Torque training explained | What is it and why do I do it?

That was horrible. You have a type of training, you have timing suggestions, you have cadence suggestions, but you have no teaching method at all…

Force generation in the pedal stroke comes down to two muscle groups, glutes and quads. You could argue that other muscle groups contribute, which is why I built a plate loaded test rig. Glutes are the widest muscle group, allowing for more muscle fiber activation within a limited contraction – they generate torque. Quads by comparison are a longer muscle, and the connection point on the tibia is very close to the pivot, so at the foot they generate speed, but very little torque. Torque work = glute isolation.

Here’s the problem: people learn how to walk and stand. Their most practiced motor skill is lifting their body weight. With the hips directly above the knee that skill set only involves the quads. This is your most practiced skill set, so it’s your go-to skill set. Put a rider on a bike, stop the pedal at 3:00, tell the rider to push down and watch what happens. They fire the quad and their hip moves up and back. The quad extends the lower leg from the knee, they are pushing mostly forward, the pedal is at 3:00, it’s only going down. The motor skill for walking and standing is all wrong here – you need a teaching method for a different motor skill set.

To teach glute isolation I have to go against what you probably think is proper pedaling technique is. This is called critical thinking – humans suck at it… To isolate the glutes you need to do two things. 1) learn how to activate the muscle. 2) learn how to not activate the quad, which is the learned motor skill in place. Oddly, this involves being as lazy as possible. If you set up a rider on a bike with the pedal stopped at 3:00, and have them lean into their riding position with their hands behind them, body weight is transferred to the pedal via the glutes (there’s a whole lot about bike fit that I’m skipping here). The trick is to first teach the rider how to fall into the pedals, using the torso as a lever arm. This must be learned at super low intensity because effort will bring the quads into it.

Now let’s talk about timing – it’s tighter than you think. You can plot foot travel as a function of hip extension. Given that you can find the offset angle at the crank. Efficiency is SIN(offset angle), we’re shooting for > 70%, so around 1:00 to 4:00. When you start looking at the best climbers you realize that there is a force impulse centered just above 3:00, which raises their efficiency – that’s the advanced class. The great thing about slowing down the activity is that you can see exactly what’s happening and correct problems in real time.

So here’s what I don’t get. There are countless videos and guides on training and trainer set-up. Not one of them has a camera at the side of the rider so they can actually see what they are doing. I require my riders to do this, maybe 1 in 10 actually watch themselves – people suck at critical thinking. People also suck at engineering. Every video about pedal stroke claims there is a dead spot at the top/bottom of the stroke. Let’s go back to defining an efficient range by looking at extension at the joint relative to intersection of the circle. The quads can only push forward. Quads can’t generate torque, they can generate leg speed. This is not rocket science, each muscle group is going to have an efficient torque/cadence range. Once a rider has learned to isolate one muscle group at a time, and it’s autonomous, they can set an output using erg mode and find them most efficient cadence range for that muscle group (this is where I am now in training and testing). The ratio between the two cadences would suggest the aspect ratio of an oval chainring for time trials. I have not gotten to testing this yes, I’m worried that I will simply run into my cardiovascular limit without seeing any significant gains, but what I’ve learned over the years studying every aspect of cycling is that it’s never a linear function.

Rant over.

1:40 1.5Nm/kg @ 45rpm for a 70kg athlete is 497W

This is the second time I have watched a channel suggest sub 50rpm 4min efforts at 1.5Nm/kg. Are people actually following this suggestion?