Cycling cadence to match heart rate?

July 31, 2007

Crazy cycling thought of the day:

There’s been a lot of research on how your cadence affects your heart rate—for a given power output, there is usually a cadence that creates the lowest heart rate for an individual.

But could there be a correlation the other way? What if your blood flow worked best when pumping at a similar frequency to your pedaling? It seems to make sense that oxygen would best be replenished at the same frequency it was depleted.

Given a bicycle with infinitely-variable transmission, might you find good results by matching your cadence to something like 1/2 your heart rate, e.g. 90 rpm for a heart rate of 180?

  1. Riding in War-Time - Mar 03, 2005
  2. Highway 9 Copout - Mar 14, 2004

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