By: Justin Chester

As we are all getting back into the full swing of training for the upcoming season, you have undoubtedly been reacquainting yourself with your bike trainer. Trainer sessions are the most perfect way to work on cycling form during this early base season. (Your Southern California friends probably don’t even own a trainer). While many trainer sessions can be boring, using the trainer to focus on drills can make it quite entertaining.
When you learned to ride a bike, believe it or not, you learned it all wrong. You used less than 15% of the available pedal stroke to propel yourself forward. This is mostly due to the fact that clipless pedals weren’t available for your Huffy BMX bike. Imagine if you knew then what you know today… you would have beaten every other kid up that hill. But what is it about clipless pedals that make us more efficient?

Clipless pedals allow us to push forward at the top of the pedal stroke and pull backwards at the bottom of the stroke which allows us to use anywhere from 50% – 95% of the available pedal stroke per leg to propel yourself forward. (As a point of reference, look at the crank arm as a clock, where 12 o’clock is the top of the right foot. From 12 o’clock o 6 o’clock per leg is 100%). Well this sounds awesome, but I have some bad news for you. Many of you are still towards the low end.
Most of the power is lost between 11 o’clock and 1 o’clock. This is because many athletes do not think about “kicking over the top.” Kicking over the top earlier in the pedal stroke will activate the quadriceps muscles earlier and produce a more forceful down stroke. This is somewhat contrary to the “scraping the mud off” concept where athletes are taught to feel as if they are scraping mud off the bottom of their cleat at the bottom of the pedal stroke. While important, all this serves to do is unweight the top of the stroke to activate the more powerful quadriceps.
And you can gain additional power from the 2 o’clock position to the 5 o’clock position just by unweighting the recovering leg. You may have heard that to circularize the pedal stroke, you must lift up on the recovering leg. Unfortunately for many athletes, not only are they not lifting up, but they are pushing down. As your hip flexors fatigue throughout a ride, you can easily forget to unweight that recovering leg thereby fighting your own down stroke.
Our trainers give us very good feedback on our pedal stroke: listen to the sound. Do you hear “whir, whir, whir, whir” or do you just hear a constant drone? If you hear the former, guess what? You’re mashing the pedals. So below is one of my favorite workouts that focuses on all areas of the pedal stroke.
Warm Up: Do 10 min. easy spinning
Main Set:
– 4×30 seconds Single Leg Drills. Put your trainer in a fairly easy gear. Unclip one leg and rest in on the back of the trainer and ride with one leg for 30 seconds. Switch legs, ride for 30 more seconds, 1-minute easy spinning before repeating the interval.
– 4x:30 High Cadence (100+), :30 recovery. Try not to bounce
– 4x:30 Single Leg Drills, focusing on kicking over the top
– 4x:30 High Cadence (110+), :30 recovery
– 4x:30 Single Leg Drills, focus on lifting
Cool Down: 10 min. Easy Spinning

Check out this great you tube clip on isolated leg drills