# Maybe not Doping Related: So high cadence was a benefit of doping and not legit?



## culdeus (May 5, 2005)

I see this in a few threads now. The talk that the guys that used high cadence were doing so because they knew their legs would give out before their lungs/cardio. They say it is common knowledge that with EPO/Bloodpack that they could just lean on those systems and pedal more.

So for the amateur now what is the right approach for paniagua? Is high cadence dead?


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## DrSmile (Jul 22, 2006)

When you look at the body of articles on Medline, there are two groups of articles: One that studied younger athletes or specifically non-professional athletes; virtually every one of those articles shows either a decrease in performance from higher cadence or no difference from cadence when studying "natural cadence" for different athletes. The other group evaluated data provided from professional racing. These articles typically do show a preference for higher cadences in mountain stages for the winners.

I'll leave the interpretation of that to you.


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## culdeus (May 5, 2005)

Shouldn't we/someone start to fan this information out? There is a lot of literature out there that says high cadence is desirable.


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## DrSmile (Jul 22, 2006)

I think it's a very hard thing to prove. The obvious counterargument is that the reason for the pros being pros (and the winners winning) is because they ride the higher cadence. If you fundamentally accept that pros dope, then the answer is readily apparent. But that's a bit of circular logic.


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## brianmcg (Oct 12, 2002)

Then how do you explain Miguel Indurain or Jan Ulrich?


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## woodys737 (Dec 31, 2005)

I'm still just going to focus on power. Cadence will be the result of it not the other way around.


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## Dwayne Barry (Feb 16, 2003)

Your lungs/cardio never give out under normal circumstances.

You've probably got a serious health issue if they do.


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## SystemShock (Jun 14, 2008)

Dwayne Barry said:


> Your lungs/cardio never give out under normal circumstances.
> 
> You've probably got a serious health issue if they do.


Wut??


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## perpetuum_mobile (Nov 30, 2012)

Dwayne Barry said:


> Your lungs/cardio never give out under normal circumstances.
> 
> You've probably got a serious health issue if they do.


If not, then why take EPO or do blood transfusions? If what you wrote was true pro cyclists would take anabolic steroids to increase muscle mass and gain more power. The amount of available oxygen limits the performance and not the muscle strength.


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## perpetuum_mobile (Nov 30, 2012)

culdeus said:


> The talk that the guys that used high cadence were doing so because they knew their legs would give out before their lungs/cardio. They say it is common knowledge that with EPO/Bloodpack that they could just lean on those systems and pedal more.


This is exactly how I understand the "high cadence" thing. Big Jan and Indurain both are big guys and even on a full program for them lungs/cardio was still the limiting factor. And Indurain was never super climber but only trying to limit loses when going uphill. You will never see small Columbian climbers mash with low cadence even if they are 100% clean - that's why they disappeared during the epo peak - dope just did not help them much.


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## DrSmile (Jul 22, 2006)

More blood cells means your lungs can dump CO2 and absorb oxygen more efficiently also. It helps on both ends. It kind of has to in order to see an increase in performance.


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## Dwayne Barry (Feb 16, 2003)

perpetuum_mobile said:


> If not, then why take EPO or do blood transfusions? If what you wrote was true pro cyclists would take anabolic steroids to increase muscle mass and gain more power. The amount of available oxygen limits the performance and not the muscle strength.


You're confusing performance capacity with fatigue. Any thing that increases the oxygen carrying capacity of the blood improves performance capacity and lessens fatigue. Note that the common doping techniques do not improve lung or cardiac function they simply put more oxygen into the fluid that is being pumped.

Your lungs are overbuilt and under normal circumstances there is no problem fully oxygenating all the hemoglobin that is available. Lungs almost never limit endurance performance. Your heart almost certainly limits your performance because how much blood it pumps per beat (i.e. stroke volume) along with the rate at which it beats determines cardiac output and therefore oxygen delivery to the muscles. Heart rate doesn't really correlate with ability. A professional endurance athlete is no more likely to have a high maximum heart rate than a couch potato (might even be just the opposite since being aerobically fit tends to lower maximum heart rate). The difference likely lies in stroke volume. That is, better endurance athletes are more likely to have large hearts with large left ventricles that allow for the pumping of a large volume of blood every time it beats. You can influence this somewhat by manipulating blood volume and one of the first adaptations that occurs when someone goes from being sedentary to an exerciser is an expansion in blood volume. Regardless the important doping techniques basically add oxygen content to the blood, they don't improve the heart's ability to pump blood.

Now onto fatigue and the notion that your lungs/cardio can give out and decrease performance during an exercise session and thereby limit performance. That just doesn't appear to happen under normal circumstances. If you're climbing a mountain using whatever cadence and you're maxed out maintaining 300 watts at the bottom but by the top you can only do 275, it's not because your lungs have stopped oxygenating your blood and it's not because your cardiac output has fallen because your heart has fatigued and lost its ability to pump blood.

Fatigue is a muscle phenomenon under most normal circumstances. That could be do to something intrinsic to the muscle, could be due to lack of fuel substrate, etc.

I've never understood where this notion has come from that high cadence relies on heart/lungs where low cadence relies on the legs. They both rely on the legs, one using lower forces more often (high cadence), one using higher forces less often (low cadence) to generate a given work rate. That may matter for performance and fatigue but again it's not because one or the other is less likely to cause your legs to give out before your heart and lungs. If your heart or lungs give out, you've got a real problem.

If your heart or lungs are "giving out" and decreasing your performance you've likely either got heart failure or are having a heart attack (heart) or you have COPD (lungs).


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## badge118 (Dec 26, 2002)

The whole cadence thing goes beyond oxygen though. As I understand it muscle performance is basically about balancing oxygen use and neural efficiency (which is effected by muscle strain). Some studies have found that the cadence with the lowest oxygen cost was not the same as that producing the lowest over all muscular fatigue. 

So at 60 rpms I am using less oxygen than I would at 100 BUT at 100 rpms I am producing less strain on the muscles themselves. One such study noted that at the same power output (200 Watts in this study) higher cadences made for better muscle blood flow and when combined with the reduced muscle strain data made for better endurance. In that study 100 rpms worked out to 2 watts of strain per rev where 60 rpms produced over 3 watts of strain.

source....Gotshal, R.W. et al (1996) Cycling cadence alters exercise hemodynamics. Int. J.Sports Med. 17(1): 17-21. 

Ultimately though it comes down to training. The problem I think some people make is they assume a blanket "faster is better". It is (within limits) once your cardio vascular system is properly trained and how much faster is better is governed by the same metric. The trick is to find that balancing point and it is going to be different for different people based on not only their training but body type, muscle structure (fast twitch to slow twitch muscle fiber ratios) etc.


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## Dwayne Barry (Feb 16, 2003)

badge118 said:


> It is (within limits) once your cardio vascular system is properly trained and how much faster is better is governed by the same metric.


Yes that's always been a paradox that almost no one uses the most efficient cadence.

Just to be clear though again it doesn't really matter whether your cardiovascular system is trained or not as far as the original assertion. I mean it matters as far as delivering oxygen to your muscles and therefore how readily they fatigue, but it doesn't matter in terms of "fatigue" of your cardiovascular system.

If you've got lungs or a heart that is "giving out" you've likely got a disease or some other abnormal physiology going on. Cardiac muscle is essentially non-fatiguable and your lungs are so overbuilt that there appear to be only rare special circumstances where they fail to fully oxygenate all the blood that passes through them (e.g. very high altitudes).


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## slamy (Mar 15, 2004)

according to Hamilton's book it was Dr. Ferrari that pushed for the higher cadence and less fatigue on the muscles. Lance did everything the Ferrari told him too. It was funny but one of the biggest revelations from the book was how little Chris Carmichael actually did for Lance in terms of training him. Apparently Carmichael was just a shell.


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## root (Sep 13, 2007)

Guys pick up a physiology book and read a bit. Your heart has about 400% higher capacity for work (i.e. deliver blood to muscles) than what is needed at even maximum effort. Likewise for the lungs (a little less efficient than heart but still way more than oxygen absorbed and delivered to blood than you can ever utilize). No part of your body will stay without blood or oxygen even at maximum effort. 

So, what is the limit then? The limit is the ability of your muscles to utilize the oxygen that the heart is so efficiently bringing to them. The limit is the number of mitochondria and ATP stored in the muscle cells, which can effectively do aerobic release of energy and do useful work. 

On the other hand if you look at definition of power, it is the amount of work you do per unit of time. Work itself in case of cycling is force (torque) multiplied by angular velocity of the pedal cranks (i.e. cadence). So by increasing cadence you can reduce force (torque) to the pedals. You are effectively using less force but increasing the cadence to keep the power output the same. This simply means you are not taxing your aerobic metabolism as much, you are working at the lower end of aerobic spectrum than you would if you were using lower cadence. Pedaling slower is more like weight lifting and you might be going anaerobic if your cadence is really low but you are cranking huge torque.


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## cbarne12 (Sep 8, 2011)

The thing is, it's all alot more complicated than is being proposed in this forum. Late's mention just a few things. Sacromere contractility, calcium channel fatigue, abiltity to stress/improve the cariovas system is not independent of the skeletal musclce system. It's a gestalt situation that cannot be readily analysed separately. The studies are doofus with higher cadence on beginner's...we all know that it takes anywhere from 8mos to 2 years to rewire the motor cortex to properly utilize a higher/more efficient pedaling stroke...even the pros don't like to be off their machines secondary to being 'rusty' when pedaling, i.e. losing some of their efficiency...bicyclign is an art as much as a science. As someone in these forums aptly put....the more you invest yourself in cycling, the more it reveals itself to you. Nuff said.


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## Dwayne Barry (Feb 16, 2003)

cbarne12 said:


> The thing is, it's all alot more complicated than is being proposed in this forum.


Nobody's suggesting it's not a lot more complicated, or at least I'm not. I'm just conveying what I think is pretty standard physiological information. Your heart/lungs don't "give out" during exercise. Your heart/lungs might not have the capacity to sustain a given work load but if they have that capacity they don't lose it during an exercise bout, unlike your skeletal muscles.


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## BassNBrew (Aug 4, 2008)

Someone explain this result to me. Earlier this week I was doing intervals on a computrainer with a fixed power number. At 80 rpms my hr was in the upper 140s, at 90-95 rpms I jumped to the upper 150s, at 100 to 110 rpms I hit upper 160s. Dropped back to 90 rpms and the hr slid back down.

Many are saying my cardio system isn't giving out. Why I agree that I'm not dying, something was less taxed at the lower rpms.


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## Dwayne Barry (Feb 16, 2003)

BassNBrew said:


> Someone explain this result to me. Earlier this week I was doing intervals on a computrainer with a fixed power number. At 80 rpms my hr was in the upper 140s, at 90-95 rpms I jumped to the upper 150s, at 100 to 110 rpms I hit upper 160s. Dropped back to 90 rpms and the hr slid back down.
> 
> Many are saying my cardio system isn't giving out. Why I agree that I'm not dying, something was less taxed at the lower rpms.


You're misunderstanding. Everyone's heart has a maximum capacity to pump blood. Assuming the same resistance as you increase cadence you're working harder and your heart gets closer to the maximum capacity as cardiac output increases (most likely) to meet the increased demand for oxygen. However, lets say you keep pedaling at any one of those cadences long enough that eventually you can no longer maintain the desired cadence and your power drops. Almost certainly this will not happen because your heart/lungs fatigued and could no longer provide the required oxygen, it will happen because your muscles could no longer produce the forces necessary to keep the required cadence ticking over.


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