You have not?!?!!
Did they work?
I think they helped my running more than my cycling but I have no data of course. I trialed them on the turbo for a full year and never once “enjoyed” a session on them. I never had the nerve to take them outside. They are the non-lockable no cheating original version. They never failed to feel weird and every session required full attention. Miserable. So they were relegated to the shed. I may stick them on eBay at some point.
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Always wondered what they’d be like to use. I think their marketing rubbish did claim it improved your running as well, due to hamstring activation and strengthening of them.
Gordo Byrn said that, he had a pair and felt they did nothing for his cycling but improved his running.
Gordo who? Did he even win Bolton or Kona?
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And no one has touched on liver vs muscle glycogen yet ;-).
Overnight I think your body uses liver glycogen but your muscles stay topped up.
So a ‘fasted’ session actually has plenty of muscle glycogen, but your body thinks it is running on low.
Or something like that. But don’t listen to me, I don’t have a scoobie anymore.
I do, a Legacy and an Outback.
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Pretty much what my mate said. He used them almost exclusively on the turbo, was a A Grade cyclist and ( I think) 4 x Kona.
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I haven’t read this thoroughly yet but looks really interesting Link here -> Endurance training big data.
It’s open access so you can download the pdf.
Edit: to make link more obvious, apologies. When there you can access the full paper and download pdf of full paper.
Links please mate
Link is in the text where it says endurance training.
Edit: might just be the abstract?
It’s there @explorerJC
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Full paper pdf available by clicking this sentence
EDIT - always frustrates me when a published paper like this has a very obvious wording error in the opening paragraph! (3rd sentence)
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Sorry. Must be my phone. Will look when home
It’s pretty poor when that happens. And I am seeing more lately
Only skimmed it so far, but is it not just trying to produce something like the “race predictor” function on a Garmin watch? And I find their initial summary conclusions surprising, in terms of their satisfaction…
When including marathon times in their data set, they can predict marathon times for people of that same data set to a mean accuracy of 2%. On 3hrs, that’s just over 3.5mins. Fair enough, not horrendous. But you are requiring to know the marathon time of an individual in order to predict their marathon time?!
When excluding marathon times, that accuracy falls to 10% (which is the mean average error), which on a 3hr time is 18 minutes! And they say “our predictions for the marathon finishing times are rather satisfying”?
They talk to all the uncertain variabilities that exist ( weather, course profile, motivation of the athlete), but even accepting that, I can’t see how a model that enables you to predict a marathon time to within 10% of your actual potential time, based solely off shorter races and training runs, is of any real value. Who is this going to be useful for? If you are trying to execute a marathon well, you need to have your pacing within 5-10s per kilometre? Even less as you get well below 3hrs. +/- 10% is useless.
Maybe I’m missing something in relation to the purpose of the study, but they do say they are trying “…to derive meaningful physiological and performance information.”
Research income for their employers and an expansion of their own personal q scores.
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Hopefully this is on topic but can someone properly explain this to me. Over on Transitions there is a discussion about commuter bikes and the adage that using a heavier bike gives you a better work out. My reply was this…
I’ve never fully understood this. How is a heavier bike a harder workout, surely you just go slower?
If my car has 100HP with three bags of cement in the back, it doesn’t gain more HP when I take them out.
Functional strength and motional power are surely two different things?
I largely agree. If you’re riding at 200w, then whether you are going 25kph or 35kph is irrelevant from a “workout” perspective. Clearly if you are going up a hill at the same speed on a heavier bike, then you are working harder. But that’s not the result of the bike. If you could do 300w on a heavy bike, then you should be able to do that as well on a race bike.
I guess the only conceivable benefit is you are riding for longer if you are riding slower, so there’s a duration “benefit”.
The HP of the car is not a measure of how hard it is working to accelerate with whatever cargo.