Bigger = Faster

[Mike314]

Hey Coach,

I read this article in the WSJ the other day and it made me think of SS. It completely makes sense based on what you teach. Perhaps the world is catching on?

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000...941575668.html

-Mike

[Mark Rippetoe]

You think road cyclists can understand this? I don't.

[John N.O. Main]

The British Cycling team is pretty damn succesful. You must have seen Chris Hoy... size = gold medals and a knighthood

http://rushracing.files.wordpress.co...hoy20legs1.jpg

(picture a bit big to insert)

[TravisRussellDC]

Then bodybuilders must be the fastest athletes in the world...

[stephen]

hey mark
if bigger means faster /stronger in road cycling, how come the skinny way smaller guy in the tour de france after 19 days of racing, won the indidual time trial, a discipline thats shows who truely is strongest?
where were all the bigger guys?remember, this was on a flat course too! not a hilly course where the bigger guys would have the excuse they have too much mass to go up hill with..

how come in all the big one days classic races in belgium and the netherlands the "biggest " guy dosent win those. why dosent the biggest guy win all the 40k time trials? remember you said road cyclists.. seems like a lot of smaller guys do quite well. even while they were even with 200 meters to go, why did mark cadavish blow away thor hushvold? marks 5'9" 150 thor is 6' 185????
whats lance 6' 165# pretty good aint he?so if lance gets up to 190 he'll win? stick to powerlifting.. you know a lot about that sport, but by all the comments over the years re: cycling and running, you know very little about these sports.
re my old post when you said pele was geat 35 years ago and the game has changed, tell me how soccer has changed???watching the classic games and watching the current games, they sure look ste same to me..

steve

[Bleve]

You think road cyclists can understand this? I don't.

We're not all stupid
But in the case of roadies who are racing up long hills, weight is a serious penalty, which is why the best flatland time trialists don't often make the best climbers. But who wants to look like Rasmussen anyway?



He's one of the top Tour de France cyclists, kicked off the tour in '07 by his team for irregularities in his reporting his whereabouts.
Now compare that to an elite track sprinter (Chris Hoy, current Olympic champion at the sprint and keiren) :

[Mark Rippetoe]

hey mark
if bigger means faster /stronger in road cycling, how come the skinny way smaller guy in the tour de france after 19 days of racing, won the indidual time trial, a discipline thats shows who truely is strongest?
where were all the bigger guys?remember, this was on a flat course too! not a hilly course where the bigger guys would have the excuse they have too much mass to go up hill with..

how come in all the big one days classic races in belgium and the netherlands the "biggest " guy dosent win those. why dosent the biggest guy win all the 40k time trials? remember you said road cyclists.. seems like a lot of smaller guys do quite well. even while they were even with 200 meters to go, why did mark cadavish blow away thor hushvold? marks 5'9" 150 thor is 6' 185????
whats lance 6' 165# pretty good aint he?so if lance gets up to 190 he'll win? stick to powerlifting.. you know a lot about that sport, but by all the comments over the years re: cycling and running, you know very little about these sports.
re my old post when you said pele was geat 35 years ago and the game has changed, tell me how soccer has changed???watching the classic games and watching the current games, they sure look ste same to me..

steve

Sorry steve, didn't mean to be offensive. I guess you're right: a bigger motor slows the car down. You just proved it with these examples. I'll stop typing now.

[Bleve]

hey mark
if bigger means faster /stronger in road cycling, how come the skinny way smaller guy in the tour de france after 19 days of racing, won the indidual time trial, a discipline thats shows who truely is strongest?

Long (>1km) time trials don't show strength, they demonstrate threshold power, which is a very very different thing. Strength isn't threshold power or power to weight. At 90+rpm, very little strength is being used to put out 300 watts, it's all aerobic and it's very low torque. That's why they can do it all day. Peak power in a track sprint is around 2000 or more watts, in a road sprint, maybe 1300-1500 watts depending on the course - which selects who turns up to race and who makes it to the finish. Track sprinters who can put out 2000+ watts don't enter those races, but they are absolutely stronger and more powerful than roadies.

The fastest track sprinters are usually very big men (relatively) eg Sean Eadie raced at ~100kg in '02 when he won the world championship, Chris Hoy's got to be around that also, road cycling has more in common with marathon running than it has with track sprinting.

where were all the bigger guys?remember, this was on a flat course too! not a hilly course where the bigger guys would have the excuse they have too much mass to go up hill with..

The 'bigger' guys are also training for endurance, not strength, as roadies. Your question is like asking where's the piranha in the goldfish pond - it's not there, they're all goldfish. All they get to eat is algae and mud, the piranha is at the local steakhouse.

how come in all the big one days classic races in belgium and the netherlands the "biggest " guy dosent win those. why dosent the biggest guy win all the 40k time trials?

They do, relatively. Tom Boonen isn't small by roadie standards, but he's still a goldfish, just a bigger goldfish. Cippolini was pretty big, so was Kursipu, Petacci, McEwen was short but solid (again, for a roadie), and Cancellerara is a giant compared to most roadies, he tends to win flat time trials.

remember you said road cyclists.. seems like a lot of smaller guys do quite well. even while they were even with 200 meters to go, why did mark cadavish blow away thor hushvold? marks 5'9" 150 thor is 6' 185????

And in this year's Tour Hushovd spent most of a day away off the front in a mountain stage, does that indicate a rider who's concentrated on sprint training? No .. he's a fast-ish goldfish, Cavendish wouldn't have been able to do that and Cavendish is a goldfish too. These guys are selected to finish a 3 week race over some of the biggest mountains in the world with roads on them, real sprinters don't do that sort of thing so they're not there in the first place.

whats lance 6' 165# pretty good aint he?so if lance gets up to 190 he'll win?

He'd be a better sprinter, like he was when he was younger and had more muscle (pre cancer) - when he won the world championship he was more of a sprinter than a climber, and there's no way he would have raced the Tour that year.

[Guppy88]

What Mark says is true. There is an unhealthy habit of anorexia inherent to cycling. I've been subjected by this through the many teams I was on. It?s horrible but true. The worst part is seeing coaches tell Jr. riders to lose weight.

No you don't need to get a bigger upper body if you're a climber, but a stronger core and bigger quads will help a lot. In addition, upper body movements are slightly involved depending on the race.

[Kent Berry]

Since when has participating in strength training to augment one's performance in a given sport meant that one risked inadvertantly morphing into a different type of athlete? God, I wish it was that easy.

Rip has simply said that strength training which increases power output means that each pedal stroke requires a decreased fraction of the total wattage available. Not unreasonable, methinks. No one is talking about turning Alberto Contador into Magnus ver Magnusson.

The sad fact is that many prominent sports use sub-optimal training methods because of the prevailing "conventional wisdom" among coaches. Swimming comes immediately to mind, and I suspect road cycling ranks right up there.