On the face of it, cycling is simple - It's just moving your legs in a circle. When you're butting against your aerobic capacity, the resilience of your fast twitch muscles and pushing intensities off the charts, it's anything but. We challenged people to show us their spin-ups, and throw down the gauntlet to their friends. Here, we explore what's behind cadence, and how you can improve your spinning with a few simple tips from Team EF Coaching's elite staff.
Fast fixes:
1. Get warmed up
Nobody just goes from standing to spinning quicker than a merry-go-round - you've got to warm up. Start off at your own pace, get into your ride - really engage your muscles to start circulating blood and oxygenating your body. Making sure you open up these routes first is a sure fire way to spin a little faster.
2. Gear selection
Not too big, not too small. The issue with max cadence is balancing speed and resistance. Go too high in your gearing and you're going to fatigue yourself with high torque, and that's not what we're looking at here - it's about the cadence. Go too low in your gearing and you'll just spin out - you need to be pushing against something.
3. Relax your arms, engage your core, and be light on your feet
Okay - what do we mean here? Well - spinning like lots of cycling requires a strong basis. Your arms need to be relaxed but controlled, you strength needs to focus through keeping your core solid, as keeping your upper body locked out will detract from superfluous movement.
When it comes to your feet, it's about making sure you're agile. You're not stabbing at the pedals - to keep your cadence high you really need to carry your momentum through each pedal stroke, and that means having an even input of energy.
Longer term training tips
1. Position
Let's start with the basics. A bike is just a way to leverage your biomechanics and transform that into output. Because your body works in certain ways and your knees don't hinge backwards, for every rider, there's an optimum position.
If your saddle is too high or too low, you'll never produce your record cadence, as you'll either be straining to make the full rotation or swallowing all the speed in your knees. Get your seat high dialled.
Then, think about cleat placement. Humans weren't designed to ride bikes - we've adapted bikes to our physiology. Cleat positioning should balance stability and power - the best cleat placement normally aligns the axle of your pedal with your 5th metatarsal head, which is a bit further down from the ball of your foot.
2. Are you doing your stretches?
Cadence is just the speed at which you can rotate your legs, but a lot of that movement comes from elsewhere. Stretching will increase your mobility and condition you better for performing high intensity. by keeping up with stretching and mobility, we enable the end range flexibility and supple muscle that is necessary to make smooth pedaling at very high RPM and high power simultaneously.
3. Sort out your pedalling style
If your knees are flaring out wide enough to clip parked cars - then something's not right. It might be comfortable, but that style of pedalling isn't optimal for achieving higher cadences. Keeping your pedalling as linear as possible is the best means of increasing speed without increasing your fitness.
4. Drill it into your training
Over the course of a social spin or relaxed ride, there's little harm in experimenting with different cadences in different situations. High cadence usually means relatively low torque, and therefore low wattage.