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Another question now keeps
Another question now keeps nagging at me:
What methods and degrees of body weight loss (or gain) have which effects on the various types of fitness for cycling?
Long experience tells me that a certain amount of weight loss can not only improve one’s power-to-weight ratio but also add a degree of extra ability over and above that improved ratio, to go faster and longer on a bike. It also tells me (the experience) that going beyond a certain weight loss (body fat percentage, in particular) can reduce cycling abilities, with losses of power and stamina.
I can’t find any objective-style examinations of these effects of body weight on cycling fitness but there must surely be some out there …. ?
The thread’s OP-question seems to assume that losing weight will always mean you’ll go faster up hills. Whilst this is probably true in many cases there are likely to be other cases where body weight losses are detrimental. But if so, by how much and why?
Weight obsession amongst
Weight obsession amongst cyclists was born and growed first in service of what are now called marginal gains in competitive cycling. Even small power to weight ratio improvements might put you another 21 yards up by the end of the race, giving you first rather than fifth place.
Then the advert svengalis realised what a fine vehicle weight obession would be for selling expensive bike parts. We poverty stricken cyclists (well, I was one once) tried instead to lose body weight, often finding ourselves going all feak & weeble as the glycogen levels descended to “not enough”.
For those who don’t race, TT or otherwise compete, the weight obsession is daft, as there are many, many other aspects of cycling that’ll provide satisfaction, pleasure, a sense of achievement et al from a bike ride. Bin that timing gizmo on your handlebars! It’s a slave-driving gremlin intent on making you feel inadequate!!
On the other hand, many would do well to change their diet to something more nutricious and less likely to bring on the diabetes. Going up the hill 10 seconds faster than you did because the better diet also shed 5 kilos bodt weight might please some too, I suppose.
For details of weight effects on real world cycling, consider this article from a heavy-duty touring fellow.
However, when you’ve read it and understood what a vast waste of time and money all that shopping for the lightest bike part possible given your wallet-state was, do not burst into tears! They’ll only rust your expensive lightweight doodwat, which may then snap and throw you into the road, which will make you cry a lot more. 🙂
The reason it’s good to have say a 50/11 on a bike in the Alps is to give a bit of resistance on the long descents, if not at higher speeds but when cruising down shallower sections. Pedalling can really help to keep warm, and avoid the dreaded ‘heavy legs’ when you get to the next climb!For keeping warm, I likes the clothes. On the other hand, spinning at 120 rpm will also tend to raise a sweat. 🙂
Consider the advantages of no 11, or even 12, sprocket – more actually usable sprockets for going up the hills, which takes far more time and effort than going down them, I notice.
My own belief, all of which are infallible (oh yes they are!) is that 52X11 folk feel they need a top gear, like in their car, which they should get in as this is what you do with gears. I have seen some who use no other of their 22 gears, if they can help it, as being in “top” is regarded as cool or hot or summick.
Wow, I never had you down as a chap for one of these new-fangled synthetic contrivances! ???It’s never wise to employ a single remark (or even two) as a means to allocate one’s interlocutor to this vast stereotype or that, eh? This is a faux pas – especially if one applies the procedure to oneself, emitting foolish remarks such as “I am a Tory” or “I only read the Daily Hate Mail” or “Ladies prefer men with big muscles who never smile and occasionally wave their fists about to harmful effect”!
When I gawp in the mirror I see a variegated olescrote repleat with 378,419 cultural acquisitions, most of which are completely inchoate, with various clots of them becoming prominent or getting hid by the others at different times in different places.
Even Tories can have more than 4 ideas at once! (Although they never change unless someone bungs them a wad).
Get an 11-32 or even better 11-34 and swap your 36 chainring for 34.The 11-34 cassettes unfortunately come with the cog toofs starting 11-13-15-17 whereas the 11-32s usually start 11-12-13-14 and maybe 15. The latter is better for the fitter cyclist as the one-tooth gap in those higher gears means you don’t have to increase or decrease your road speed by a large amount just to find your ideal cadence or anything near it.
One tooth jumps in such high gears are a pain in the legs.
… and install a 13-32 cassette with a 48/34 chainset. No silly big gears are needed as downhill and flat bits are where you need active rest in preparation for the next monster hill.A slight flaw in that plan is that OP is riding from Monaco to Zürich, those ratios might get a bit old on much of the remaining -600km.
What does “a bit old” mean? Is there an obverse of “a bit young” and if so, what does that mean? 🙂
The highest gear of professional racer folk just 2 or 3 decades ago was 52X13 (a ratio of 4:1). 48X13 is not a lot lower. Will the OP be riding at race pace (25- 27mph) on the not-climbing parts of that route? Or will he go a bit slower (not much) and admire the scenery?
Now, must I explain also that freewheeling downhill crouched over the bars with the knees tucked into the frame, rather than flailing about pedalling, will actually make you go faster than if you turn the cogs?
I rode steel racing bikes
I rode steel racing bikes (whilst actually road racing) for many years, as there was nothing else easily available decades ago. Since then I’ve become a convert to framesets made with carbon fibre and resin.
In my (extensive) experience, a well-designed and made frame of carbon fibre & resin not only feels more efficient at transmitting your pedalling power into forward motion but actually is so. I’ve measured this in the best way many times – by comparing experiences of how different bikes I ride with framesets of steel, aluminium or CF behave compared to other riders in various group rides.
In short, even with the best frameset designs (for going fast) CF is generally better than framesets of other materials at turning your power into forward motion. …. All other things being equal.
Of course, there are exceptions to the rule. Sometimes a frame designer/manufacturer manages to produce an exceptional steel or alumnium frame despite the lesser opportunities those materials offer a bike designer compared to CF & resin. But CF & resin frames can be almost magical in their ability to go whoosh when you press hard on the pedals whislt also remaining comfortable in a way that similarly “efficient” metal frames often aren’t.
I wouldn’t go back to steel, no matter how pretty or inducing of a nostalgia-burst. 🙂
Many of us olepharts have
Many of us olepharts have ridden such climbs on the long ago standard bottom gear of 42X21 (or at best, 24). It can be done, although you do get geet big quads and glutes, as it’s weight training via pedalling.
The requirement to be able to do this was no doubt a decent FTP (although no one measured such a thing in those days) but also a big dollop of what was then called stamina. With long days out and a long series of extensive climbs, the ability to go for hours at a decent power output is more important than just a good FTP.
Now I yam old and decrepit, I enjoy the lower gears on the climbs …. and even the sporadic help of an electric motor! But all climbs are still possible as much because I can push pedals for hours as well as quite powerfully when needed.
So ….. I’m sure you’ll have enough power to go up nicely graded Continental climbs with even 39X28. But 34X32 will be kinder to your sinews and joints, especially if you haven’t trained for years with a 42X21 lowest gear. 🙂 What you really need, though, is that stamina – the ability to do many miles, every day with most of the time spent going up. (It takes only a minute or two to go down, or feels like it).
Me, I’d forget the big jockey wheels (a useless fad) and install a 13-32 cassette with a 48/34 chainset. No silly big gears are needed as downhill and flat bits are where you need active rest in preparation for the next monster hill.
What you might also find efficacious is a close ratio cassette – as many one-tooth jumps between sprockets as possible – to enable you to find your exact cadence sweet spot as you labour for 30 minutes up a perfectly graded Continental climb.
IanMSpencer wrote:
For me it is the opposite. Tubeless is fit and forget. After about 6 months, l will top up the fluid. One unrideable puncture in 6 years, iirc. I’ve helped fix loads of other people’s punctures in that time.I think tubeless appeals to alot of cyclists as they like to endlessly tinker around with their bikes and so the preparation and maintenance of it hits their buttons, so to speak. Others of us just want to spend our time riding our bikes instead, and I’ve never got the appeal of what tubeless actually gives you. But maybe I’ve been influenced by watching too many youtube cycling influencers using tubeless, and who all seem to have mates who run bike shops that do all their tinkering for them, who seem to spend an inordinate amount of time plugging tubeless tyres whilst on rides.As with all new! improved! claims from manufacturers stoking the various fashion cycles, I was very wary of tubeless at first, not least because after decades of cycling on less than resilient tyres and tubes, I was adept at mending a puncture at the roadside in just a minute or seven. However ….
Buying some new wheels from Hunt, about 6 years ago, I took the plunge and added a set of tubeless tyres, fitted by Hunt. These were Schwalbe G-one Speed, ridden many, many miles on the winter bike over some seriously nasty backroads throughout Lancashire, Cumbria and West Yorkshire. No punctures – although the eventual worn tyre change revealed several self-sealed penetrations by bits of glass and thorns, with the offending items still stuck in the tyre but only obvious from inside.
Schwalbe Doc Blue sealant was needed only every six months (and perhaps less often than that, as there was always some of it still liquid in the tyre when I topped them up).
All my tyres are now tubeless. No puntures requiring a mend by me so far in thousands and thousands of miles on four different sorts of tyres. I did have the pleasure of pulling a geet big chunk of hawthorn out of a front tyre then watching the latex ooze seal it in a second, with no obvious tyre deflation.
Once you’ve got the tyre mounting process sorted (soapy rims or tyre edges is the key for me) the tubeless tyre is far easier to manage than the tubed variety. They also feel significantly and noticeably better to ride – less pressure so more comfort & grip; and they seem to roll better (freewheeling downhill faster than others in the group with similar tubed tyres).
Well, that was fun. Got new valves as one was clogged up.Could not remove one of the old valves, the outer lock nut was solid on and with 2 paris of pliers still no movement.
Google suggested this tool would help https://rydercycling.co.za/
but in the end, I used a dremel to cut it off !
Lessson – once all is working, after a week, loosen lock ring.
If you loosen the lock ring you might let the air and sealant out. A better arrangement is to put a squishable rubber grommet between the lock ring and the rim. Many tubeless valves are sold with such a ring included for the purpose.
Finger tight is then enough to keep the air and sealant inside the wheel-tyre; and you can usually get the lock ring loose again with your fingers. The rubber ring conforms to any wee gaps left between rim and valve lock nut.
Rubber grommets of many sizes, including a dozen that will fit bicycle valve stems, can be bought in boxed sets of around 100, from many places, for about a fiver. They include sizes for all sorts of purposes, from rim-valve lock nut squishers to preventing your garden hose from leaking at the tap connector.
If you’re a rubber fetishist, you can use one of your rubber ring collection as an engagement ring to your equally excitable partner. Also for other related purposes (or so I have heard).
A Dremel to remove a locknut! You must be butch as a fitter’s cat!! 🙂
The crucial difference between powered and non-powered contraptions though is there is *much* more user feedback and often a pretty hard limit in the case of the latter: the (human) motor! When unpowered the “potential maximum” may not be reached very often or maintained for long. With power, you’re more likely to reach the limit and stay there.
How much control one has of bike or ebike is a function of how much practice and learning one has with the particular bike. In some ways, ebikes are much easier to control than non-ebikes, as the rider isn’t devoting all of their attention & time to making the pedalling effort. My relatively novice-cyclist wife, for example, finds her ebike much less demanding to control than her non-ebike as she isn’t periodically exhausted by the Welsh hills we go over constantly.Of course driving a car can also give you more power than you can control when things go wrong. But they’re also much better at protecting you.Going by the results of most serious car “accidents” I would say that the nature of cars affords far less protection, mostly because their speed and momentum have huge bite – on the occupants as well as those outside the crashing tin box.
The issues in the study seem to highlight issues for the young and those over 55, especially women. For the former less experience / less caution is an issue. For the latter – and possibly both – it may be simply that strength is important here. That might be for handling to avoid a serious incident or in mitigating things if people do crash.In your example the “MAMIL” – if aerobically fit – is probably also sufficiently strong to physically manage a bike / better weather a crash – compared with e.g. the average older woman
It doesn’t take “strength” to control a bike but a familiarity and confidence with the means of control. Age and gender may have an effect on crash statistics but it’s unlikely to have anything to do with “strength”. Much more likely to be something to do with experience or lack of it; and an associated under-confidence.
As to the “strong” MAMILs – this ability to ride the bike fast but in an inexperienced and over-confident fashion is often the cause of their inclination to become the cause of crashes, as anyong who has been in a sportive or similar will know all too well. They’re like sprogs in a road race but much worse because heavier and more aggresive!
Mostly quite agree – however:This misunderstanding seems to give rise to all sorts of assumptions, for instance that:[ … ]
* ebikes are dangerous because novice cyclists will all go at 25kph in all circumstances as the motor forces them to, so they should be banned from so-called shared paths. (In fact, ebike riders will ride in exactly the same fashion as they would on a non-ebike, well or badly as their inclinations, attitudes and abilities drive them).
There is some evidence that (25kmph assist) ebike riders have a different crash / injury profile at least. PDF here says in NL in 2021 ebike riders had a 1.6x chance of an A&E visit compared to those on an unassisted bicycle – apparently that’s corrected for age, gender, kilometers cycled, obesity, physical complaints and medication use.
So rather than saying “bike riders will ride in exactly the same fashion as they would on a non-ebike” it might be fairer just to note that they have a slightly elevated risk profile. They could be riding the same or not … and / or perhaps there’s something about ebikes that increases risk (Bike weight? More time at higher speeds? Accelleration?)
Interestingly it wasn’t just older people – who might not cycle without an ebike and may have less physical strength / reaction time / come off much worse in any fall. There was an increase over time in younger victims on ebikes. The linked infographic doesn’t show if it’s just that many more younger people were using an ebike however.
The link to the stuidy gives me a “site not available” message.
As I recall, that study didn’t exclude those riding delimited, perhaps illegal, ebikes ….. ? In other words, the would-be motorbike riders seemed to contribute to the increased crash rate. But perhaps that was a different Dutch study?
But you do make a valid point that there can be something about particular technologies that encourages a more dangerous use than with similar-but-lesser items. This is obviously true of cars, especially “sports” cars, that are made, advertised then driven to emulate the antics of drivers in Formula One, rallies and the like. It’s also true of those MAMILs on (non-ebike) TdeF bike clones riding about in all the gear with no idea, imagining themselves to be in a race. 🙂
So it is possible that a novice rider begining wth an e-bike might employ the e-bike power to ride with more vigour & vim than they’ve learnt to control well. But then that’s true of those MAMILs as well, on their non-ebike TdeF lookalike, especially if their other hobbies of running and squash have made them aerobically fit.
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Myself I feel that ebikes are just bikes that are “more efficient” at turning your pedalling power into forward motion – up to that 25kph only. They’re nothing like motorbikes and are controlled in exactly the same way as is a non-ebike.
Personally I’d lift the cut-off speed entirely but restrict ebikes via the software governing them so that a motor power restricted to 200 watts maximum can never contribute to pedalling power above 200 watts from the rider. As the rider power increases, the motor power decreases within that 200 watt envelope. That would allow the less fit to be assisted at speeds greater than 25kph but not by very much.
The speed of an electric bike varies depending on the type and model of the bike. In most countries, electric bikes are classified as either pedal-assist or throttle-assist, and their maximum speed is often limited by law. In the United States, for example, Class 1 and Class 2 electric bikes have a maximum speed of 20 miles per hour (32 kilometers per hour), while Class 3 electric bikes can reach up to 28 miles per hour (45 kilometers per hour) but are limited to pedal-assist only.However, some electric bikes designed for off-road use or racing can exceed these speed limits and reach higher speeds, up to 45 miles per hour (72 kilometers per hour) or more. It’s important to note that riding an electric bike at high speeds can be dangerous and requires appropriate safety gear, training, and caution.
Yes but no but yes but ……
The speed that ebikes can go is not limited to this or that maximum by law. Virtually every ebike can be pedalled by the rider to whatever speed the efficiency of rider to produce, and bike to use, power allows. The law only restricts the top speed above which motor power can’t be added to rider power.
Many who know little of cycling seem to believe that ebikes are speed-restricted, or even forced to, 25kph. They aren’t so restricted; only the use of the motor above 25kph is disallowed.
This misunderstanding seems to give rise to all sorts of assumptions, for instance that:
* ebikes have to be illegally destricted if they’re to go faster than 25kph/ (In fact, the rider just has to get fitter).
* ebikes are dangerous because novice cyclists will all go at 25kph in all circumstances as the motor forces them to, so they should be banned from so-called shared paths. (In fact, ebike riders will ride in exactly the same fashion as they would on a non-ebike, well or badly as their inclinations, attitudes and abilities drive them).
Depends how fast you pedal. But, legally, the motor has to cut out when you get above 15.5mph.As with all bikes, it depends on several other factors. Nor is one factor how fast you pedal but how much power you pedal at, with the motor perhaps adding various amounts until the road speed gets above 25kph. (How fast you pedal is determined by the gear ratio and the road speed).
When out and about, I notice quite a few Panzertank ebikes (those 28 kilo monsters) going everywhere at 25kph – but rarely faster. One suspects the pedaller is doing 50 watts and the Panzer is doing 250 (until the cut-off speed is reached).
Myself I have a racey Fazua-equipped ebike (Lapierre eXelius 700) that goes like a rocket, often well above 25kph, usually with the motor switched off (or even absent the frame) and me pedalling just shy of blowing up.
Mind, I also go up long steep hills at speeds approaching 25kph, which requires another 150 watts (the maximum I allow myself) from the motor. I am once more aged 29 (not 74, at least) and at my peak!
In short, ebikes go as fast as non-ebikes, which speed varies with the available rider-power + e-power actually applied, the gradient, the tyre rolling resistance, the air-drag, the mental state of the pedaller, the rider+bike weight, the …… . (Quite a long list of factors, really).
I’ve been using a 10-speed
I’ve been using a 10-speed Ultegra triple chainset with 11-speed chain and cassette for years, without any issue at all. Triples are probably more demanding than doubles, of chains, so you shouldn’t have trouble.
On the other hand, I also have a 10-speed DuraAce triple and that has the issue that it’s chainring spacings are just a bit different than those of even other Shimano chainsets of the same “speed” and era. Using chainring other than DA chainrings on DA crankarms seems to require some fiddling with exra thin washers to get the spacing right.