I love this question: Why am I having a tough time losing weight cycling?

“Ah, grasshopper, doth thou lackest honesty?”

The answer is simple, my friends, for those who can embrace honesty:  Results are equal to the effort put into achieving them.  Not less than, and certainly not greater than… though most wish the latter were true.  As a recovering drunk, I can relate – after I’d become I pickle, I wished and prayed I could to back to being a cucumber.  

We find losing weight difficult because we don’t push hard enough on the pedals, dear.  Well, that and we eat too much of the wrong crap, but let’s keep it on track.

Every cyclist on the planet needs an easy day once in a while (including the pros).  However, if your days are all easy, guess what?

Look at it this way, imagine yourself atop a mountain pass – you drove your bike up there on your car.  You unrack your bike and coast almost all the way down the hill, riding your disc brakes to the bottom.  It takes you 30 minutes.  You then take a bus back to the top to get your car…

Many will chalk that up to a 30 minute bike ride then reward themselves with some form of fast food goodness.  In reality, you put in slightly more effort than you would sitting on the couch watching Diners, Drive-ins and Dives.  You will gain weight on the day.  That’s how it works, and that’s why it’s so hard.

Try this revolutionary idea:  The easy days don’t count.  

Lately, I’ve been walking quite a bit for work, upwards of three or four miles a day.  I don’t count that because, dude, it’s walking.  I do my regular evening ride and that’s what I count.  I consume an average of 400 calories less than I burn every day.  Guess what happens!  Every ten days or so. I drop a pound.

Expectations and intake must be in line with effort, it’s simple as that, if sometimes disheartening.  

Ride hard, my friends… because the other option is to eat twigs, leaves, roots and fungi.  

Woof!

It’s dark out, quarter past seven, and raining.  It’s been raining all day.  A sure sign the season is coming to a close – and a perfectly good day to write this post.

Let’s jump right in – How to spot a noob cyclist’s bike:

Your rear wheel spoke protector.  You need it because you don’t know how to keep your rear derailleur perfectly tuned.  I don’t need one because I do.  The single easiest way to spot a noob is that they’ve still got the spoke protector on their bike….  The bear is that you can’t remove it unless you know what you’re doing when it comes to tuning a rear derailleur – and I’m not giving that up for obvious reasons;  You’re liable for your own butt, in other words.  You also need a couple of special tools to remove the cassette so you can get the thing off in one piece in the first place…

Reflectors.  I know, they’re required by law.  Call me a rebel.  No self-respecting badass has reflectors on their race bike – even if the law requires the bike come with them.  My bikes did come with four each – they were taken off the bike before my first ride.  Seriously.  Also, you don’t need reflectors if you don’t ride near dusk or sunrise anyway.

Your bar tape says more about your ability to ride than you would like – and don’t worry, we all suck at the skill of wrapping at first.  Keep trying.

Notice how the wrap goes the opposite way to the center of the bar on each side?  You’ll also notice the tight wrap, no gaps, no loose coils.  If at first you do not succeed, try and try again (that photo was taken shortly after I installed the leather bar tape – once it had a few weeks to set up, I straightened out the bar end plugs).

A dirty drivetrain; there’s a difference between dirty/grimy and well lubed.  The latter is okay, the former, not.

Your hoods aren’t lined up and square.  This one will lead to neck and shoulder pain, not just a raised eyebrow from a friend:

A dirty bike will betray a noob cyclist every time.  When you get back from riding in gnarly weather:

Clean it up before you ride again.  It should look like this before your next ride (UK cyclists are excluded here.  If you had to ride in that much rain, you’d let your bike go from time to time too):

Simple as that.  I clean my bikes once a week, whether they need it or not.

Shifting!  This one doesn’t need a photo.  If you push your shifter lever to change the gear and the chain clicks several times before it shifts, others will notice.  It normally takes between two and 30 seconds to fix this… If you know what you’re doing. It takes two minutes to three hours if you don’t.  How do I know it can take three freaking hours?  That’s what it took me the first time I tried.  Now, if you shift weakly, this can also cause the same skip.  You have to know the difference between a weak shift and a need to index your rear derailleur.

A wobble in your wheel.  I am a seasoned, well-versed, fashion conscious, mechanically inclined cyclist.  I suck at truing a wheel.  Most noobs think you tighten spokes to pull the rim back into true.  This is not the way to go, as you’ll pull the wheel out of round.  You have to tighten some and loosen others.  So, to get around this, I take my wheels in to get them trued if I see a wobble.  I check them regularly.  Whether you have the wherewithal or not, wobbly wheels are a noob’s dead giveaway.  Things happen, of course, but you don’t want wobbly wheels.  Again, I’d provide a photo, but I don’t have wobbly wheels.  Sorry.

A dry bike.  A dry bike is a squeaky bike.  A squeaky bike should be annoying as hell to you.  If it isn’t, make it so.  A dry bike, one that hasn’t seen a lube bottle since some time last season, makes very distinctive noises that are very easy to pick up in a group.  They’re squeaky.  Bikes that are lubed regularly, are whisper quiet.  Lube regularly the following (not including the chain which should be every 250-400 miles):  Rear derailleur, front derailleur (at the pivot points), the brake caliper pivot points.  Once or twice a year, take the crank apart and lube it (clean it first, obviously), and do the headset once a year (more if you ride in a lot of rain).  Lube the wheels once a season, including the cassette body (or as needed).

Now, this can be a lot of work, especially when you’ve got a lot of bikes to maintain (I have, including my wife and kids, more than eleven to take care of).  This is what the off-season is for.  Change the cables, take apart the headset and cranks to clean them and lube them…  Do a couple of bikes a weekend while the snow is flying (if you live in a climate that gets snow, or use a rain day).  After a while, you’ll become efficient at the tasks and they’ll go a lot faster.  Of course, every once in a while, you’re going to run into that front derailleur cable that takes a half-hour to change and index.  It happens.

Take care of your bikes and they absolutely will take care of you.  The easiest way to spot a noob is to look at their bike.  This has been a public service announcement from Fit Recovery.

I’ve been watching “The Bike Fit Adviser” series on YouTube and I like a lot of what John has to offer.  Put simply, he has a tendency to go off the reservation on a topic every once in a while.

Pedal efficiency, the difference between a Look style vs. SPD, is one of those topics.  

It’s easy to pooh-pooh the notion that road pedals offer greater aerodynamics or offer an advantage in actually getting the pedals around the cranks – you’re talking about such a small gain, it becomes inconsequential unless you’re a pro where every little difference matters.

That’s not the end of the narrative, though.

I’ve ridden both, and over long distances, enough to know that there exists a huge difference between the two and it has nothing to do with aerodynamics or pedaling efficiency.

Grocery-getter or cyclist?

The first thing to determine is what style of cycling will we be taking part in, because this matters in the decision-making process.  If you’re going to commute or take rides up to the grocery store, if you’re talking about trips up to 30-40 miles (48 to 65 km) at reasonable efforts, what difference there is between the two pedal styles won’t matter.  It’ll be more advantageous to not walk like a duck when you get where you’re going.

Where the discussion gets interesting is when you look at changing up the style of cycling and/or increasing the distance and pace (50+ miles, 18+ mph average [80 km @ 29 km/h]).  

At that point, it’s time to ditch the mountain bike shoes and pedals and go for a road setup – and for some reason John just skips right over this….  The spd mountain bike pedals have a tiny cleat contrasted against a Look or Shimano road cleat so the load is transferred from the foot to the pedal over a smaller surface area with a mountain pedal/cleat rig.

The smaller cleat causes “hot spots” of pain on the ball of the foot.  I know this happens because I’ve ridden thousands of miles on the spd pedals.  The further and faster one rides, the more the feet will hurt with the effort.  

It’s not about position of the cleat, either.  It’s about stiffness of shoe and the size of the cleat.  More cleat surface area will cause less deflection in sole of a shoe, will cause less pain over a long, fast ride.

Period, end of story.

Spd pedals on the road rig, circa 2012.

I rode mountain pedals on the road rig because I was too poor, at the time, to afford mountain and road shoes.  Today times are better and I can afford both, so I ride Look pedals and cleats on my two road bikes and spd’s on my gravel and mountain bikes.  

The road rig favors how I ride road bikes, the spd pedals and cleats on mountain shoes mean I can walk on dirt roads and in fields without worry of gumming up the cleats/pedals.  

Finally, the pain associated with riding spd pedals on road bikes isn’t so bad it can’t be lived with, I’d simply rather not with as many miles as I ride on the spd’s. 

That’s the short and curlies of the pedal debate.