This one specific training session improved V2 max by 8.7%. Now, that might sound like too much until you dig into this and you realize that the other half of the test, the other group, they were doing the exact same training program and they only improved by 4.6%. Same sessions, same errors, same effort, nearly double the results. The only difference, one number on their bike computer screen, cadence. The craziest part of this whole thing is the coaches behind some of the best riders in the world. Writers like Tare Pagatcha, Chris Froom, and Aen Bernal, they've been prescribing this exact training session for years. While the internet and Reddit forums kept telling you this session is a waste of time. Don't waste your time doing it. You're going to hurt your knees. Now, a brand new study has just proved all those coaches right. Their maximum aerobic power in this study went up 8.1% versus 3% in the control group. Same program, same intensity, just that one difference. I keep talking about cadence, big gear work, torque training, strengthies, whatever you want to call it. The science now says the coaches were right all along. And today I'm going to break down exactly what this study found, why it works, and the exact sessions you can steal and go out the door and do this week. Okay, let's get into this. But before we get into the study itself, let's talk about why this is such a big deal. Because this argument has been raging on in cycling forums for decades. On one side of the argument, you've got the old school coaches and the professional pelaton. These people are people who've been doing these sessions and prescribing big gear work since before power meters even existed. They'd send riders out to find a long climb, slap it into the 5311 and grind along at like 50 RPM for 10-minute intervals at a time. The French called them force reps. In Australia, they call them strenies. In Ireland, I've only ever heard them been called like muscle tension intervals or torque work. I remember Alan Davis, you know, the guy who came milance on radium pod, milance on Ramo podium, world's podium. He coached me for a while about 10 years back and he was swearing by these sessions. When you look at the type of coaches using them, these aren't average coaches. They're some of the very best coaches in the world. John Wakefield, he's the director of coaching and sports science at Red Bull Bora Hansrove, the man who worked directly with Pagatcha and UAE in the early years. He's been prescribing torque training sessions to every single rider he coaches, amateurs and world tour professionals alike. And he typically uses four and 10 minute interval protocols, a cadence as low as 40 and 60 RPM range. We'll get into that in a little bit because if you stick around until right towards the end of this video, I'm going to give you the exact sessions that John Wakefield mentioned to me and talked about when I had them on the podcast and you can go and do them this week. Now, on the other side of this debate, on this process, anti-cadence debate, you've got the scienceonly crowd. And look, I respect the evidence-based approach. That's what we're all about here. But for years, the research on low cadence training was mixed at best. Christopherson in 2014 actually found that freely chosen cadence beat low cadence for aerobic improvements. And Nimmer in 2012 found absolutely no difference. Luda in 2016, no difference. witty in 2016. He called it basically a draw. So the internet had its ammunition. No evidence it works. Stop grinding away and ruining your legs. High cadence is king. Was essentially the evidencebacked message. We couldn't really argue with it. But there was a major hole in all of those studies that I mentioned. The protocols, almost none of those studies actually tested the protocols that world tour teams and world tour riders were using. The cadences were wrong. The intensities were wrong. The durations were wrong. I I'll leave these studies linked down below and you can flick through them yourself. It was testing it was I don't know like the protocols were so broken. This would be like testing a weightlifter and we're trying to test the efficacy of building muscle by getting people to lift 2 kg dumbbells seeing they didn't get a reaction and then concluding that weight training doesn't work. The coaches knew these protocols were wrong. So they kept prescribing these sessions anyway and they waited for the science to catch up. And the science finally has caught up. Now, here's where it gets really, really interesting. In November 2024, researchers Raphael Habis and Paulina Habis from the Rocklaw University of Health and Sports Sciences in Poland published a study in POS1. This is one of the most respected open access scientific journals in the world. And the conclusion was clear. Low cadence interval training produces greater improvements in aerobic capacity than the same training performed at a freely chosen cadence. I'm going to link this study again down below if you want to dig into it.
But here's what they did. They took 24 well-trained female cyclists aged 17 to 20. These were experienced riders, all with at least three years of competitive cycling, training a minimum of 10 hours per week, raced at least 15 times in the last year. So we're not talking about beginners here. They're serious competitive athletes. They split them into two groups and they put both groups on identical 8-week polarized training plans. Same structure, same volume, same intensity. The only difference cadence. Group one used freely chosen self-determined cadence. They did their sprinter intervals and their highintensity intervals at whatever cadence felt natural, which was about 80 RPM, just like most of us would ride when we get to self- select. The second group, the test group, this was the low cadence group. They did the exact same intervals, just the intervals now, mind you, at 50 to 70 RPM. The endurance ride was self- selected cadence. Both groups followed four day training blocks. Day one was a sprint day with 8 to 12 reps, 30 second allout. Day two was four highintensity intervals of four to six reps of four minutes at 90 to 100% of max aerobic power. Day three was a long steady endurance ride. And day four was an active recovery ride. And then they started that cycle all over again. Pretty sticky training cycle. The number of reps increased progressively over the eight weeks. Eight weeks, same sessions, same effort, just cadence. That's the only difference here. And honestly, the results, I had to read them twice when I dug into the results section. Let me give you the highlight number straight from the paper here. V2 max, arguably the single most important marker in aerobic fitness. It improved 8.7% in the low cadence group versus 4.6% in the freely chosen cadence group. The researchers confirmed this difference was statistically significant. They use something called a p value. And the p value in this case was 0.02. That is statistically significant. That's a real difference between two training approaches. Maximum aerobic power. That's like the absolute ceiling your aerobic engine can produce. This improved by 8.1% in the low cadence group versus 3% in the freely chosen cadence group. Again, the difference between these groups was deemed to be statistically significant with a p value of 0.03. And the one final detail which jumped out at me was the freely chosen cadence group gained an average of.7 kg of body mass over the 8 weeks while the low cadence group their body mass stayed the exact same. So the obvious question is why? What is it about grinding a big gear at low RPM that produces these kind of results? Well, there's three mechanisms at play here, and understanding them is going to change how you think about your training and maybe even convince you to throw in a few strengthies yourself. Number one, it's greater muscle fiber recruitment. When you pedal at a high cadence, your slow twitch type one muscle fibers handle most of the work. They're efficient, they're fatigued resistant, and they're perfectly happy spinning along at 90 RPM. But when you drop the cadence and you increase the torque demand, your body has no choice but to recruit the bigger, more powerful type 2 fast twitch muscle fibers to help share the load. And here's where this gets interesting. When you repeatedly force force those fast twitch muscle fibers to work at aerobic intensities over sustained training block intensity, research suggests some of them begin to shift their characteristics. They start behaving more like slow twitch muscle fibers, developing more mitochondria, better blood supply, improved oxidative capacity, while still retaining some of their force generating ability. You're essentially expanding the size of your aerobic engine by putting previously underused muscle fibers to work. Secondly, neuromuscular pathway development. I know that sounds like a mouthful, but stay with me. And this is exactly what Wakefield talked about when he had when I had him on the podcast. He explains why he prescribes low torque work to his world tour riders. It's because when you pedal at low cadence under high force, you're training the nervous system to activate more muscle fibers simultaneously and to coordinate that activation more efficiently. You're improving that communication between your brain and your lungs. And here's why that really matters. Because in a race, you're invariably, you know, you're four hours deep into the race and your cadence is invariably going to drop because of fatigue. And it will, trust me, it will drop. And the riders who've trained their neuromuscular pathways through torque work can produce meaningful power at that reduced cadence. Excuse the brief interruption, folks. This episode is brought to you by Bickmo Cycle Insurance. 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