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Comment by onetimeuse92304 | Hacker News Reader

Any muscle is trainable. To some extent. If you cycle enough, you will develop muscles necessary to pull the pedal up.

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.

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This is true for certain metabolic zones but not others. If you're sprinting then yes, you get a higher power output while pulling up on the pedal. However if you're going for any kind of endurance (longer than a minute) the limiting factor is not muscular but cardiovascular/aerobic, and using less efficient muscles (the ones used for pulling up) will actually hinder your performance since you'll need to be supplying those with oxygen, thus decreasing total cycling economy.

I am not versed with cycling economy. But yeah, it makes sense.

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.

Your goal in endurance conditions is to maximize the aerobic pathway, which means maximizing the number of active mitochondria. Recruiting more total mitochondria from more total muscle fiber will give you greater aerobic power output.

Ah yes, the Powerhouse of the Cell.

Like the parent said, the goal is efficiency not maximum power. And as another comment said, in practice the pros do not pull up. If there were even a minute gain in doing so, they would train themselves to do it (in fact some of them used to in the past before they figured out that it was a waste of time)

I would assume that just your hands being on the handlebars would let you push more than you weigh.

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