Tag: cycling

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Biking biomechanics, pedalling muscles, cadence, etc.

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- Alex Hutchinson (@sweatscience)

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I’m back online after an unplanned hiatus — I’m currently on a reporting trip in South Africa, and had some trouble (now sorted out) updating the blog. As a result, I didn’t get a chance to point out this Jockology column that appeared last week: it’s an infographic with a somewhat random assortment of neat tips and factoids about cycling. I particularly like the illustration of which muscles you use at various points of the pedal stroke.

Yesterday, I had the opportunity to watch the Comrades Marathon, an 89-km race that had somewhere around 23,000 entrants. It was a pretty amazing sight. Here’s a picture of the literally thousands of runners streaming towards the finish line in the last five minutes before the 12-hour cut-off (at which point the race director fires a gun indicating the course closing, and volunteers rush across the finish line and link hands to prevent anyone else from crossing and getting an undeserved finishing medal!):

comrades-finish

And here’s another shot showing something that I suspect we’ll be seeing a lot of in the coming month: those colourful horns are called “vuvuzelas,” and they make an incredible racket. Anyone with ticket to a South Africa game during the World Cup had better bring earplugs…

vuvuzela

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Pacing, “deliberate practice,” and Jerry Schumacher

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My new Sweat Science columns are being published at www.outsideonline.com/sweatscience. Also check out my new book, THE EXPLORER'S GENE: Why We Seek Big Challenges, New Flavors, and the Blank Spots on the Map, published in March 2025.

- Alex Hutchinson (@sweatscience)

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In a post last month, I mentioned having a chance to chat with Simon Whitfield about his recent training camp in Portland with the Nike running groups coached by Alberto Salazar and Jerry Schumacher. This week’s Jockology column in the Globe and Mail explores some of the ideas Whitfield talked about — in particular the fact that the Portland groups are very precise in monitoring their training paces, and how that relates concepts in sports psychology like “deliberate practice”:

… The group Mr. Whitfield trained with in Portland included Simon Bairu of Regina, who earlier this month smashed the Canadian record for 10,000 metres by 13 seconds at a race in Palo Alto, Calif., running 27:23.63. Chris Solinsky, another member of the group, broke the U.S. record in the same race, and a third member of the Portland group also dipped below the old U.S. record.

“They’re so precise about their pacing,” Mr. Whitfield says. “We came home with the message that when a tempo run is supposed to be, let’s say, 3:05 [per kilometre] pace, then 3:03 pace is not a success. That’s a fail.”

Such precision may be daunting, but it’s a hallmark of “deliberate practice,” a concept advanced by Florida State University cognitive psychologist Anders Ericsson and popularized in recent books like Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers: The Story of Success. The best way to master an activity is not simply to repeat it mindlessly over and over again, Dr. Ericsson argues, but to set specific goals and monitor how well you meet them.[READ THE FULL ARTICLE]

I also chatted to Lex Mauger, the lead author of a recent study on pacing in a 4-km cycling time-trial. The study showed that getting accurate pace feedback during a hard effort really does lead to better performances — something many athletes would have told you intuitively, but which had never been shown. In particular, pace feedback seems to be crucial in the early stages of a race, before you’ve settled into a rhythm.

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Staying fuelled while cycling helps bone density

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My new Sweat Science columns are being published at www.outsideonline.com/sweatscience. Also check out my new book, THE EXPLORER'S GENE: Why We Seek Big Challenges, New Flavors, and the Blank Spots on the Map, published in March 2025.

- Alex Hutchinson (@sweatscience)

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I’m not sure if my headline is misleading. There’s a new press release from the University of Missouri titled “Maintaining Energy Balance During Stage Races May Protect Cyclists’ Bones, MU Researcher Says,” but the description of the research is a little confusing (and the journal paper in Applied Physiology, Nutrition and Metabolism has yet to appear).

The new study is by Pam Hinton, who I interviewed last year for a piece on exercise and bone density. That previous study compared running, cycling and weightlifting, and concluded that running was good because of the jarring impacts, weightlifting was good because the added muscle puts stress on bones, but cycling had neither of those benefits.

The new study monitored cyclists during the Tour of Sutherland, a six-day, 10-stage race:

Hinton found significant increases in markers of bone formation and bone breakdown among the athletes whose energy intake matched their energy expenditure throughout the race.

Fortunately, bone formation increased more than bone breakdown, which suggests that everything is fine for those who take in enough calories.

“The findings suggest that participation in stage races might not have negative effects on bone turnover if energy intake matches the energy cost of high-intensity racing over several days,” said Pam Hinton, associate professor in the Department of Nutrition and Exercise Physiology. “The results are consistent with the practical recommendation that elite cyclists should match their energy intake to the high energy demands of stage racing.”

What’s unclear from the press release is whether she actually observed enhanced rates of breakdown in cyclists who weren’t getting enough calories during the race. If so, you’d think they’d mention it. If not, then I’m not sure how the study proves anything about adequate energy intake (though it’s obviously a good idea with or without this study!). I’ll follow up on this when I see the full study.

Anyway, uncertainty aside, the message seems to be: hauling ass during a brutal multi-day stage race won’t have any negative effect on your bones, assuming you’re taking in enough calories.

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Tylenol’s pain-blocking boosts endurance performance

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My new Sweat Science columns are being published at www.outsideonline.com/sweatscience. Also check out my new book, THE EXPLORER'S GENE: Why We Seek Big Challenges, New Flavors, and the Blank Spots on the Map, published in March 2025.

- Alex Hutchinson (@sweatscience)

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To the scientist in me, this is a really interesting study. But to the athlete and fan in me, it seems like bad news. British researchers fed highly trained cyclists acetominophen (Tylenol, as it’s known around here) before a 10-mile time trial. It was a double-blind, placebo-controlled trial. The riders who were fed Tylenol cycled about 2% faster, and had higher heart rate and lactate production (i.e. they were working harder) — but their perceived exertion was identical to the placebo group’s.

To read more about the study and its implications, read this entry in Amby Burfoot’s Peak Performance blog, which includes a Q&A with one of the researchers. The basic interpretation is simple: Tylenol blocks pain, and pain is what makes us slow down during long races. This is an important scientific result, because it sheds light on a red-hot debate about the nature and origins of fatigue. The authors of the study view their results as supporting the “central governor” theory, which argues that our brain subconsciously makes sure that we never let our body get too close to its absolute limits.

This, of course, is not the main message that many athletes will take from the study. A 2% performance boost is nothing to sneeze at for the well-trained athlete, so I expect that many athletes will start experimenting with Tylenol in training and racing. Is this dangerous? I don’t really know. (Gretchen Reynolds wrote an interesting article last summer about the risks athletes incur by overuse of NSAIDs like ibuprofen; Tylenol is a different class of drug.) But I have to admit: whenever I see a study of a potentially performance-enhancing pill, I cheer when the results come up negative, because (in my view) it keeps the sport a little simpler.

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“Heart rate recovery” to monitor overtraining

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My new Sweat Science columns are being published at www.outsideonline.com/sweatscience. Also check out my new book, THE EXPLORER'S GENE: Why We Seek Big Challenges, New Flavors, and the Blank Spots on the Map, published in March 2025.

- Alex Hutchinson (@sweatscience)

***

Back in the late 1990s, I was training under the guidance of Harry Wilson, the coach who steered Steve Ovett to Olympic gold and world records at 1,500m and the mile. Harry was an interesting mix of old-school traditionalist and cutting-edge training buff. Instead of prescribing a set amount of rest between hard intervals (like two minutes, say), he liked to wait until the athlete’s heart rate had returned to given value (generally 120bpm for me). Being a young technophile, I would wear my heart-rate monitor for these workouts in order to have instant feedback. But Harry never really trusted this newfangled technology, so I would stand there between each interval while Harry jammed his fingers into my jugular, listening to my pulse himself until it had slowed to his satisfaction. [EDIT: An astute reader points out to me that you take your pulse from the carotid artery, not the jugular vein. My apologies for any misunderstanding!]

I bring this up because, while I was browsing through the pre-prints of the Scandinavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports yesterday, I noticed an article by researchers at South Africa’s University of Cape Town, including Tim Noakes, on “heart rate recovery” to monitor training fatigue. The gist is as follows: 14 cyclists took part in a four-week high-intensity training program that included two interval sessions (eight repetitions of four minutes hard, with 90 seconds recovery) each week. Immediately after the final hard interval of each session, the researchers recorded how much the athlete’s heart rate decreased in the next 60 seconds.

After the four-week training period was finished, the researchers divided the subjects into two groups: those whose heart rates had recovered more and more quickly throughout the study, and those whose heart rates had recovered more and more slowly. The hypothesis was that getting better at recovery indicated the subjects were adapting to the training, while getting worse would be a sensitive indicator that they were overtraining. To test this, the subjects rode a 40-km time trial, and compared the results to a similar time trial they had ridden at the start of the study. Sure enough, the group that was recovering better rode faster, and increased power by 8.0%, compared to the slower-recovering group, which only improved power by 3.8%.

This study is part of a larger project investigating the role of heart rate recovery, so it will be interesting to see the remainder of the results when they appear. Monitoring overtraining — the failure to recover from a heavy training load, essentially — is much more of an art than a science, so having some objective tools to use would be really helpful to endurance athletes. (And I’m sure it’ll work better with heart-rate monitors than using a finger to the jugular.) Continue reading ““Heart rate recovery” to monitor overtraining”