It's the most neglected and least understood aspect of a cyclist's capabilities, but Neuromuscular power is one of the most critical to success.
Most cyclists think Neuromuscular Power is only relevant for sprinters. But in this episode, Neal and Mac break down the myths around NM, examine why neuromuscular coordination drives your efficiency at all effort levels, and explain how sprint training, cadence builds and other drills will make you both a faster and more complete athlete.
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Mac Cassin 0:00
Hello, and welcome back to another episode of The Knowledge Podcast by Wahoo. I'm Mac Cassin.
Neal Henderson 0:04
And I'm Neal Henderson. And this is part one of our four-part dimensional power metrics discussion. Today, we're going to be starting at the top with neuromuscular power.
Mac Cassin 0:16
So near what is neuromuscular power?
Neal Henderson 0:17
Effectively, it is instantaneous peak power production. It's a combination of your cadence and torque. And in fact, it's a product of
Mac Cassin 0:26
those two, because math, because math multiply
Neal Henderson 0:30
one time the other to get the product of power, there is a tendency to get a single data point, sometimes in recordings, that is what we might say unreliable or false or incorrect, bad data. Yeah, like little spikes. And so we actually use the highest five-second peak power output to define what our neuromuscular 40 P value is.
Mac Cassin 0:55
So a secondary component of neuromuscular power is actually muscular activation and coordination. And now when we're talking about power, right, it's that torque and pedaling speed, but you're never going to hit that peak power at the highest cadence highest velocity, or the highest torque, which would be lower. kittens.
Neal Henderson 1:13
Exactly. It's somewhere in between those two points where the peak actual power value occurs. So why is neuromuscular power important? And really, what does it tell you?
Mac Cassin 1:23
It can tell you just you know how much you can sprint, which is great, but that's not really relevant to lots of people for lots of different events. But what it really can get down to is a coordination aspect, like how efficient are you pedaling? That inefficiency is more highlighted at those higher powers, but it exists across all intensity levels. So if you can't sprint efficiently, if your muscles aren't working efficiently during a sprint, it means they're not working as efficiently as they could at lower intensities,
Neal Henderson 1:49
definitely. And so that efficiency is kind of related to your effectiveness of firing the right muscles at the right time. So that's really kind of one of the ways of thinking about coordination. And so it's about your, your agonist muscles, the ones that are producing the force in the direction that you want, and then not having the opposite muscles, what we call the antagonist, working against you, that would be reducing the net power that you'd be applying into the pedals in that way. So
Mac Cassin 2:18
So like, if you are your quads, contracting on the way down, as soon as it starts coming back up, you don't want your quads to be contracting anymore. But if you're not writing efficiently it might be and then the power of your other leg is producing is now actually fighting against the leg on the way up. And that's, it's no fun to be inefficient.
Neal Henderson 2:35
Absolutely. And when we think about this neuromuscular power isn't exclusively sprinting ability, make sure you can refer back to Episode 48, where we talk about sprinting, this peak instantaneous power very rarely actually wins a race. A five-second power is not a super great predictor but it is a great predictor of your neuromuscular power production. So how do you go about testing?
Mac Cassin 3:00
Yeah, so like you said, it's that fresh power that not when you're fatigued, so that episode goes into, you know, at the end of a race, you're not going to be you know, super fresh and cranking out these Max numbers. So for us will we complete a seven-second Sprint, and we take a five-second peak from that, and we're looking at a seven-second sprint one to give you a little wiggle room on either side. But it's not, it shouldn't be longer than that a lot of people will maybe ramp up to that sprint and go, and you might actually get a higher five-second value. But it's not representative of that actual instantaneous ability to produce power.
Neal Henderson 3:39
Yep, kind of think of this like a standing vertical jump, as opposed to like running or a few steps into a leap, you might be able to jump a little higher if you run into it. But that wouldn't be the exact same thing is that instantaneous peak power so your five-second power probably would be fairly correlated to a vertical jump, like neck,
Mac Cassin 4:01
it probably wouldn't. That efficiency of Max is instantaneous, getting everything out all at once.
Neal Henderson 4:06
Exactly. So one of the other things that we can do is look at the velocity side of neuromuscular power and neuromuscular coordination by doing 32nd, Kayden spelled, that is really where we start with very low resistance and progressively increase the cadence, ideally, while keeping the resistance pretty low. So if you were there, you know, outside, you'd want to be shifting into progressively easier gears or be riding on a second or be riding downhill a bit like downhill not super steep, but a slight downhill, or if you're on a train and you could do the same thing. And if you're in level mode, again, just keep shifting into a little bit easier gear as you go along over those 30 seconds to reach your absolute peak speed peak cadence for a few seconds at the end of those builds.
Mac Cassin 4:57
And you can think of that and just your RPM for A lot of people 110 RPM sounds pretty high. When you're doing cadence build, some people peak out at 120, which isn't great,
Neal Henderson 5:06
not super high back, I'll say that, you know, if somebody says they're the peak cadence that they can hit is 120, it kind of makes me sad, we know that as humans more as possible, we always want people to be able to get better coordinated, and be able to enhance that range. And so with training, you know, most folks can get well into the 150 RPM range. And many, even with some coordinated practice, over time, can exceed over 200 RPM and get in that 200 clubs, you know, that's the good stuff. The opposite side, then on the neuromuscular recruitment is really about our force or torque, one of the best ways to do that is a standing start effort. And that's where you're going to have that absolute highest peak torque that you can put out on your bike that happens at the slowest in the very beginning of a standing start effort to really actually quantify or measure that peak torque, you have to do a little bit of extra math and analysis to basically back-calculate what that peak torque value is. So it's not something that we necessarily monitor on a frequent basis, though, in certain realms of sports science for track cyclists. And for folks where that's really important BMX riders, it is something that would be actually assessed in a little bit more consistent and frequent basis.
Mac Cassin 6:25
Yeah, for track for a lot of our track camps, we measure this by basically just the first 50-meter standing start. So not even doing a full lap. It's just basically to turn one. And I was always on the lower end of the results sheet for that one, because my peak torque is not as good as some other people's. Yeah, not your happy place, necessarily. That being said, I wasn't bad at it. Yeah, just compared to some other some others that we're
Neal Henderson 6:49
pretty good at it. Well, one thing to keep in mind when we think about the sprinting efforts is cadence is an important part of this. And a mistake that most riders and I'm talking even pretty experienced writers make is that they shift into too big of gear when they start sprint efforts. So they do hit a relatively high torque, it's not going to be anywhere near a standing start kind of torque level. But they feel that resistance. And so they think it's a lot higher power than it actually is. Because in reality, most humans are going to be hitting peak power anywhere from 110 to 130. RPM. And so when you start a sprint effort, you want to be at least in the ad, realistically closer to 90 even 95 RPM when you commence or begin a sprint effort for the short 568 Second type of efforts that neuromuscular power is all about.
Mac Cassin 7:44
Yeah, for me, when I'm riding out on the road, if I'm doing one of these, I always try to start it basically at the bottom of a hill. So once the gradient starts going up, because then because I'm going uphill, my speed doesn't increase too much, I can be in a relatively steady gear. So I'm not all of a sudden way over spinning it. And I'm not super bogged down just starting at 70. And trying to wind that thing up. And that yeah, dialing in that cadence can be really tricky. And it's why when we test that in the 40 p test, we give you two sprints, and you get two options. Basically, the first one is sort of a trial, 90% of people have a higher power in the second sprint, and they're short enough that they don't negatively impact the rest of the test. But it often gets you to know, another 100 watts on that value, which is important when you're trying to look at your true capabilities across these different domains that we're getting into over these episodes.
Neal Henderson 8:36
Exactly. So another thing that we look at and being able to quantify our neuromuscular power is just looking at that raw power is an absolute value of x watts, or x
Mac Cassin 8:47
x x x watts, 4x 4x watts. 1000.
Neal Henderson 8:51
Pretty good. Yeah, you're in the 1000 Club. That's good. The kilo club. Recall that in terms of absolute power, you can also look at it in watts per kilogram, which is watts relative to body weight. Again, in most sprints, that's not super critical. But if it is a little bit of an uphill sprint, then there's a little bit more relative importance there.
Mac Cassin 9:14
Or if it's from starting at low speeds, and it's about acceleration, a lower weight can be a higher power to weight there, and a weight
Neal Henderson 9:21
can be beneficial in that acceleration. Yeah, for sure.
Mac Cassin 9:25
That being said, track cyclists, who are kilo specialists and sprinters those dudes are not small. They just put out crazy power beasty power
Neal Henderson 9:32
Yeah, peak power there can easily double what a normal human can do with two legs they can do with one leg effectively.
Mac Cassin 9:38
There have been some of those sprinters who've done 40 pee tests and I think the highest recorded one we have is 22,400 and like 30 Watts that's which is
Neal Henderson 9:48
category Yeah. Yep. I remember way back with Taylor as an 18-year-old. He did some sprint efforts in the computer that he had at the time didn't register and the 2000 Watt range, and the highest value that it would show would be 1999, which alone is pretty darn good. But upon download, it was over 2000 watts. It's like holy moly, that's pretty, pretty, pretty high.
Mac Cassin 10:14
Yeah, that's up there. And okay, those raw values, but then we need to put it into the context of who you are your age, your gender, we actually just had a nice big dataset that we presented at ACSM. And we were able to see that for given age brackets, neuromuscular power goes down, it just decreases for raw value and watts per kilo, and it decreases with age. And for age-matched men and women, women have a lower value. So when you're looking at so when you're hearing Taylor Finney broke 2000 Watts need remember, he was pretty gifted, Junior? Yep,
Neal Henderson 10:51
absolutely high, high capacity in that realm had some success in events that require that kind of power. And so
Mac Cassin 10:59
yeah, so if you're 65, and doing 1200 Watts, that's crazy impressive. If you're 18, doing 1200. That's, you know,
Neal Henderson 11:07
good, it's good. And again, it is in some cases relative to size, and again, relative to your, sex. So we see some of those differences that that study, you can look at, basically, we break into 10-year age groups from the 20s through 60s. We'll talk about that another time. So next thing, let's talk about how we train to improve neuromuscular power. And there is a say in that some people say that sprinters are born in a way that there is a pretty strong determination of the absolute peak neuromuscular power that you can develop, which has a relationship to your genetics, especially the amount of fast twitch muscle fiber that
Mac Cassin 11:49
you have. Taylor Finney is another great example of his parents, you choose your parents wisely. Yeah, very successful cyclists. Papa
Neal Henderson 11:57
won a couple of stages in the Tour de France, Mama won the Olympic gold and the road race and individual pursuit World Champs and that sort of thing. So you know, good, good starting stock there from the genetic side of things and was able to hone it just a little bit better with proper training then. So regardless of where your starting point is, you can always improve neuromuscular power with proper training and workouts. So there are three real elements that we think about. Number one is high cadence work to improve that coordination. And firing the right muscles at the right time, standing starts to improve your force application into the pedals. And then pure sprint efforts are also necessary for you to be able to improve neuromuscular power, you can do any one of those three and yield some benefit, but ultimately addressing all three of those by speed, force, and then power, you're going to have the best possible development over time.
Mac Cassin 12:52
Yeah, so when you're doing a session for that, you generally want to focus on one, right, it's either all focused on high torque, it's focused on proper peak power, or it's focused on that velocity. And the velocity training, basically, Cadence training is really great, because it doesn't really add that much additional fatigue. So it means you can do it more frequently than you could say, a max torque session. And it's really easy to incorporate those into a training program. If you've ever done one of our plans, you've done cadence builds, because it's such an effective way to train that coordination component without putting you deep the in The Hurt Locker and impacting the next day's ride.
Neal Henderson 13:28
Exactly. Another thing is that we can go to our standing starts then for that maximal torque training, and so even though the peak power might not be really high, it's really about that high force. And that's
Mac Cassin 13:39
one that can be tricky to do on a trainer just depending on the trainer you have. Because ideally, you're starting to get that high torque, you need low flywheel speed, and then getting it back up. If you ever do it on a trainer, I'd recommend being in level mode and not ERG mode, because that can get really funky when it does that. I mean, granted, I'm biased because I've done a lot of track stuff, but doing them out on the road is the best, the best, a nice flat road, you don't have to come to a full stop. If you want to practice your track stance and stationary, you can but just a really slow roll. And when we say high torque the standing starts you're in a big gear. So it'd be like 5314 or, or 13. And that's a big year to get turned over. Definitely.
Neal Henderson 14:19
So just remember, we do have a couple of specific episodes on high cadence and low cadence training. If you go back to episodes six and 38, you can catch up a little bit on both aspects of that high cadence and low cadence training that's going to be beneficial here for your neuromuscular power development.
Mac Cassin 14:36
And so kinda want to emphasize that you don't need to be constantly chasing a peak power or higher neuromuscular power like people will do with more sustained values. They always want higher and higher. You can do that with neuromuscular power, but it doesn't have to be that sort of mindset. But it also doesn't mean you can just ignore it. You can view these sessions as more maintenance keeping up the ability you have to do the work to do I'll a bit and then maintain it. Because if you don't use it, you lose it. And if being more muscularly efficient helps you with your sustained power, that's a pretty good thing.
Neal Henderson 15:10
That's a great, great absolute benefit. So generally speaking, when we're working on developing then that peak power that neuromuscular peak power, we want to use short efforts, I typically say like, five to 10 seconds is probably the sweet spot six to eight seconds, a lot of times in training is really ideal, the longest kind of neuromuscular work we might do is closer to 15 seconds, and that might be the first five to eight seconds out of the saddle, initially, and then the last portion of that seated with a little bit higher cadence. If you're starting to go longer than that 15-second mark, you're pretty well moving into this next of the 40 P values, the anaerobic capacity, which we're going to be talking about in part two coming up.
Mac Cassin 15:57
So with that being said, Neil, why don't you break down what are your favorite neuromuscular sessions?
Neal Henderson 16:03
For me, my top three are going to be cadence build standing starts, and violator. For those
Mac Cassin 16:09
who doesn't know, that's what Neil's original workouts are, and it's 64 sprints. And it's, it's one of the few workouts where I just stopped on the side of the road and lay it on someone's yard for like, 10 minutes until another person he was coaching at the time, Yannick Ekman rolled up us doing the same workout. So then we did the last one, side by side,
Unknown Speaker 16:25
more fun. Much more fun. Yeah, that was.
Mac Cassin 16:29
So it's the names, the names apt, it's a great session, but just be ready for,
Neal Henderson 16:34
yeah, we don't do that frequently. That's like, a couple of times a year, and then most, the session, so if you
Mac Cassin 16:41
want to do it more frequently, then you know,
Neal Henderson 16:43
don't, won't that'd be my recommendation.
Mac Cassin 16:48
Now, I'm going to be biased because you train me for so long, but I'll say my favorite ones are also cadence builds and standing starts. The other one that I like thrown in there is just when you're doing a base ride, doing a 10-second sprint, like every 10 minutes, that can turn a nice five-hour day into a very hard
Unknown Speaker 17:05
day, a very effective five-hour day, but that gets
Mac Cassin 17:08
really good into the muscular endurance component and make make you more resilient to repeated hard efforts like you would see in road racing, which was what I was training for at the time.
Neal Henderson 17:18
Exactly. It's not just that one time being able to do it, but being able to repeat it. So initiating and recruiting is good, but being able to consistently then repeat that high power output is even better.
Mac Cassin 17:30
And we've talked in other episodes about weight training, but that's going to be a big component for that peak power, that peak torque, there are some things that just you can't do on a bike you need to do in the gym. And when you are doing gym work, neuromuscular sessions are great to pair with that because all the same stuff is going on.
Unknown Speaker 17:47
Kinda like chocolate and peanut butter. Right?
Mac Cassin 17:50
I hadn't thought about that before. But yes, that's
Neal Henderson 17:52
exactly yeah, you know, they're good apart, but better together. Awesome. Well, that is it for another episode. We hope you're able to take away some useful information here to improve your neuromuscular power and be a better endurance athlete. Thanks for listening to the knowledge podcast by Wahoo
Transcribed by https://otter.ai