Many people’s first impression of professional road riders are high cadence. This is indeed a common phenomenon among professional cyclists, and there are even many instances where the higher the cadence, the better the performance, and multi-time Tour de France champion Chris Froome is one of them. But if you want to imitate Froome’s cadence, I advise you not to.

In the era when power meters were not popularized in the professional arena, the high-cadence riding method represented science, and the former “Drug King” Lance Armstrong was one of the typical representatives. But the latest scientific research has found that when you maintain a high cadence, the ratio between the oxygen delivered to the thigh muscles and the oxygen absorbed by the muscles is too low, which is not a good thing.

“When you’re riding with a small gear ratio and a high cadence, the blood flow to your thighs is reduced, which means less oxygen is flowing to the muscles that drive you.” Federer, senior lecturer in human physiology at King’s College UK Federico Formenti said: “This kind of phenomenon often occurs in what we call the thresholds riding range.”

For the riders, when the above situations are encountered during riding, we will actively change the gear ratio to achieve a comfortable riding state.

The study found that when the cyclist approached the thresholds range with a cadence of 90, the oxygen content of the thigh muscles decreased, while at the same intensity, the rider with a low cadence did not. At this time, the heart rate of the tested riders in the high cadence group increased by 15%, and the exercise efficiency actually decreased.

Physiologists will tell us that the efficiency of a muscle depends on how fast the muscle contracts. If you choose a gear ratio and cadence that allows your muscles to contract at one-third of their maximum speed, you will maximize your power output.

Although through scientific experiments and formula derivation, we can figure out the cadence of a rider when he is at his best ability. But the fact that professional cyclists don’t ride at an optimal efficiency cadence, and they generally train and race at a slightly higher cadence, remains a mystery.

So why are professional riders generally high cadence, and amateur riders are not suitable for imitation?

In cycling, we need to take the rider’s VO2max into account in order to more accurately study the relationship between cadence and oxygen consumption. Professional riders have a higher VO2max than ordinary people. Compared with ordinary people, the oxygen content in the muscles is relatively higher when the cadence is high, so the efficiency will not be reduced.

Another reason is that professional riders usually have better pedaling efficiency, and the pedaling efficiency of ordinary people can be reflected by the following experiments:

A group of experiments found that when a rider rides with a small gear ratio and a high cadence, 60% of the work is used for the up and down movement of the thigh, and only 40% of the work is transmitted to the crank. This set of experiments confirmed at the time that brainless high-cadence riding was not an efficient way of riding, and in the case of low pedaling efficiency, it would only waste more energy.