Professional Bike Fitting at BikeDynamics Ltd. CYCLING PERFORMANCE TIPS - Main Page. Technique: Cadence Matters. By Joe Beer | Wednesday, May 14, 2008 11.00pm Learning what cadence works best for you can significantly improve your efficiency Robert Smith Photography Cycling is a simple sport really.
To break it down into its simplest controllable factors you can vary your effort (heart rate), gearing (front and rear combination) and pedal cadence (revolutions per minute). There are the obvious additional controllable factors of whether you ride on- or off-road and the hilliness of the terrain you choose to cover, but the principle still applies - speed is a function of your effort, your choice of gear and how fast or slow you decide to spin. For example, you can get 30mph with minimal effort in 53x17 downhill, but you can be way up in Zone 3 (86% to 100% HR max), crawling at 9mph grinding your lowest gear if you’re going back up.