The Science of Cycling
From CRCycling
I started writing these articles in the early winter of 2008. I had the urge to tweak my position on the bike. Usually when I do that, I go by feel. If I feel cramped on the bike, I'll move the saddle back or up, and if I feel I can generate more power in a compact position, I'll move the saddle down or forward. This year, I felt compelled to take a more scientific approach. I read several articles. Most of them provide a cookbook style recommendation, that is, a set of directions with no explanation of the principles involved. It's my nature to ignore this type of advice even if it's correct. So I decided to start building a simple mathematical model of a leg driving a bicycle crank so I could get at the principles involved.
The great thing about modeling a real world system, like a leg-crank-pedal system, is that the problems of the model crop up right away and those point out gaps in the modeler's knowledge. Where do the muscles attach to the skeleton? How does a muscle produce force? Other people have already answered these questions and published their results. So, while the effort to create the model is redundant, the transfer of knowledge from the article to the brain is much faster than it would be otherwise, like in a classroom setting.
This series of articles is basically an organized presentation of various steps of the model building process. The first article gets at the question, how does a bike work? I'll be adding articles at random times throughout the winter.
Be warned, I'm not a practicing physicist anymore, so lots of this stuff is probably wrong.
- List of Exercise Related Articles
- Interesting exercise related articles to waste some time
- Gears Force and Power
- The Basics
