Do we have anything indicating that targeting a specific torque has a benefit?
Sure if your race requires efforts that force you into a lower cadence it is valuable to train for that but I am unaware of any real evidence that targeting a specific torque is better than just riding at your preferred cadence. There has been several studies done over the years and the general consensus has been that there is no evidence (as of yet) that low cadence drills work.
So your low Z2 power is 500w?
Again, your numbers don’t line up.
Also, cadence has a no bearing on your wattage. You can do 70 rpm or 90 rpm, but 200w is still 200w.
Yes, the gcn episode was based on a study
That study only had the low cadence on the HIIT and SIIT sessions, not during LIT sessions.
Additionally it was a very small cohort, but so are most of these studies.
I really hope we can get more studies done with this as a focus, lots of people prescribe them for varying reasons but it’s good to see some work being done on it.
Trainer resistance on a 1-100% scale? I.e. Riding along at 20% resistance, increasing it by 1% to 21% is actually a relative increase of 5% (1/20).
Yeah, he explained it fine. He holds his cadence steady and bumps the resistance. That’s all you need to know.
I think we are miscommunicating. Not sure where you get 500w. The trainer has a resistance unit that has increments from 1% to 100% and they have no relationship with FTP or any training zone. They are just increments. Based on cadence 90 and the specific gear I am using, every 1% increment = 5-7 watts. If I use a different gear and/or different cadence the increase will be different.
Are you thinking ERG mode? Correct, in ERG whatever cadence you use won’t change the watts the trainer holds it will adjust as needed to maintain its target. But I am not using ERG.
The smallest increment is 1%, so that’s what I use, as I am just trying to nudge my way through the workout not make large jumps within the zone.
Thank you for posting the study!
First a comment on GCN: I think the workout they propose is Iess than optimal. I suppose there are a million ways to incorporate torque, but if you’re going to target 90-95% FTP (sweet spot) as GCN suggests then you should incorporate the appropriate duration, so let’s say intervals of 20-45 minutes. The 4 minutes they suggest is what you’d do in Z5, not SS. However, it would be exceedingly difficult to hold 60 RPM SS torque for 20-45 minutes - I think most people would give up long before 20 minutes. It would be better to start at 80 RPM SS torque for 20-45 minutes and, every few weeks, see if you can nudge up the torque a small amount with a corresponding decrease in cadence while staying in SS zone, like 80 RPM, then 75, then 70, etc.
Second, the results of the study do not surprise me. The general thought is that, for developing maximal aerobic power via intervals, you should focus on heart rate/the cardiovascular system, not torque/leg muscle cells. Put another way, focus on supply (of blood) not demand (for oxygen). It’s been 30 years since I sat in an exercise physiology lecture or read a text book on this stuff, but if I recall correctly, this belief actually goes back to the 60s or 70s (possibly even earlier).
However, I have always thought this belief is erroneous, perhaps based on bias and/or lack of technology to perform proper research, and still do to this day. Obviously I have a bias in favor of this study’s results, but I’ve never understood the thinking that demand for oxygen by muscle cells is insignificant and should be ignored. The vast majority of the oxygen consumption occurs in the leg muscle cells, and improving oxygen consumption is the goal. While it’s extremely important to train the cardiovascular system to supply blood to working muscles, at some point it’s important to focus on increasing the muscle’s ability to do more work and thus require more oxygen – torque training, and the resulting increase in muscle cells doing work to maintain increased force production, accomplishes this goal. Supply and demand complement each other and both are necessary components for developing aerobic capacity.
Hopefully future studies will focus on threshold efforts and include biopsies - it would be really informative to note actual physiological changes occurring in the cells (assuming there are any).
Don’t neglect the neuromuscular benefits that riding at different cadences also delivers. It’s not just about oxygen delivery.
I haven’t been following this thread, but FWIW, I clicked on TrainNow this morning and happened to get Carson, which is an hour of sweet spot intervals mostly at 75 rpm with some short periods of standing,
Can’t hurt to mix it up. We all run out of gears at some stage or other so having trained at lower cadence has to help.
I’ve seen very fit riders come here to the Alps and suffer because they’re not used to sustained low cadence high torque riding. Only way to avoid it on big col climbs is with very low gravel gearing. So if that type of riding is on someone’s book, then for sure it helps to prepare for it
Assuming you’re in the same power zone, how did the 75 rpm ss efforts feel to you compared to higher cadence ones?
For sure, when I first hit the Alpe d’Huez last year (my first ever climb, only ever having cycled in the Netherlands) it really helped me mentally knowing I could sustain these high torque/low cadence for more than just the first few bends besides the practice it had given me stabilising my bike
It was a little different. As to be expected, I felt it a little more in the legs and a little less in the lungs. I just started TR a couple of months ago and there was a fair amount of low/moderated cadence training the the previous platform I used, Systm. I also mainly ride mtb and gravel grinding up hills so I ordinarily get a good amount of moderate cadence riding.
Thank you for writing this thought provoking post, I did my best to understand what you are saying and used GPT4o to parse your main post up so that I could digest your thesis. Having not seen the GCN video on torque training I still do rate it for a number of reasons.
First and foremost being because I had run into a Canadian pro rider at a bakery near Monaco last spring and he just had this really depleted look in his eye, he told me that his coach had him on 4 hard low torque efforts across the 5 hour ride and he was a dead man walking. He was wearing his old bib shorts from when he was a junior trying to go pro so you could tell that he knew this would cook him.
Point is it’s going to overload even the most experienced riders which can be important to trigger adaptations. Going into why is kind of a fun exercise because I feel like you don’t have to really look much into it past the massively increased RPE for the effort to know that some kind of adaptation is coming to the rider after smoking themself.
To touch on your theory points :
Likely with a normal cadence like 80-90 it’s actually fairly freestyle in terms of recruitment and the primary movers just take over and do what they can at whatever rate that makes sense. Whereas a cadence like 100 you have all these other muscle groups having quick and low torque contributions to the pedal stroke it really is a trained skill to do as there can be a lot going on.
But as you say it’s interesting to use cadence variation to tune these workouts to include a peripheral component.
So for example z2 for 2h at self selected cadence vs z2 2h with 2x15minutes at 55 cadence seated. Slowing down the cadence causes increased time under tension which starts frying the muscles when normally this z2 ride should cause almost 0 peripheral adaptation apart from the bare minimum of repair.
your last point regarding the trade off between doing a low cadence effort vs being able to finish the effort is also important, so much of what happens on the trainer is limited in different ways than out on the road. On the road out in real life on courses with ramps you end up facing this high torque requirement and at a certain point the riders dropping would report that they just couldn’t push any harder downward on the pedals, they would say that their quads are blowing up and it’s impossible to push anymore.
It’s really rare that they would say wow I just could not raise my cadence. Meanwhile contrast that with exercises on the trainer done with effectively no torque… riding the trainer is like spinning while track standing the bike to achieve a required power, and TR reminds of this all of the time in their workouts so often asking for focus on the cadence to get the power out rather than focusing on the torque. This is something that is unique to the trainer where you never really get walled off like you do on real ramps where torque suddenly becomes a requirement in order to get up the thing.
So in conclusion I do rate high torque efforts for climbers because they are realistic and provide a guarantee of overload. I wouldn’t think in terms of actin/myosin too much and when you think about recruitment the cadence has to be much lower than 70 in order to start seeing more bulk recruitment of other groups and fibers, Recruitment at ultra low cadence is really high and neurological, then it drops as you raise cadence and time under tension drops, then it begins to rise yet again as cadence rises to 100.
Thank you for the thought provoking post, here is a picture of a ramp that I always keep in the back of my mind when doing this kind of thing. I was in the feed zone at the top last year and I can promise you that nobody was spinning up this climb with 95+ 
I did a 1 hour zone 2 heart rate trainer ride this morning before church averaging 55 cadence. It does really work your leg cycling muscles more than a spin with the same heart rate averaging 85 cadence. I think I will keep this up for my easy zone 2 rides.
