The future of cycling is here LPP

SCIENCEEE!!!

“The biggest advantage I’ve seen using Lift Propulsive Pedaling is the substantial increase in my overall average speed. I have two routes I ride consistently, each one 25 miles in length with considerable climbing. My average speed on those routes has hovered around 14.5 mph. Once I started using this technique I began to see a substantial increase in overall speed going from 14.5 to 15.7 mph over the same course with my weight, road bike and fitness level being the same. I can only attribute this improvement to one thing…Lift Propulsive Pedaling!” - Chip Fox, San Diego, CA.

Danm… why didn’t I think of this. Revolutionary! A marvel of engineering

I can’t tell if this is serious or not, but I’m going to assume it was.

harden the fuck up

what does this even mean

my goal is 31% more efficiency

The basic gist of the next minute is that they claim that yanking upwards at the pedals, eliminating any significant use of the quads, is super sweet and you should pay them for their handycam coaching videos

wat

i’m now convinced that you don’t know efficiency means

Finally, how did they come to the figure of $80 000? Just write your god damn book and see if it sells (it won’t).

This is what team sky uses

I love the 5% grade comparison, with the non LPP guy having super bowed legs and 30 pounds overweight, compared to the lesser overweight guy who clearly is just a stronger cyclist.

MARKETING GOLD!

LOL

Joe,

Allow me to apologize for my dismissive comment made earlier in this thread. You’ve demonstrated conviction and sincerity, and have answered the questions that all of us have had (asked by my teammates above).
I would like to talk with you more in depth about LPP, what your objectives are, and why/how you’d need McGill Cycling to assist you (providing the data is sound, as David mentioned). As such, you can expect an email from me soon.

Cheers!

Dhruv
President, McGill Cycling

[quote=DhruvB]
So disappointing, I was actually expecting some cool homemade invention[/quote]

You clearly need to buy the book.

Thanks Mike!

Dear team, give this new technology a real chance! There is everything to gain and very little to loose. Lift Propulsive Pedaling is truly based on proven engineering mechanics. MikeB is also right, a variant of the lifting process combined with pushing and sweeping is used successfully in the UK. This LPP variant is all about a complete Lifting action with all the mechanical and physiological details attached to it.

When I made the development leap, it took over two years of detailed analysis and my own empirical observations to fully understand its capability. Once I was comfortable with it, I started passing its knowledge to novice, intermediate and advanced cyclists, carefully getting their long term feedback and progress before deeming it ready for full exposure. The Kickstarter project, if funded, will allow me to disseminate it properly as well as put a strong amount of funding behind further development of its potential. As a fairly successful engineering innovator in other high technology fields, I have done and continue to do everything that is possible to understand the benefits of this LPP technology.

I racked my brain looking far and wide to see if there is anything else like it. The bottom line is that there is nothing like it as I know it. So the choice was to keep it to myself and the few people that I passed it to, or to expose it for everyone’s benefit. It was those who used it that motivated me to expose it. So the leap has been taken and let’s hope that there is the funding required to launch it properly. But if there is not, I still won’t give up on passing it forward, even though it may not be in as far and wide a plan as I had. Thanks for your understanding, feel free to ask questions about it and by all means take care, ride safe and God speed!….Joe

1 Like

Awesome Dennis and that is precisely the well polished technique that combines the push from the 9 o’clock position, the sweep and then the pull to the 3 o’clock position. That is definitively the way the Pro’s and the advanced cyclists pedal (Most of the rest of the average cyclists just push down on the pedals). No doubt about the fact that it is a highly effective technique when applied properly.

Now let’s take it one step further. Let’s totally eliminate the 9 to 6 o’clock push and instead just focus on pulling from 6 o’clock to the 12:30 o’clock position while purposefully letting the leg that is falling down aid the pulling purely by its inertial mass! (I have no choice but the getting into the mechanical dynamics of it!). By focusing purely on the lifting action, you are doing the following:

  1. You are simplifying the mechanical motion scheme of the pedaling stroke into one single action…thus simplifying the brain to leg coordination work.

  2. You eliminating any lack of efficiency related to the total lack of use of the trailing leg as it moves from the 3 o’clock to the 9 o’clock position. Which for a pro it can add a small measure of performance gain. For guys that just push down without sweeping (Lot’s of people out there!) …It is a huge gain!

  3. The combination of the inertial mass of the falling, non-force producing leg and the force producing lifting leg yields a very smooth, high rpm pedaling motion that at certain gear rations seems effortless. The feeling of the synergy of mechanical motion produced by those two mutually inclusive forces (the muscular power of the lifting leg and the effect of gravity on the falling leg) is very cool and hard to describe unless you try it.

One caveat: It is not as easy to do as it sounds at the beginning because your brain is so used to the other motion that it feels weird just to pull up. Also, you are using the back muscles more than you used them before.

I was teaching the technique to a US nationally ranked Mountain Biking Pro early this morning and it took him some time to get used to the motion, especially while climbing. But man! Once he got into it and he said “I think I got it!” it was bye, bye and see you later Joe! I had to let him take off and enjoy it because I was clearly slowing him down! My reward was the smile in his face when he got the hang of it! He will still have to work on it but the progress he made was showing. I hope this chat helped!…Joe

So you advise not pushing down on the pedals at all, and ONLY using the up stroke?

You got it! That is key Dennis.

In strict engineering terms I equate the technique to a two stroke engine where the pistons fire up alternately and their cams with the specially shaped cam shaft combined weight, aid the pistons in their up stroke by their descending inertia.

That is not the way I thought of it when I started trying to work out why the technique provided the nice flowing efficiency it did. But I had to find something in the engineering field that could explain it. The two stroke engine was the model that more closely matched the technique. Then it made a whole lot of sense to me why the behavior of the technique yielded the results it was producing….Cheers…Joe

Okay Joseph, now that I realize that you might actually have a novel idea and are not simply marketing “pedaling circles” which has been around for decades – instead you’re marketing peadling half circles at the back of the pedal stroke instead of the front – let me ask a few serious questions, if I may. If you can give me a good answer I’ll be impressed.

How do you back up the claim of 30% increase in efficiency? Where does this come from? That is mammoth!

You say this would be more in the vacinity of 10-15% increases in the pro ranks. Do you know what else boosts performance by 10%? Performance enhancing drugs…

Fair question Dennis,

The average of 30% increase in pedaling efficiency relates to a conservative estimation of the amount of inefficiency that is reduced by eliminating the energy/work spent in dragging up the non-pushing leg of the stroke for an average cyclist. This percentage does have a direct correlation to the level of experience and therefore sophistication of technique of the cyclists.

You know how the bell curve fits in that respect….The very new, or those that for a variety of reasons, have not been able to improve on one edge…the ones that are trying and markedly improve as a function of time but hit a plateau in the middle…and the advanced/pro level ones at the other edge.

Through the years I have had a large amount of individuals that fit within the first two levels of the curve in my indoor cycling classes. Some of them were new to cycling, took the indoor cycling classes and then started riding road or mountain bikes. Others were already riding on groups, some of them for many years. Others have just stayed doing the indoor cycling. The improvement that LPP has provided to cyclists of those two segments of the curve has been, to steal your words, mammoth!

This is more evident when they are so clean coming out of the gate from doing many indoor classes with the correct technique and they decide to go into outside cycling. For them this technique has been awesome. Some had injured knees, were about to quit cycling and were able to stay on it. Others were simply tired of being dropped, could not improve and were falling off the sport. For them indoor cycling was a good way to exercise without frustration. They ended up picking the sport back up because they started moving up on the rung of their groups rides. For many of those people, the improvement in pedaling technique was at least in that 30% range if not better. A 1.5 to 2 mile an hour increase in their average ride speed has been reported for those who who do outside cycling. No wattage data is available.

For the more advanced and efficient the pedaler, as well as for semi-pro or pro level cyclists, that percentage of improvement of pedaling efficiency should be in my estimation about 10 to 15%. Improvements of 1 mph average moving speed with the same ridding effort for those individuals has been reported. For me personally, improvements of 1 to 1.2 mph average speed in my rides have been achieved and my personal normalized wattage average has gone up about 20% from where it used to plateau. Now a pro has started using the LPP technique and I can’t wait to see what kind of average normalized power and moving speed results he gets across his training tracks once he is fully comfortable with it.

Being the geek/propeller head I am, I love being able to dive into experimenting and collecting that kind of data not just from advanced riders but also from the regular ones. That my friend, takes money and that is why I needed the Kickstarter project. I also wanted to create the material required to provide the average riders the information in a way that could be understood and internalized. I have worked directly for many sessions with people of all levels and my experience is that the less experienced need more help to understand and internalize the concept.

However, and there is always a catch, in Kickstarter, if you don’t get to your goal, you don’t get the money and all the people that pledged get their money back. So the jury is still out as to whether LPP stays constrained to the few or goes to the many. Either way I will continue moving forward and you guys at McGill can count on me being there for you! As usual Cheers Dennis!

I wonder how much data it would take to prove any beginner cyclist who actualy starts structured training improves their speed on their daily commute no matter what you tell them.

I think I speak for a lot of cyclist by asking how this technique affects my quad and calf definition?

It seems like eliminating the use of the quads and glutes is a big loss… Could you elaborate on exactly which new muscles are recruited to compose the “larger and more diverse set of muscles, thus distributing the workload across a greater muscle mass” ?

And I understand why you need the money now. If Kickstarter doesn’t work out for you maybe you’ll have more luck with your Kicktraq or crowdfunding campaigns


Philippe,

Here is my shot at your first comment……No mention of LPP or any other pedaling technique. Just the way a beginner starts. Develop a three month structured training program. Undergo three short time trials across a reasonable course to establish an average speed baseline. Provide the required training (intervals, tempo rides, etc) and once they have the proper stamina, continue their training across a 50 mile course with reasonably varied but balanced terrain. Log their average moving speeds at the end of each month across the 50 mile course. Rest them properly through tapering on the last month and have them run the course for a final average moving speed result/improvement. That should give you a good indication of their short term improvement level strictly as a function of structured training. If available, I would use power as training tool but that takes money.

Now do the same thing using LPP with another group of beginners and see how fast their progression goes against that of the first group. You should be very happy with the results.

LPP will not engage your quads to a measurable extent as it relates to muscle definition because you are not purposely applying force with them during the downstroke. They are providing inertial mass that will complement the lifting force provided during the upstroke. Your calfs (Gastrocnemius) are definitively engaged in the lifting action and get their workout.

Having said that, I strongly encourage anybody using Lift Propulsive Pedaling to do weight training for the quads at the gym so that they get a balanced workout and more important than that, they are fully developed and well defined to provide a solid inertial mass. I devote time to work my quads out at the gym consistently! I hope I properly addressed you comment and question Philippe…Cheers…Joe

Dennis,

First let me tell you that I do appreciate your suggestion about considering other crowd funding sources and I will take definitively explore them if necessary once this one runs its course. Let’s hope that with 53 days to go, wr can get positive movement forward and accomplish the funding goal. I can tell you one thing! All of these insightful questions and comments help immensely to explain the fundaments of the technology and demystify it. I’m purposely directing everybody that wants to know more about LPP to this forum. So McGill Cycling’s involvement in helping others achieve a better understanding of LPP is duly noted and greatly appreciated!

As for your question about the muscles, here is the my take. We directly engage 9 muscles during the lifting process that are spread out throughout a larger area of the leg. We also indirectly activate the abdominal group as part of the lifting process too. We directly engage only 7 muscles when we push down on the pedals and we do not engage the abs in the process. The lesser mass of the pushing muscles concentrates the massive effort within a smaller area and with that comes that searing and debilitating burn on top of the legs.

With LPP all of that burning sensation is eliminated and substituted by what I can term as area wide discomfort underneath the leg but definitively not debilitating pain. I have done this technique for years now with efforts including those required of competitive time trials and the results are the same. No debilitating pain, just discomfort which varies with the intensity of the effort. What tends to become my physical challenge is my aerobic capacity to withstand the stress of the effort. My heart rate is totally redlined well before my muscles are ready to cry for mercy and as you know that is very good! The reason being that you plenty of room for power improvement by virtue of improving your aerobic capacity.

The good news is also that even though the quads and glutes are not actively engaged, they do contribute weight for the critical inertial mass component of the technique. Hence, their role, is very important too. I have found that every muscle is important in LPP. Those that do not add power, add weight in support of the power producing muscles. Cheers and take care!…Joe

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