Tag: cycling

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Static stretching before cycling makes you less efficient

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As of September 2017, new Sweat Science columns are being published at www.outsideonline.com/sweatscience. Check out my bestselling new book on the science of endurance, ENDURE: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance, published in February 2018 with a foreword by Malcolm Gladwell.

- Alex Hutchinson (@sweatscience)

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I wrote a few months ago about an Italian study showing that static stretching hurts cycling performance — that was the first study I’d seen about stretching and cycling, joining a whole bunch of studies showing that stretching hurts speed, power and endurance in running. Now researchers at Cal State Fullerton have backed up that initial result with a slightly different study, published in the Journal of Strength & Conditioning Research, that reaches basically the same conclusion.

The study was very simple: 10 highly trained cyclists (5 men, 5 women) did two 30-minute rides at 65% VO2max pace, while the researchers measured economy (i.e. how much oxygen they needed to maintain the pace), perceived exertion, and heart rate. Before one of the rides, they did a standard 16-minute static stretching routine. Here are the results for oxygen use (squares indicate the non-stretching trial):

Pretty straightforward: after stretching, it took more oxygen to maintain the same pace. Note that the difference was statistically significant only at the five-minute mark, not for the rest of the data points, indicating that the effect gradually wears off. Perceived exertion was the same in both trials — so the volunteers felt the same, but their bodies were working less efficiently.

Why does this happen? The researchers write that the results “may be explained through either muscle mechanics or neural factors or a combination of the two.” Then they spend a few pages going through all the various muscle-related theories and the various brain/nerve-related theories. The short answer is that no one knows. One of the previous neural studies they mentioned was interesting, and I wasn’t familiar with it:

Cramer et al. (4) proposed neural factors, such as decreased muscle activation or altered reflex sensitivity, might be the primary mechanism underlying the stretching-induced decreases in force. After stretching only one leg, they reported the same pattern of stretch-induced decrease in both stretched and un-stretched limbs...

That’s pretty cool! It certainly suggests that, whatever is going on in the muscles, there’s also something going on in the nervous system. Bottom line is simple — and by now, should be no surprise: don’t static stretch before workouts or races. It hinders performance.

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Time-trials, body weight and allometric scaling in cycling

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As of September 2017, new Sweat Science columns are being published at www.outsideonline.com/sweatscience. Check out my bestselling new book on the science of endurance, ENDURE: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance, published in February 2018 with a foreword by Malcolm Gladwell.

- Alex Hutchinson (@sweatscience)

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If you want to be a great sprint cyclist, you need to be able produce enormous bursts of power — so being big and muscular helps. If you want to be able cycle up mountains, on the other hand, you need great relative power — power divided by body weight — since every extra pound is deadweight that you have to haul upwards. But what about the middle ground? How does weight affect your performance in, say, a flat 40-km time trial?

Studies dating back to the 1980s have suggested that you need to use “allometric” scaling of weight to get the best prediction of performance in a 40-km time trial. Start by performing a graded peak power output (PPO) test, which is basically like a VO2max test, and PPO is the average power maintained for the last minute before you reach failure. Your PPO is a great way to predict how you’ll do in a 16-km time trial. Divide PPO by your body weight, and you have a great predictor of how you’ll do in a mountain race. And the interesting part: divide PPO by your weight to the power of 0.32 and you’ll have a great prediction of how you’ll do in a 40-km time trial.

This idea was first proposed by David Swain back in 1987, but hasn’t been tested much — which is why a new study just posted online at the British Journal of Sports Medicine, from Rob Lamberts and his colleagues at the University of Cape Town, put it to the test with 45 trained male cyclists. Here are some of the key results:

It’s pretty clear that the bottom graph (power divided by weight to the power of 0.32) provides a much better fit to the data than power (top) or power divided by weight (middle). So this is a useful piece of data for performance monitoring. But left unanswered is the question: why 0.32? Is this just an empirical number that happens to capture the tradeoffs between having more muscle and carrying more weight in exercise lasting about an hour? Or is there some physical or physiological explanation?

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Static stretching lowers cycling effiency and time-to-exhaustion

THANK YOU FOR VISITING SWEATSCIENCE.COM!

As of September 2017, new Sweat Science columns are being published at www.outsideonline.com/sweatscience. Check out my bestselling new book on the science of endurance, ENDURE: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance, published in February 2018 with a foreword by Malcolm Gladwell.

- Alex Hutchinson (@sweatscience)

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What we know so far: static stretching seems to cause a decline in maximal power, strength and speed, as well as hurting running economy in endurance runners. What a new study in the Scandinavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports reveals: stretching is bad for cyclists too — possibly even worse than it is for runners.

The authors of the study, from the University of Milan, argue that the performance-damping effects of stretching may be more obvious in endurance cycling than in running. The reason is that type II muscle fibres (a.k.a. fast twitch) are affected more than type I muscle fibres (slow twitch) by stretching. When you’re running at below-threshold paces, your leg muscles are only applying about 20% of their maximal force, so they can rely mainly on type I fibres. Cycling, on the other hand, requires a greater proportion of maximal force: about 60% of max force at 85% VO2max, according to the paper. As a result, cyclists recruit a higher proportion of type II fibres, and are thus more vulnerable to stretching-induced weakness.

That’s all fine in theory — but what do the experiments say? The researchers did a series of tests of VO2max, mechanical efficiency, time to exhaustion (with the power set at 85% of power at VO2max, so that exhaustion took about 30 minutes), and so on. Here are the efficiency results, with open circles corresponding to no stretching and closed circles corresponding to 30-minute pre-exercise stretching routine:

On average, efficiency was about 4% lower after stretching. The time to exhaustion was decreased by 26% after stretching (22:57 vs. 31:12).

I’ve been explaining the reduction in running economy caused by stretching by talking about the legs as a set of springs that store energy (and do so less efficiently when they’ve been stretched). But these results suggest that the effects of stretching on the muscle fibres themselves (and perhaps on neuromuscular signalling pathways) are just as important, since cycling doesn’t rely on that springy-legs effect.

Anyway, this is, as always, just one study — but probably worth keeping in mind if you do a lot of static stretching before cycling.

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Extreme exercise: Tour de France cyclists live longer

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As of September 2017, new Sweat Science columns are being published at www.outsideonline.com/sweatscience. Check out my bestselling new book on the science of endurance, ENDURE: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance, published in February 2018 with a foreword by Malcolm Gladwell.

- Alex Hutchinson (@sweatscience)

***

A little bit of exercise is good for you, but too much is bad for you. That seems to be a fairly widespread societal view — certainly anyone who trains seriously as a runner or cyclist or other endurance athlete is familiar with all the comments about how training so much can’t be good for you. And to be fair, there has been some recent research that raises questions about whether running multiple marathons over an extended period of time can damage your heart.

So I was very interested to see a study, forwarded by Brian Taylor (thanks!), that just appeared in the International Journal of Sports Medicine. Spanish researchers decided to study the records of cyclists who rode the Tour de France between 1930 and 1964 — an example of “extreme” exercise if ever there was one — and see how long they lived compared to the general population. They focused on riders from France, Italy and Belgium (who comprised 834 of the 1229 riders for whom birth records were available), and they compared the longevity of those riders to the general population from their home country in the year of their birth. Here are the aggregate results in graphical form:

The trend is pretty clear. The age by which 50% of the population died was 73.5 for the general cohort, and 81.5 for the Tour de France riders — who, according to the paper, ride about 30,000 to 35,000 km per year (though I’d be surprised in the riders competing in the 1930s were training as hard as modern riders).

So what does this tell us? Well, as in any case-control study, there are plenty of limitations on the conclusions we can draw. First of all, this doesn’t prove that “extreme” exercise is better than “moderate” exercise. It may be that riding 30,000 km/year is significantly better than doing no exercise at all (or than doing the relative pittance that the average modern person does), but is still worse for you than riding, say, 10,000 km/year. But it’s pretty clear that extreme levels of aerobic training don’t shorten your life. As the authors put it:

In our opinion, physicians, health professionals and general population should not hold the impression that strenuous exercise and/or high-level aerobic competitive sports have deleterious effects, are bad for one’s health, and shorten life.

It’s also worth mentioning some potential confounding factors. The paper notes that former athletes tend to smoke less, drink less alcohol and have a healthier diet than the general population. Fair enough: these factors almost certainly contribute to the increased longevity of the riders. Again, the conclusion we can draw isn’t that extreme riding makes you healthier; it’s that it doesn’t make you less healthy.

What about genetics and selection bias? Maybe the Tour de France riders tend to be the type of lucky person with a great metabolism who’s destined to be healthy for his entire life no matter what he does, and it’s those great genetics that predisposed him to become a competitive cyclist. Again, not an unreasonable point. In response, the authors point out a 2010 British Journal of Sports Medicine paper in which researchers in Sweden compared the genetic profiles of 100 world-class male endurance athletes (“Olympic finalists or Europe/World Champions and Tour de France finishers”) with 100 matched controls. They looked at 33 “risk-related mutations and polymorphisms” associated with cardiovascular disease, hypertension, insulin resistance, cancer, and other major causes of mortality — and found no difference:

[T]he overall picture suggests that there is no evidence that elite male world-class endurance athletes are genetically predisposed to have a lower disease risk than non-athletic controls. Thus, the previously documented association between strenuous aerobic exercise undertaken by elite athletes and increased life expectancy is likely not biased by genetic selection.

Bottom line: if the question is “How much exercise is too much?”, I still think the answer is “Way, way more than you think.”

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Cycling efficiency: strength training is key for masters

THANK YOU FOR VISITING SWEATSCIENCE.COM!

As of September 2017, new Sweat Science columns are being published at www.outsideonline.com/sweatscience. Check out my bestselling new book on the science of endurance, ENDURE: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance, published in February 2018 with a foreword by Malcolm Gladwell.

- Alex Hutchinson (@sweatscience)

***

The links between strength training and efficiency in sports like cycling and running have been studied for over a decade, but a study in the European Journal of Applied Physiology offers a new twist: the role of strength training becomes increasingly important as you get older.

Researchers in France studied nine masters cyclists (average age 51.5) and eight younger cyclists (average age 25.6), and measured their “delta efficiency” before and after a three-week strength training program focused on knee extensions. Each workout consisted of 10 sets of 10 bilateral knee extensions. While the younger cyclists improved their cycling efficiency by 4.1%, the older group improved by 13.8%.

Traditionally, researchers have figured that the big decline in endurance performance with age comes from lower maximal oxygen consumption, which seems to reduce performance by about 10% per decade. The new study suggests that the muscle loss that accompanies aging could also play a key role in endurance, perhaps because inefficient fast-twitch muscle fibres have to be recruited earlier in an exercise bout. That would explain why the older athletes saw a bigger jump in efficiency when they improved their strength, even after only three weeks.

You’d expect the same thing to apply in running. Bottom line: another reason that I need to get more consistent with strength training!