The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
-
Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
-
Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
-
Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
-
Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Re cycling clothing vs athleisure clothes:
There are three major factors at play that make areo cycling wear look goofy while competitive exercising clothing makes you look hawt.
Re. calculator:
I think I was confusing that calculator, this calculator, and plugging in various Cd⋅A from random wind tunnel reports I'd seen. But yeah, I think it's generally in the right direction. Anything that makes you more aero without sacrificing comfort, or reduces rolling resistance, is free speed, and it's not even necessarily negligible speed.
Re. cadence:
I'll have to take a look at the paper when I can get access, since it's paywalled. Based on the abstract I think we're, more or less, on the same page. It looks like their average OPR and FCPR for trained cyclist was well within my 70-110 RPM range I quoted. @FiveHourMarathon was talking about 60 RPM, which seems a bit on the low side, but I assume it will creep up into the 70 with more experience. From there I suspect it depends mostly on individual physiology and ride type. Since the paper was from 2006 I assume that short cranks hadn't been "discovered" yet. My intuition is that higher RPM is more efficient the shorter the cranks, but this adaptation would occur without any explicit cuing.
Re. Single leg:
I see they are talking about much higher intensity than I was. My logic for warming up with single leg drills was:
Additionally, it's easiest to do the drills when using a stationary bike or turbo trainer, since you don't have to worry about traffic or balance. Single leg stuff introduces some novelty which might slightly combat the extreme boredom from training indoors. Also, depending on configuration, the inability to freewheel will highlight dead spots in the pedal stroke. The gain is probably too marginal to be worth the expense or hassle of counterweighted or split cranks for us mere mortals. On the other hand, there isn't a whole lot of cost to warming up on the trainer with single leg drills. I think it's unlikely it's harmful, and there might be some small marginal benefit.
You know, this might actually be the explanation. I was really only thinking of wearing the stuff while doing the thing or maybe immediately après--the actual Soffe Ranger Panties are pretty impractical for non-training wear due to lack of pockets and arguably bare upper thigh contact with common seating areas, so I for one would not wear them out and about any more than I would cycling kit.
I prefer a somewhat thinner one than industry standard, but as far as I can tell this is essentially unavailable in bib form.
Well, the usual finding (replicated here) is that energetically optimal cadence is substantially lower than freely chosen cadence, which is somewhat interesting in its own right, imo. But the interesting part of this paper specifically is that they took trained cyclists who presumably had had a reasonable amount of time to get used to pedaling and find a preferred cadence range (and I tend to believe that that shouldn't take all that long, it ain't rocket surgery--this is also tangentially addressed in the podcast), told them to lower their cadence quite a bit at the same power, and not only were various performance measures improved or unchanged but the subjects actually reported that they weren't working as hard. If they're not choosing their cadence based on what feels easiest, how are they choosing it? (insert some handwaving about being better able to respond to pace changes in mass start racing, etc.)
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link