I had a session with Watt Bike at the Bike Show in at the NEC last year and it showed that I was using more power on my left side than my right so I have been concentrating on applying even power. I am also wondering do you use just your legs and foot stroke to pedal and apply the power and should your hips stay still or can you use some hip movement in a rocking like motion in line with each sides pedal stroke (if you get my meaning.

I was out on my road bike tonight and started to put my hips into each pedal stroke and it seemed better and more efficient, but felt perhaps that’s not the correct technique.

IIRC your hips are meant to be static.

Fixed is good for pedaling.

If you want moar power you want to be be stood up so a lot of that power comes from your core .. road cycling technique is pretty irrelivent to most mtb riding (or it ‘should’ be)

Its more road riding technique that I was really wanting, I can’t seem to stand up on the pedals for long on climbs, I can manage short bursts, yet I am slowly going for longer the more I ride, so my intention is to do longer and steeper hills to gain strength and fitness.

Fair enough

I think if your hips are rocking then your saddle might be too high?

Try lowering your saddle and dropping your heels with each stroke. I find I drop my heels a bit when climbing seated. Im probably not that good though.

I prefer to climb stood up so I can stomp on the pedals and not worry about my technique.

I seem to raise my speed on the road by 1-2 mph by concentrating on “setting myself” against the bars – that makes me pull against them & makes a lot of difference to my effectiveness

(I guess it’s the same as GW engaging his core by standing up)

Also, nod your head in time with each pedal stroke, definitely speeds things up.

I think if your hips are rocking then your saddle might be too high?

I don’t normally rock my hips I just started doing it as an experiment to see if it would add any power and efficiency, it was also near the end of the ride when a bit of fatigue crept in. So moving your hips is bad form, I am wondering if there is anything else I should be looking at, I did have my bike setup using the Greg Lemond method by a bike shop who seemed to know their stuff.

I am also trying to engage my core, but my belly was at 40″ now down to 38″ after a week, so hoping I have shaved more off by Sunday (measuring day)so should get faster when the belly reduces 😆 and my core thinks heyup we can use the tummy muscles again.

Rocking hips=instability=weaker power transfer and back strain potentially.

Keep a solid core while seated, you use more than your leg muscles to pedal even when you appear static(ish) from the waist up. Honking out of the saddle uses more muscle groups as well as your body weight on top, but this is why it’s tiring too. Honking is powerful but not particularly efficient for longer durations.

I’d say work on a smooth, constant pedal stroke (rollers, fixed gear and high cadence help this) and the rest will fall into place in proportion with your training load. If you can keep the pressure on the pedals without spinning out and bouncing in the saddle then you are making better use of the whole stroke; try it, you’ll see what I mean and different muscles will work to keep the bike going.

EDIT: the last paragraph refers to a lower than normal gear.

I did have my bike setup using the Greg Lemond method by a bike shop who seemed to know their stuff.

They obviously dont know their stuff then

They obviously dont know their stuff then

Ok I’ll bite. Why’s that then?

I just had a look at what the method is and its some sort of calculation based on your leg length. And then bingo, thats your saddle height! If you want your bike fitting, go to a bike fitter, not a bike shop that uses equations to fit a bike.

They did a lot more than that to set up my bike, they had a weight from my knee to measure the slight bend in my leg and while one guy was holding the bike with me on it made sure my feet where aligned on the pedals, they adjusted the saddle position as well as the height and adjusted the bars and levers, all in all it took a good hour, perhaps they used just one aspect of the LeMond method 😕

I can’t seem to stand up on the pedals for long on climbs

Practice. When I got the road bike I could do short sprints (understandably, like you do on an MTB) but couldn’t stay out of the saddle for any time. More riding like that means more ability to it for longer.

for smooth pedalling try track cycling at an indoor velodrome.

those fixed gears and 30 degree slippy banks will quickly make you pedal in the most smooth circles you have ever done.

One legged pedalling drills. Unclip one foot and pedal for one minute concentrating on a push/ pull technique using all 360° of the pedal stroke. Then change to the other foot.

Do sets of these on each ride and you will soon have a more efficient pedal stroke. Just need to build up muscle memory. Would be better if you could do it on a turbo.

Once you get used to it it doesn’t feel as if your even pedalling.

I’ve been trying this drill recently: Pedalling Tens

And this article looks at what’s actually happening when pedalling with more accuracy than most: Which muscles are used…

I seem to be getting much quicker uphill since I started standing more and learning to not just stomp in a high gear but also be able to pedal with higher cadence and lower force when standing.

Fixed is good for pedaling.

personally i find fixed is not good for pedalling technique because the pedals will pull your feet through deadspots. riding fixed for ~a month then switching to SS always leaves me mashing pedals; few weeks of SS and i have a much smoother delivery.

fixed is good for cadence work though.

I’ve heard good things about pedalling circles one legged but I’ve yet to manage it on flats – if I had clips I’d definitely be working it into my commute.

One legged pedalling drills…

Will make you good at pedalling with one leg. Waste of time if you normally cycle using both.

Not at all. Trains each leg to use a full pedal stroke and creates muscle memory. Similar to training a correct golf swing.

May not work for everyone but adopting this technique certainly helped me. I used to mash on the down stroke only and used my right leg more than my left. Then used this drill and improved greatly.

I had a metabolic test done last year on a Watt bike which also analysed my pedal stroke. Came out at 48/ 52 right leg bias. Pretty efficient I’d say.

http://www.trainingbible.com/joesblog/2009/12/pedaling-drills.html
http://www.coachthomas.com/support_drills.html

Except the motion of pedalling one footed is not the same as a two footed pedal stroke. The whole stroke has different forces acting on it.

Sure it’s going to help, but your time would be much better spent practising smooth pedalling using both legs.

“…started to put my hips into each pedal stroke”

What sort of cadence / pedal revolutions per minute are you pedaling at ? Just a guess but is it possible that you are maybe doing quite low cadence about 60 or 70 rpm?

If you are spinning the pedals at a fairly high cadence 80 or more rpm then you might find that things start to even out.

Oh well, I felt that fixed helped me.

road cycling technique is pretty irrelivent to most mtb riding

OK then I’ll bite…not even those bits where you’re sat down pedalling constantly for a period of time? Please explain.

Some thoughts on pedalling:

PEDALLING TECHNIQUE – Which is best?

fixed helped me maintain a higher cadence for longer…

OK then I’ll bite…not even those bits where you’re sat down pedalling constantly for a period of time?

C’mon you know GW doesn’t do that, he’s so awsum that he’s always riding one handed wheelies, whilst stood up. I’ve heard he doesn’t even have a saddle. Rad.

No one drill is going to do everything. One thing I want to be able to do is crank big torque at very low cadence and also spin fast but light at very high cadence. If you can do that you’ll always be in the right gear because you’ll have so much adaptability in your pedalling. If you cycle your commute why not do lots of different drills then?

OK then I’ll bite…not even those bits where you’re sat down pedalling constantly for a period of time? Please explain

I was going to bite and point out that using more muscles doesn’t mean more power as the limiting factor is your heart and lungs so any increace in power is only short term and just reuslts in an oxygen deficit. But then I remembered what njee20 said and that GW could probably win the WC XC and DH in the same weekend on a bike with no seatpost, he just choses not to.

Pretty sure that push/pull was debunked a while back.

Oh, a little thing I forgot to add was that it can help to think of the pedal stroke (in terms of a clockface’s numbers) as going 9-3-9-3 instead of 12-6-12-6. By having the dead center in the middle you push through it and not hesitate to shift your weight.

Like kung-fu punching through the opponent!

Rotor Q-Rings!

You mean the ‘bits’ just like smooth road al?
That’s why I used the words “pretty”, “most” and “should” 🙄

Njee – I don’t really see why you sat down pedalling/running round the fun bits fans even have mtbs.

You know what I’m gonna bite too;

Sorry GW but you’re utterly wrong…

If you ride a bike whether utterly Rad or relatively sedate you need to pedal the effing thing about, efficient pedaling saves that little bit more energy meaning you can expend it on being Rad, Walking round obsticals or whatever you like, to dismiss the idea of improved pedaling technique as mainly applicable to road bikes just reinforces the image various people have of you on STW as being a know-it-all, lord of the Rad, Who doesn’t seem to be interested in anything but lift assisted hucking…

If you can learn anything from another discipline of cycling then I think it’s wise to at least consider it, 10% more efficient pedaling techniques taken from a road bike and applied to an MTB should mean 10% less wasted energy on the way to your trails and I’d have thought therefore 10% extra Radness (which for you of course means 110%)… But you already know every-chuffing-thing ever so why not piss off back to bike radar and stop bating on STW?

You might want to read what I wrote more carefully before going off on one.

I think that a power meter is the greatest thing in terms of learning to pedal more efficiently. It’ll show you pretty instantly how power output relates to cadence and smoothness.

My experience has been that maintaining a steady and reasonably high power output just isn’t going to happen intuitively, or going by perceived effort.

road cycling technique is pretty irrelivent to most mtb riding

It’s relevant to that parts where you pedal.

Most people ride their bikes up hills, being an intrinsic part of topography and that. To do this one pedals (that’s the ‘ride’ part). You may walk, or levitate with your sheer radness. This process is the same irrespective of the shape of the handlebars, the size of the wheels or the ground under the tyres. It’s how a bicycle works you see.

Now, for most people who are not as ‘hyper awsums’ as you they tend to rest their posterior on a saddle, supporting their weight for many of those sections where gravity is not assisting them. These may be tarmac, they may not be, the technique is still the same.

I doth my cap to you for your ability to never sit down, clearly I (and every other rider on the planet) isn’t as strong as you, but we knew that. If you ever come down here I will gladly show you a great 50 mile loop of the Surrey Hills, so you can exercise your unrivalled fitness in a new setting! Sure I (like everyone) can learn lots from you 🙄

The thing is, with pedalling on an mtb, you are always shifting your weight about to maintain balance on tricky sections or to provide traction on different surfaces. Sometimes you pedal with a much higher cadence, other times a much lower cadence.

Its often not just sitting and spinning.