on steep hills.
Not sure where you get that from. Amateur road cyclists can pretty easily reach 50MPH given a long enough hill and do so pretty uneventfully.
That's dressed in just shorts, jersey, helmet and fingerless gloves.
A professional racing cyclist could easily break 60MPH on closed roads and even 80MPH on occasion.
For someone like Tom Pidcock who knows[1]. In the linked video he's topping out at about 100kph (60mph) but it's worth noting that that's without being allowed to sit on the top tube of this bike. They banned that (even though it wasn't linked to any crashes).
The bike manufactures will eventually just add dropper posts to all pro road bikes and those speeds will go up again.
I’d be surprised if it’s more than 1% for more than a handful of people. An ultra elite athlete on a normal bike can hit that on level ground in an absolute sprint, but you can’t sprint for very long. Going downhill requires time spent going up the hill.
The women’s 1 hour speed record is 30.6MPH, the men’s is 35.3 MPH. So sure downhill, rolling start, or motor-paced people can reach extreme speeds but they really aren’t doing so for hours a day. Streamlined recumbent bicycle can do it far more easily but that’s niche territory.
You seem to be conflating that if someone reaches a particular speed it is safe which the whole 'velocity squared' doesn't give two damns about. The energy you have to safely dissipate increases very quickly.
I’m not a professional rider. Nothing special about me.
Yet on a small hill near my house, with a maximum gradient of maybe 8%, I regularly hit 40mph.
When I need to I’m able to safely decelerate uneventfully.
It’s really not that rare. It happens every ride. I get to the bottom and I just go on with my day.
You won’t suddenly loose control if go past a arbitrary speed. Just read the road conditions and act accordingly.
This is not something only professionals do whilst wearing body armour. That’s an obviously silly suggestion to anyone that regularly rides a bike.
If you must make a car analogy then a better one would be crashing at 80mph on a motorway. If you do it will be life changing.
The same thing applies on a bike going 40mph but I happily do both when I think it’s appropriate to the conditions.
Two decades ago I was doing downhill MTB. On a road section it was quite frequent for me to reach those speeds†; and that's with a MTB (tuned to that end), friends†† with road bikes reached these speeds with ease, some of them regularly hit 80-90kph on specific sections.
One of the wide hairpin turns happened to be littered with gravel, and as I was banking for the turn the bike wheels started zipping off laterally as it the ground was ice, propelling both of us sideways at full speed towards the downward outer bank.
Luckily a) I had slowed down to approach the turn so I was going more like 45-50kph and b) the bike had much less ground grip than my body so it flied away while body-ground friction (painfully) slowed me down to a stop before I hit any tree or rock down the bank. Sheer luck had it that I walked away from the event with only a few bruises and a lot of scratches (one of my elbows still bears burn scars)
† Top recorded speed ever was 74 kph, at which point gear ratio was such that `cat pedalling > /dev/null`
†† c.a 1995-1999 they biked regularly with the then young Julien Absalon (I only biked with him once): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julien_Absalon.
I doubt the total time by any bike rider over 45 MPH was 0.1% of the total time people ride bikes.
That thing where you are 'running out of hill fast' I'm doing comfortably with 80 to 85 kph, and sometimes when in a 'real crazy' mood, and weather is allowing it (strong gusty winds, and possibility of black ice NOT good) with 90 to 95 kph. Though I'm really having to pedal like mad then, like in 1st gear, even faster.
Usually anywhere between 2000 to 4300m above sea level.
Got myself 2 really nice roadbikes recently, after having ridden an antique citybike with only 3 gears for almost 2 decades now.
It's like I'm young again! Unbelievable! :-)
If you’re suggesting doing 60 to 65 kph for an hour on a normal road bike after 5 minutes of 75 kph, I simply don’t believe you.
The world record 1 hour time on ultra flat indoor terrain set in 2014 was 51.852 km (32.219 mi). It’s climbed since then but your suggestion of ~63 kph for a full hour on a roadbike comes off as silly unless your using serious electric assistance.
Can't do anything about it. Shrug. :-)
So I touched the thick rubber lip of its back bumper at its far right side, almost the corner with my front wheel, while already being banked right by about 30 to 45 degrees (because turning right in a wide bow from the entering main street).
INSTANT STOP and I FLEW over the back of that f...ing thing.
In that moment I felt surprise, and anger, for being so stupid, but also thought in ultrafast-forward about anything I could think of to dampen the crash.
Which was to spread the energy of impact as much as possible around my whole body, execpt my head, and separate like hell from my roadbike.
I actually managed that while doing a summersault, not by myself, been already catapulted into it, still attached to bike, but got free of the pedals, and managed to spread out my arms and legs while flying feet forward, and somehow stay oriented like that.
BAM! Hit the road with my back at least a dozen meters away from 'lift-off', could have been 20 to 25 meters also. Can't tell anymore.
Hands outstretched, palms flat down. Head UP, chin toward my breast. Soles of my shoes also flat down, legs slightly bent upwards at the knees.
OOOF! Couldn't breath for a while, that just didn't work anymore, even if I tried. That went on for about 30 seconds, then I managed to gasp, and then it was gone. It didn't hurt, I just couldn't.
My palms tingled. The soles of my feet too. Like hell. But only for about a minute or so. Then that was gone, too.
In utter incomprehension I sat up and checked my hands, arms, ribs, legs, head. Nothing. Everything still attached, not broken, no blood, while the chalk white faces from that 2CV emerged, running toward me, shocked.
I told them to get their damned 2cv out of the roundabout, to avoid another crash, grabbed my bike from the street where it lay a few meters away, and went to the sidewalk, still debating with the shocked people that I wouldn't need an ambulance, that nothing bad happened, and they could calm down now.
No torn clothes. Yay for Levis 501 and Nomex45p Bomber Jacket CWU!1!! But the roadbike was trash. Not even the frontwheel, as I'd have expected, but the whole frame and fork bent diagonally sideways in a hard to describe way.
Did walk the rest of the way home, after removing the saddle, very light bell with a nice ring, tachometer, its sensor, cable and fixings.
Sitting on a bench in a park next to a river, thinking: Insane, insane, this can't be, can't have happenend like that, can't can't...
Moving on, still a few kilometers to walk, through forest. Sun rises. Still thinking can't be, can't be, like in an endless loop.
Went to bed at about 6AM after checking for bruises, swelling but nothing to be seen or felt. Used the next day to get me another roadbike (used) for 2000 Deutsche Mark ;-)
Over short distances (up to about 800m) a cheetah's sprint speed of nearly 100kph dominates, true. However, because they only maintain that for up to 30s, an augmented human moving at 75kph would be less than 10s behind at that point and might be able to catch up over slightly longer distances. I'm unsure the exact distance as I don't know offhand what running speeds a cheetah can maintain for longer than 30s and I'd also assume that cheetahs have better dodging agility than a human with giant springs strapped to their legs (and as per above hopefully some safety gear).
But I stand by my assertion that I want to imagine such a scenario.
The last time I attempted to run at full speed after not running for years, I struggled to keep up and lost my balance. I started tilting forward slowly and eventually fell then slide on the ground for a while, resulting in multiple scratches on my face, front pelvis, etc.
Running in them, even properly like mentioned, was like running a sprint. You were wet and exhausted in half a minute.
Fell from them twice -- once while running, a rubber shoe of the leg that was moving forward, brushed the asphalt, and I fell forward. Despite my arms were ahead, I hit the asphalt with elbows and ribs.
The other time, year later, a rubber shoe broke apart when I landed on it, and the other leg, under much weight, bended slightly off the turning plane -- there was no fracture, but I barely could walk or cycle. It took a week till I could cycle, 2-3 weeks to walk normally and 3-4 months to stop feeling pain.
Overall, it's too exhausting, you can't run in low energy mode. Walking in them is noteably harder and not much faster. You also can't stand straight in them -- must always keep stepping to keep balance, because there are no human feet to balance back&forth.
Another issue is that it puts a lot of load on spinal disks, and some bone/connective tissue conditions forbid this -- you can walk but jumping will cause chronic pain for some time.
Not to mention you can't walk in them in autumn, when asphalt is wet and covered with slippery leaves.
Overall, it's more like downhill MTB -- for skilled and fit, and not scared of a fracture every season.
==== EDIT: Ok, maybe the whole problem with jumping stilts is height. I'd still love to see a mechanical stilts with springs that don't put you that high in the air, but have springs on the sides.
I eventually ended up buying some shift.io moonwalkers, which do have quite a speed-up effect. The problem is that they're quite heavy and the walking motion required to use them effectively ended up requiring my anterior tibialis muscle to have more endurance than it does currently. Additionally, at higher speeds they're dependent on your foot stepping direction, which I have slightly outwards rather than in-line forwards, which causes a slightly skating motion when walking.
The quest continues on.
Or is about training running but being bicycle-fast?
Honestly, maybe I wear cooling vest and just jog to work. Walking too slow: 15+ min / mile.
If you try working with hips/knees while touching the ground, you'll amortize all the energy you generated, and exhaust quickly. Beginners suffer from this, and it takes some learning to run properly.
Also, the energy converts from motion into spring load and back into motion, and you can keep adding it. Pro stilt jumpers can jump several times with more and more energy and increase height.
When I took such classes of spring stilts, the coach showed us jumping above 2.5 m. Me and a classmate held a ribbon in our hands above our heads (we stood in stilts too), and he jumped several times towards us, each time higher, and finally flew above the ribbon. This is actually much more work than olympic jumping, where the COG of the jumper is actually a bit lower than the bar. This guy had to jump with COG much higher than the ribbon.
But as I mention in the other post, if you fall down even routinely while running on stilts, it's very painful -- falling forward with your arms extended ahead, you still hit the ground with the ribs. Then they ache a month.
1a. LOAD (Foot-ground contact, foot is descending)
2a. UNLOAD (Foot-ground contact, foot is ascending, optionally arms swing to boost upward force)
3a. WAIT (No foot-ground contact, foot is ascending)
4a. WAIT (No foot-ground contact, foot is descending)
Their proposal is 3-step:
1b. LOAD (No foot-ground contact, foot is descending)
2b. UNLOAD (Foot-ground contact, foot is ascending, optionally arms swing to boost upward force)
3b. WAIT(No foot-ground contact, foot is ascending)
Step 1b performs the same function as both Steps 1a and 4a, but is closer to Step 4a alone in terms of duration. By reducing the overall time one cycle of gait takes you're able to convert the same amount of energy from chemical to kinetic in a shorter amount of time (ie. achieve a more powerful gait cycle). This presumes that you can achieve equivalent levels of energy input with both methods, but this doesn't seem like a huge reach to me since both methods rely on springs so presumably you could fiddle with the spring constants until the overall energetics are the same.
It's kind of like how an 18-wheeler can produce tons of torque (which it needs to move something heavy), but has less horsepower than a Porsche. Torque is what determines how much weight you can haul (or in the case of jumping stilts, how high you can go), but horsepower is what determines how much time it takes to go from 0-60MPH. Swinging your arms is like adding more torque, but the paper is about maximizing horsepower.
I wonder, do these things add endurance ? Or do they maybe require the use of otherwise-little-used muscles, reducing endurance ?
Running in them is VERY hard, even if you do it properly (landing on straight legs, to not dampen the energy). You can run only at high power mode, like sprint, for 200-300 metres.
And they can race a marathon in under an hour, so that's 26+ mph (42 kph)
Not only could they race an entire marathon, they would beat those inline-skaters. 30mph for hours and 150 miles in some journeys.
They evolved a different cooling system than sweating.
https://journals.biologists.com/jeb/article/211/5/749/18118/...
(Recently learned that aspen bark also contained salicylic acid, which is how aspirin got its named).
He riffed on why aliens are always the scary ones in movies. Maybe we are the scary ones.
There is no amount of money you could pay me to run at 52 mph.
Look up allometry for more. There are formulas for calculating top speed based on mass.
If so, that doesn’t mean that they would get faster if only they got more muscle. I would expect that species evolve towards not having more muscle than they can effectively use. I think looking at elite human runners supports that. At longer distances, they get less muscular.
> The reason elephants don't outrun cheetahs is that they […] run out of energy before hitting the top speed their muscles could produce. > Look up allometry for more. There are formulas for calculating top speed based on mass.
I think our best knowledge is that adding more muscle only works for a limited time. https://news.cgtn.com/news/3d51544f7767444e/share.html:
“If muscles were all that mattered "elephants would reach maximum speeds of about 600 kph (370 mph)," she told AFP.
Instead, tuskers peak at about 34 kph (21 mph).
Big beasts, in other words, run out of so-called anaerobic energy, supplied by the muscles, before being able to reach their theoretically maximum speed.“
> Big beasts, in other words, run out of so-called anaerobic energy, supplied by the muscles, before being able to reach their theoretically maximum speed.“
Aren't we saying the same thing?
"However, the current top speed of augmented running, 11 m/s, achieved using a spring prosthesis in series with the legs (13), is 10% below the top speed of natural running. A spring in series with the legs can mitigate collisional energy losses but requires the legs to provide a large force to support the body, unlike the wheel of a bicycle (10, 13, 14)."
The point is, these springs look terribly difficult to maneuver compared to bikes. No brakes, not continuously touching the ground, constant movement up and down etc.
The proposal isn't "springs under your feet" it's "springs along your legs that you load while your leg is in the air". The point is that by loading the spring with a leg which is otherwise not doing anything you're able to increase the overall energy output of the body. Their Fig. 2 shows exactly the (theoretical) difference between the naive "jumping stilts" approach and what they're suggesting.
> Cycling is faster than running partly because (i) the rolling motion of the wheels prevents collisional energy losses from stepping but also because (ii) wheels can support the weight of the body in place of the legs, while (iii) pedals enable the human to supply energy continuously in the air instead of intermittently when the leg is on the ground .
Super interesting to see that they still can't outperform cycling. Presumably their proposal resolves most or all of point (iii), so the difference is from (i-ii). I would assume that, of these, (ii) would be the hardest to replace with any kind of leg attachment
Sounds like this is the same thing for running.
I don't think I ever got around to trying one. I was the youngest regular member of our club. Power output was not my primary problem.
The main advantage of the clips is to keep your leg in contact with the pedal throughout the cycle and make sure the ball of your foot is optimally placed on the pedal. With a traditional pedal you have to keep some downward force on the pedal to create friction to avoid slipping off, so even when that leg is rising up, you can't completely unload the pedal. With clips you can completely unload the pedal.
Additionally, the goal isn't to double your power output. It is to be better than the other cyclist. Even by just a tiny bit.
I personally think that clipping the feet helps more with left right stability. Also, if you are pulling with one leg, you can potentially push more with the other. Normally you can only push as much as you weight, but with the other leg clipped you can push your weight plus the force you use to pull the other pedal.
On a bike, if you want to put up more power you have options to push harder or spin faster. If you had to push harder than your weight, you could always change your gears to rather spin faster.
Absolutely not, and there are plenty of easy counterexamples.
If you've ever raced track, team pursuits start from a dead standstill. You have to expend a ton of force to turn a huge gear, and the contribution of the lifting leg is crucial to getting up to speed. Of course it's not going to contribute as much as your lead leg, but all four of your limbs are at maximum exertion getting the bike up to speed. Even not racing at a track, you can test this on any road bike. Shift into high gear, come to a standstill, and time yourself getting up to speed.
Another trivial counterexample that anyone (with clipless pedals) can test is a hill climb. Being able to lift on the upstroke is an enormous additional benefit and the difference can be easily measured and proven. Perform a lengthy climb with and without involving your trailing leg, at a given level of intensity. Repeat this multiple times, and it will be patently obvious that your trailing leg is performing significant useful work. The steeper the climb, the more important this is.
Sprint finishes are another place where this is critically important, but it's harder to set up a simple test.
What all of these have in common are situations where outputting a higher force is more important than long-term endurance. Lifting on the upstroke is difficult to do at high pedal speeds, but at medium or low pedal speeds, it's a clear differentiator.
And not pressing doesn't shine any light on the force of lifting.
The foot doesn’t slide with clipless peddles. The foot is locked in position. And you can absolutely use lifting and pushing combined - I have done this many times on long sportives (~100 miles); it can give respite to the ‘pushing’ muscles
So you obviously have never used clip in bike pedals before. Why are you trying to argue this point if you know nothing about what you're talking about?
Preventing sliding by pushing is how effort is wasted and is a possible explanation why a cyclist might feel much stronger when clipped in and no longer has to push - while attributing the lower effort to the upstroke pull.
They are, and this is trivially demonstrable by literally just trying it on a bike. Seriously. Go put a road bike in the highest gear and try to get up to speed from a standstill. Not only will you be pulling up on the rear pedal, but you’ll be using your arms to try and wrench the handlebars off the stem too.
Go climb a steep hill. Same thing occurs. It’s not like this is subtle. The contribution of your rear leg very clearly contracting will be impossible to miss.
But I think you have to go to triathletes to really see that effect more pronounced. Since they like to sit tilted a couple degrees farther forward on the bike, the hamstring is more accessible.
At the end of the day a pro is 5-10% better than a serious cyclist at five different things. Even before you get to diet and genetics (and doping, sorry) they’re already outputting more watts and getting more of them to the wheels than I could hope to. Technique adds up.
And yes, sometimes they’re won by someone time trialing away from the pack while in the saddle. But even then, most of the time it’s a breakaway pack which fights for the podium in an all-out sprint.
I’m looking around at all this ”data that we have about pedal strokes” and nobody mentions sprinters or climbing specialists. If they don’t know it’s important they won’t test for it. Sounds like “science” being done by domain neophytes and called objective.
What is interesting though is that one claimed that advanced amateurs have higher peak stroke torque than pros. Pros are spreading more power out over a larger arc of the circle. Now that could still be 130° of the stroke for all I know but that still sounds like circularizing to me.
I also haven’t found anyone yet who says LeMond was wrong about driving through the bottom of the stroke, which is how I rode.
Oh goodness yes. When you’re going full out it’s like you’re trying to wring water out of a steel towel. Pull up on left handlebar while using right arm to prevent oversteer.
Another fun failure mode is when you don’t quite trust your handlebars. I’m either not going to pull on these or I’m gonna stop before the Big Hill to find an Allen wrench and tighten these stupid things. I think the new design is meant to prevent a lot of that.
I’m stealing this! Spot on.
This might feel true, but it isn't. Buy or borrow a dual-sensing power meter (Garmin Rally, SRM X-Power etc) and you can see for yourself - there's practically no useful power in the upstroke. Toe clips or clipless pedals can extend the power stroke, but only by a few degrees at the bottom of the stroke.
https://bythlon-pedal.myshopify.com/pages/the-myth-of-the-up...
The intuition of cyclists is a very bad indicator of actual performance. For decades people thought that hard, narrow tyres were faster, but nobody had actually tested it properly. Narrow tyres have lower rolling resistance on a smooth steel drum in a test lab, but they have much higher rolling resistance on real roads with bumps and ruts. When paired with suitable rims, the reduction in rolling resistance of wider tyres more than compensates for the penalty of increased weight and drag.
Thinking about it your hands and a back leg allow you to apply a lot of downward force to your body and your lead leg can add all this force to a stroke. It doesn't matter that your hands or back leg individually are not so strong when pulling, because their efforts are combined.
In situations when you need not to extend as much force as you can, probably clips do not add much, though I do not know. I tried at some point to ride a bicycle without clips and nearly failed. My back leg tries to pull and leave a pedal.
> https://bythlon-pedal.myshopify.com/pages/the-myth-of-the-up...
They are saying that with high rpm cyclists do not pull. I can believe that, high rpm is beneficial exactly because you need to apply a relatively small force.
Time yourself on a max-effort sprint in a high gear from a standstill. Don’t pull up on half your efforts. Pull up on half your efforts.
The effect isn’t subtle.
I’m not particularly convinced by power meters not showing much here. The biggest reason being that pulling up has the effect of allowing you to push even harder down. Without pulling on the handlebars or pulling up on the rear pedal, the maximum force you can exert on the pedal is a function limited by your weight. By pulling up on those three points, your ability to push down harder is significantly greater.
Another simple counterexample is hills. There exist hills in my city that are physically impossible to climb without clipless pedals. You can stand on the pedal all you want, but your body weight is not enough to overcome the downward pull from the slope. On clipless pedals, while pulling up, you can climb the hill.
I would also say that as a former cyclist and bike mechanic, there were thresholds of pedal adjustment where your foot would stay on the pedal if you only applied downforce, but not sufficient for any other force. It was a common enough problem that there were articles written about it.
Early Look models had this problem, but not as substantially as most of their copycats. There’s a reason they had little competition for most of a decade. I think the Shimano MTB pedals (with the little countersunk cleats) sometime around 2nd Gen, were the first time Look got properly nervous.
There were some people for whom you had to dial the tension to the edge of “annoying” for clipping in in order to keep them from accidentally clipping out at speed or on hills, both if which can be dangerous.
Even when I had mine dialed in “right”, I ended up pulling one shoe vertically out of the pedal when I came to a stop without disengaging first. Adrenaline is a hell of a drug.
I know them as 'Tretkorb'. How do you call them, toe clips?
After about 20 years pause, only using an antique 'citybike' with three-spead gear hub and coaster brake.
It feels like I can fly again! :-)
I'd guess the highest power and torque outputs in cycling are from track sprinters. If you look at what they use it's both cleated pedals and straps.
No matter how they're generating that torque they definitely don't want to slip off a pedal going full tilt.
Riding a hardtail I always want clipless pedals because I don't want to have have my ankles at a weird angle just to grip pedals when I go over something rooty.
> When paired with suitable rims, the reduction in rolling resistance of wider tyres more than compensates for the penalty of increased weight and drag.
Unless you include specific conditions you can't really say that a hard, narrow tyre won't be faster with any confidence.
At some point having even wider tyres will only slow you down because the surface bumps don't get any bigger but the cda of your front tyre and rolling resistance due to hysteresis keep increasing.
e.g. a 4" fat bike tyre at 0.5bar is not going to be faster in a velodrome than a 23mm tub at 7bar just because they're wider. If you were riding on snow or cobblestones however...
Similarly there as a few different muscles that can bring your knee up if it’s pinned between your hip and a pedal. The hamstring being one of them. Though personally (as an enthusiast rather than a pro) I always felt like I had more stamina from just driving through the bottom of the stroke. I only pulled up on hills and when someone tried to drop us.
And yet Thai boxers appear to be able to generate at least as much force using upward knee strikes as push kicks.
Not necessarily :-)
See https://www.eurosport.com/cycling/famenne-ardenne-classic/20... for an example where that happened and the sprinter still won.
Well momentum can be your friend or your enemy.
It looks like not only did he pull his foot out, he also clipped his chain or front derailleur with his foot and popped himself down into the small chainring.
How do you explain the effect in OP’s device if this is “disproven”? Nobody seems to have offered an alternative theory.
Anyway, I can't find any of these so-called studies that admits to knowing what a sprinter is let alone a green jersey, so I'm going to keep my eye out for less flawed studies.
In fact, get me one by a team medic or physiologist, and then we can talk. Until then it's nerds in coats coatsplaining things to people actually doing the work.
It makes a big difference to be able to have both legs "inputting" energy into the system at the same time. I would say "non-linear response" but that's probably inaccurate... but maybe not? Basically once you've overcome rolling resistance to _start_ going up a hill, being able to continue it with "both legs" instead of one feels like you're not overcoming the "zero-to-one" hurdle as much and instead staying in the "one-to-two" zone. Like you're not "starting over" every downstroke, but instead transitioning your power from one leg to the other.
Given a pretty basic commuter bike that I'd upgraded over time, it felt like moving from ~35 to ~20 tires (basic to "road bike") felt like "gaining a gear" (what used to need 1st gear, I could now do in 2nd), and same with clips, also "gaining a gear" (cumulative: now I could be in 3rd instead of being in 1st).
Cycling is extremely efficient -- around 80% of the energy expended by the body is converted to forward motion, even in the simplest configuration, and this can be enhanced further under some circumstances.
The power leg and the stability/control leg being opposite not the same really boggles my mind.
Real shape rotators will know what I mean ;)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cliff_Young_(athlete)
It's actually surprisingly easy to do because you feel you're using less energy when doing it.
"Without external energy (but with external device attached)" is ... a bit disappointing. At what point does it cease to be running and start to be run-assisted catapulting? Or catapult-assisted running? It seems like more than just running.
That's not what TFA is discussing, you should probably read it.
So now you're just admonishing someone for trying to engage a comment instead of identifying the epic "anime run funny" humor.
IMO the sanest policy is to just allow people to respond earnestly to posts even if it might be a joke.
Just as a heads up, not everybody watches anime.
To be serious, though, the article suggests:
> Cycling is faster than running partly because the rolling motion of the wheels prevents collisional energy losses from stepping, but also because wheels can support the weight of the body in place of the legs, while pedals enable the human to supply energy continuously in the air instead of intermittently when the leg is on the ground.
but I think they miss the point by focusing on the last element rather than the first. I have lots of experience with running (where reducing ground contact time is often advantageous for efficiency), with cycling with clipless pedals where I can supply energy continuously, and with cycling with flat pedals. On the bike, I can sprint on the flats to about 16 m/s or 36 mph while clipped in. I don't do hard workouts nearly as often on flat pedals, so the data is more spotty, but I know I can reach at least 14 m/s or 32 mph; I'm just about spun out but typically not in my highest gear. I've never specifically tried to do a short-duration time trial on flat pedals, it might be higher than that, but it's not more than a 10% differential between intermittent and continuous connection to the pedals.
But running? In my prime, I could barely hit 9 m/s or 20 mph (I'm not and have never been a sprinter). If you tied a rope to my chest and towed me to 36 mph (using the rope to eliminate energy loss to air resistance) I'd be road pizza after a single step.
I can go faster on a pair of roller blades or ice skates, with one foot at a time providing an inefficient combination of sideways and rearward thrust, or a kick scooter using only one foot, than I could ever hope to run. The problem is not about the intermittent application of force, it's all about the need to convert angular velocity of your joints which has a very limited effective range into linear velocity over the ground. It turns out that cranks and chains over sprockets of various tooth counts are a great way to do this.
Professional runners today already use an "external device," aka running shoes. If they ran barefoot or even wore mediocre shoes, they would perform worse. As long there's no external energy powering the device, I'd still consider it running.
That it actually works is moderately surprising.
Snark is kind of the enemy of critical thought