This one specific training session improved V2 max by 8.7%. Now, that might sound like too much until you dig into this and you realize that the other half of the test, the other group, they were doing the exact same training program and they only improved by 4.
6%. Same sessions, same errors, same effort, nearly double the results. The only difference, one number on their bike computer screen, cadence.
The craziest part of this whole thing is the coaches behind some of the best riders in the world. Writers like Tare Pagatcha, Chris Froom, and Aen Bernal, they've been prescribing this exact training session for years. While the internet and Reddit forums kept telling you this session is a waste of time.
Don't waste your time doing it. You're going to hurt your knees. Now, a brand new study has just proved all those coaches right.
Their maximum aerobic power in this study went up 8.1% versus 3% in the control group. Same program, same intensity, just that one difference.
I keep talking about cadence, big gear work, torque training, strengthies, whatever you want to call it. The science now says the coaches were right all along. And today I'm going to break down exactly what this study found, why it works, and the exact sessions you can steal and go out the door and do this week.
Okay, let's get into this. But before we get into the study itself, let's talk about why this is such a big deal. Because this argument has been raging on in cycling forums for decades.
On one side of the argument, you've got the old school coaches and the professional pelaton. These people are people who've been doing these sessions and prescribing big gear work since before power meters even existed. They'd send riders out to find a long climb, slap it into the 5311 and grind along at like 50 RPM for 10-minute intervals at a time.
The French called them force reps. In Australia, they call them strenies. In Ireland, I've only ever heard them been called like muscle tension intervals or torque work.
I remember Alan Davis, you know, the guy who came milance on radium pod, milance on Ramo podium, world's podium. He coached me for a while about 10 years back and he was swearing by these sessions. When you look at the type of coaches using them, these aren't average coaches.
They're some of the very best coaches in the world. John Wakefield, he's the director of coaching and sports science at Red Bull Bora Hansrove, the man who worked directly with Pagatcha and UAE in the early years. He's been prescribing torque training sessions to every single rider he coaches, amateurs and world tour professionals alike.
And he typically uses four and 10 minute interval protocols, a cadence as low as 40 and 60 RPM range. We'll get into that in a little bit because if you stick around until right towards the end of this video, I'm going to give you the exact sessions that John Wakefield mentioned to me and talked about when I had them on the podcast and you can go and do them this week. Now, on the other side of this debate, on this process, anti-cadence debate, you've got the scienceonly crowd.
And look, I respect the evidence-based approach. That's what we're all about here. But for years, the research on low cadence training was mixed at best.
Christopherson in 2014 actually found that freely chosen cadence beat low cadence for aerobic improvements. And Nimmer in 2012 found absolutely no difference. Luda in 2016, no difference.
witty in 2016. He called it basically a draw. So the internet had its ammunition.
No evidence it works. Stop grinding away and ruining your legs. High cadence is king.
Was essentially the evidencebacked message. We couldn't really argue with it. But there was a major hole in all of those studies that I mentioned.
The protocols, almost none of those studies actually tested the protocols that world tour teams and world tour riders were using. The cadences were wrong. The intensities were wrong.
The durations were wrong. I I'll leave these studies linked down below and you can flick through them yourself. It was testing it was I don't know like the protocols were so broken.
This would be like testing a weightlifter and we're trying to test the efficacy of building muscle by getting people to lift 2 kg dumbbells seeing they didn't get a reaction and then concluding that weight training doesn't work. The coaches knew these protocols were wrong. So they kept prescribing these sessions anyway and they waited for the science to catch up.
And the science finally has caught up. Now, here's where it gets really, really interesting. In November 2024, researchers Raphael Habis and Paulina Habis from the Rocklaw University of Health and Sports Sciences in Poland published a study in POS1.
This is one of the most respected open access scientific journals in the world. And the conclusion was clear. Low cadence interval training produces greater improvements in aerobic capacity than the same training performed at a freely chosen cadence.
I'm going to link this study again down below if you want to dig into it. But here's what they did. They took 24 well-trained female cyclists aged 17 to 20.
These were experienced riders, all with at least three years of competitive cycling, training a minimum of 10 hours per week, raced at least 15 times in the last year. So we're not talking about beginners here. They're serious competitive athletes.
They split them into two groups and they put both groups on identical 8-week polarized training plans. Same structure, same volume, same intensity. The only difference cadence.
Group one used freely chosen self-determined cadence. They did their sprinter intervals and their highintensity intervals at whatever cadence felt natural, which was about 80 RPM, just like most of us would ride when we get to self- select. The second group, the test group, this was the low cadence group.
They did the exact same intervals, just the intervals now, mind you, at 50 to 70 RPM. The endurance ride was self- selected cadence. Both groups followed four day training blocks.
Day one was a sprint day with 8 to 12 reps, 30 second allout. Day two was four highintensity intervals of four to six reps of four minutes at 90 to 100% of max aerobic power. Day three was a long steady endurance ride.
And day four was an active recovery ride. And then they started that cycle all over again. Pretty sticky training cycle.
The number of reps increased progressively over the eight weeks. Eight weeks, same sessions, same effort, just cadence. That's the only difference here.
And honestly, the results, I had to read them twice when I dug into the results section. Let me give you the highlight number straight from the paper here. V2 max, arguably the single most important marker in aerobic fitness.
It improved 8.7% in the low cadence group versus 4.6% in the freely chosen cadence group.
The researchers confirmed this difference was statistically significant. They use something called a p value. And the p value in this case was 0.
02. That is statistically significant. That's a real difference between two training approaches.
Maximum aerobic power. That's like the absolute ceiling your aerobic engine can produce. This improved by 8.
1% in the low cadence group versus 3% in the freely chosen cadence group. Again, the difference between these groups was deemed to be statistically significant with a p value of 0.03.
And the one final detail which jumped out at me was the freely chosen cadence group gained an average of.7 kg of body mass over the 8 weeks while the low cadence group their body mass stayed the exact same. So the obvious question is why?
What is it about grinding a big gear at low RPM that produces these kind of results? Well, there's three mechanisms at play here, and understanding them is going to change how you think about your training and maybe even convince you to throw in a few strengthies yourself. Number one, it's greater muscle fiber recruitment.
When you pedal at a high cadence, your slow twitch type one muscle fibers handle most of the work. They're efficient, they're fatigued resistant, and they're perfectly happy spinning along at 90 RPM. But when you drop the cadence and you increase the torque demand, your body has no choice but to recruit the bigger, more powerful type 2 fast twitch muscle fibers to help share the load.
And here's where this gets interesting. When you repeatedly force force those fast twitch muscle fibers to work at aerobic intensities over sustained training block intensity, research suggests some of them begin to shift their characteristics. They start behaving more like slow twitch muscle fibers, developing more mitochondria, better blood supply, improved oxidative capacity, while still retaining some of their force generating ability.
You're essentially expanding the size of your aerobic engine by putting previously underused muscle fibers to work. Secondly, neuromuscular pathway development. I know that sounds like a mouthful, but stay with me.
And this is exactly what Wakefield talked about when he had when I had him on the podcast. He explains why he prescribes low torque work to his world tour riders. It's because when you pedal at low cadence under high force, you're training the nervous system to activate more muscle fibers simultaneously and to coordinate that activation more efficiently.
You're improving that communication between your brain and your lungs. And here's why that really matters. Because in a race, you're invariably, you know, you're four hours deep into the race and your cadence is invariably going to drop because of fatigue.
And it will, trust me, it will drop. And the riders who've trained their neuromuscular pathways through torque work can produce meaningful power at that reduced cadence. Excuse the brief interruption, folks.
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Cancel anytime. Check the terms in your policy docks. Now, the third mechanism.
This is one that nobody talks about, but it might be the most important of all three that I've talked about. The third one goes to improve gross efficiency. A gross efficiency is the ratio of mechanical work output to mechanical energy expenditure.
Yeah, I know. What the hell does that mean? In plain English, it's how much power you can get out of each calorie you burn.
Elite cyclists are already extraordinarily efficient. But even a small improvement here translates into significant gains on the road. But if you're not as efficient as them, you're going to get even bigger gains.
By training under high torque conditions, you're teaching your muscles to produce force more economically. You're refining the pedal stroke under load. You're training the right muscles to fire at the right time in the right sequence.
And when you then go back to riding at your normal cadence of 85 to 90, you carry that improved efficiency with you. The same effort produces more power. The same power costs less energy.
You've upgraded your engine without adding any extra training volume. Okay? Right?
So, you're convinced. The science says it works. The coaches say it works.
They're prescribing it to the pros. The pros are doing it. Now, the question you probably cared about at this point is, how do you actually add this into your training?
Let me break this down and make it really easy for you. And I'm going to talk to you about I'll link the John Wakefield episode below because it's actually really good. When we talked on the podcast, he talked about some of his common prescriptions, and it's a likely guess that some of the Bora Red Bull guys are going through similar sessions to this at the moment.
There's two type formats this breaks down for down with for me. So the first type format session one that's the 4minute torque interval. So find a climb ideally not too steep 4 to 7% gradient and you're going to ride it for 4 minutes at 40 to 60 RPM.
RP here should be around 7 out of 10. Not an eyeballs out effort. Controlled, deliberate.
The focus on sustained torque production, not destroying yourself. You take four minutes of easy spinning recovery between the intervals. Start with around three reps if you've never done this type of work before.
Build it to five over the course of several weeks. Now, the second session, which I think is worth throwing into your arsenal as well. It's a 10-minute torque interval.
Same concept, same gradient, but it's a 10-minute effort, same low cadence, equal rest between intervals. Start with two reps and try and build up to four reps. Now, here's where I need to give you a serious warning because this is where most people mess up.
Torque training. It puts enormous stress on your knees, your tendons, your connective tissue, and if you jump into like straight off the bat doing 40 RPM efforts without building up gradually, you will get injured. Insider not done yet coaching community.
I'm seeing writers coming in the door and they've executed this type of stuff badly in the past and we're sometimes left to pick up the pieces, which is fine, but it's a vivid like graphical display of how it can go badly and it has real consequences. Like I'm cautioning to you that you can and you will get injured if you do too much of this too soon. So I want to give you a sensible 8week progression for this.
For the first couple of weeks, start with the cadence relatively high. So, we're talking 65 RPM. That's it.
You're just getting your joints and your connective tissue accustomed to increased force demands. Do three sets of the 4minute protocol with the 4minute recovery and keep the effort effort moderate on these. Weeks three and four, you can start to drop the cadence down to around 55 to 60 RPM.
Increase it to four sets. Allow the effort to come up to around seven out of 10. Weeks five and six, push down towards that 50 RPM if your joints feel good.
introduce the 10-minute interval format. Weeks seven and eight, you can move over to the full protocol. Do this twice per week during the base phase, build phase.
Don't aim to do this three times per week and definitely don't do this every day. And make sure you're doing at least some gym based strength work to complement this because the stronger your legs are off the bike, the more you'll be able to tolerate the forces involved in these torque sessions. Ideally, I would say do these sessions outdoors on a real climb.
I find outdoor sessions much more effective because the gradient it provides a natural consistent resistance indoors on a trainer especially in urg mode. Riders often report that they struggle to maintain that rhythm at very low cadences. The erg just seems to get on top you at low cadence and the feel is fundamentally different.
Let me know if you're having that experience. Let me know in the comments about that. I find that urgs on top of me when the cadence starts dropping and it becomes this almost race to the bottom.
Before we wrap this up, I want to put this study into context because there is an important lesson here that goes beyond the one training session or this specific thing that I'm talking about. You know, for years, the cycling internet's been obsessed with the idea that science trumps coaching experience. And many cases, that's absolutely right.
We should demand evidence. But what this study shows is something the best coaches have always understood. Sometimes the science takes a while to catch up what works in practice.
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The Heb study used protocols that were actually close to what the coaches prescribed. Sprint intervals and highintensity intervals performed at the 50 to 70 RPM range. Previous studies often used cadences that were too extreme, intensities that didn't match, or durations that were too short.
They weren't testing what the coaches were actually doing in the real world. When the science finally tested something something resembling the actual torque training protocols, the results were clear. But I do want to be straight with you about the limitations on this study because this wouldn't be a Roadman Cyclone podcast if I cherrypicked the data on this.
This study used young girls like it used well-trained female cyclists. 17 to 20 year olds. We're not all going to respond to training like that.
The sample size was 24 people. That's 12 in each group. The intervention was only 8 weeks long and critically it was conducted after a 3-month period of exclusively low inensity training which means that likely any added highintensity work was going to produce gains in both groups.
These are real limitations. So we do need more research with different populations, larger sample sizes, and longer time frames before anyone should call this settled science. But here's what tips the scale.
This isn't one study sitting on its own. This is one study that aligns with what multiple world tour coaches are already doing. People with grand tour winners in their stable, world champions in their stable have been observing their athletes for years and seeing the benefits.
So, if you take one thing from this video, let it be this. Low cadence torque work. It's not a magic bullet.
It's not going to replace your endurance rides, the consistency, the hard work, your V2 max intervals, or your time in the gym. But it is a seriously underutilized tool for amateur riders. The best riders in the world are using it.
The best coaches in the world have been using it for decades. Now we have peer-reviewed data from a well-designed study to support it. I would suggest you add these torque sessions to your toolkit.
Be smart about the progression. Protect your knees and just watch yourself getting faster. If you want to go deeper on any of this training methodology or hear from the coaches and experts who are actually shaping how the pros ride, you can apply to join us inside our notdone yet coaching community.
You can do that at romancecycling.com2026 roadmycling.com/2026.
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