Winter training on a fixed gear?

[zachateseverything]

I've been looking for ways to fix my natural tendency to just straight mash the pedals. My cadence is high, generally 95-100 rpm, but I still pedal squares. I've noticed that if I really focus on smoothing my stroke out I see a nice bump in power at a stable HR. However I'm having a heck of a time fighting through years of muscle memory and doing it consistently, let alone when I'm cross-eyed and chasing hard in a race.

Is winter training on a fixed gear a legitimate tool for smoothing out your pedal stroke? or is this just more Belogic BS like not shaving your legs the night before a race?

Any suggestions on how to incorporate this or other tools/techniques into training?

[Octave]

I used to have a similar problem. After a long (read: Chicago) winter of 100% fixed-gear riding coupled with a lot of time on a good set of rollers, my pedal stroke really smoothed out. An unbalanced pedal stroke on rollers = an unwelcome date with the ground.

[Too Tall]

It is a long tradition and not without merit just don't get obsessed with it. Ride a ton of miles in a 72 to 76" gear than switch back.

Old school thinking was to keep you from riding too hard but to challenge the aerobic engine and yeah that sort of makes sense. The long beards would advise that you ride 1500 miles'ish on fixed after the race season than switch back to gears.

In real life I've found that riding fixed does infact make me a better rider. As a coach my observation is it won't cure a bad pedal stroke and it sure as heck will stop you from getting base miles that are < Z4/5 if you are in hilly territory or can't stop yourself from tagging onto race team rides. Make sense?

Be sensible, have fun with it keep the gear inch small'ish.

[11.4]

I've gotten to where I say that it depends on your particular issues. Here's why.

I and my track team used to do on the order of 3000 miles in about 2 months, all in a 68" gear (42x18) fixed. Most of it was slightly off-flat, with a few easy hills just to stretch the legs. Nothing to overwork the knees or whatever. The point was to ride that 68" at 23-24 mph average and basically be working hard whether we were going uphill or down. We developed lots of good spinners but no one was bringing home the medals in the sprint.

I encouraged a few of the riders to go into a different kind of workout -- varying the fixed gear so that it was actually activating a lot of muscle fiber (and not letting most of it float and just keep out of the way of the rpms). They rode more road gears and did hard workouts through the winter, interspersed with easier fixed rides. They kicked ass the next season.

We added other riders to this regimen and they improved on a similar scale, so while we didn't exactly have statistical samples, we did have a pretty good indication that that low fixed gear was a nice psychological break but didn't exactly build performance, whether power or cadence.

We went on to other experiments. We had several riders who put out good power but felt they pedaled squares. Well, a winter of 68" fixed gears sometimes made them feel smoother, sometimes didn't, but uniformly they lost speed. We put them back on the same program described above and they also kicked ass. As a team we had a great year.

We then took some new but talented developmental riders, split the group, and had some work hard during the winter on fixed gears and the rest worked on regular gears. You know what happened. We took the ones who had been riding fixed gears and switched them back to road gears and they actually did better than the ones who were already on road gears. Why? They felt fresher and were more jazzed because their routine had changed.

Next, a lot of research and conversations and testing with a university physiology lab, and we found this was pretty much what all the researchers had found. We had wasted a couple years and probably a couple riders and certainly not brought home the bacon in the interest of experimentation that had already been done out there.

So I have a fixie and I'll ride it each week during the winter. For a 30 mile cold weather winter loop, it's good for me, as long as it's not a license for going slow. I have to be riding 125 rpm and riding the same speeds I'd be hitting if I was drilling it hard on road gears. For the rest of the week, it's road gears.

Bottom line? It really doesn't matter that much how you ride, but you can't cheat. There's some need to recover in the winter, but if you want to improve in the winter, you have to hit it hard. Trainer time is very important, hateful as it is. So is hard road work. Think about it. If you watch the riders who wait til June to start getting fast, they aren't usually the fast winners. It's the ones who were racing cross, then training hard, then racing early season road races. Now when I say that the success of any program depends on you, you may simply not be able to work this hard without tearing yourself down. But not pushing to that point where that happens means you don't develop past that point. Same way that pumping 60% of your max weight 20 times may be cathartic, but it's the 1X at 100% that makes your power go up. Same thing on the bike.

So I certainly wouldn't give you an answer, at least not one that you wouldn't laugh at. But if you aren't working it hard enough that you find yourself burning out a couple times, you aren't training to improve your marginal capabilities. There are some who would disagree, and there are some whose physiology lets them improve on a different basis, but if you aren't improving, it means you are either capped out or you aren't working hard enough to improve. Your odds are that it's the latter, and you need to test that anyway. Does that make sense? It's your decision based on how your body responds, and fixie riding should not be an end in itself, just one way you work like this and motivate yourself. The speed comes. Work to ride faster and you may not have a beautiful pedal stroke but you don't have to look like Anquetil. You just have to go fast. Focus on the important issue -- speed -- and let the rest take care of itself. It may not even be relevant.

[sk_tle]

powercranks ?