The Obree Way by Graeme Obree

Author:Graeme Obree
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781472947123
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Published: 2017-03-16T04:00:00+00:00

“We must learn to use the most neglected muscle in cycling – the vastus medialis – the muscle you kick a football with.”

The basic principles of using the full pedal cycle are relatively simple. The difficult part is learning to use it on the bike all the time without having to think deeply about every single pedal stroke. At the start you will have to do just that to replace your old pedalling habit with a better one. When I set out on this quest in the late 1980s, it took at least a month before it became my new way. This will take perseverance, and on top of the breathing technique you can understand better why I said near the start of this book that there is enough to think about on the bike without the need for computers and heart-rate monitors. I can also tell you that if you follow my stretching routine on a daily basis, this technique will just seem to get easier and easier. If you master this, then you will never go back to the old way.

The first point of the stroke is when the cranks are straight up and down (top dead centre). This is the most neglected part of the stroke and conventional thinking is that you have to wait until your legs have bowled past to 30° or 40° before applying a proper standing force on the pedal. This is where we must learn to use the most neglected muscle in cycling, the vastus medialis – the muscle you kick a football with. You have to start at the top by kicking that football. On the upstroke leading up to this point you should have allowed your ankle to drop so that your foot is at an acute angle to your shin (hence the need for free movement).

This is not an explosive kick, but because your ankle is dropped, you roll on to where you would normally put the force down and use the available movement in the ankle to employ the calf muscles as well as the muscles in the thigh to drive the pedal stroke downwards. This enables you to use the entire half circle of the downward stroke. At the start you will need to do this in slow motion to get to grips with it, but if you think L—O—N—G (as in the stroke) it will keep you focused on distance of stroke rather than force during the long downstroke. Don’t try to put one burst of strength at the middle point. This is about using just a little less force than a stomping style but delivering it evenly over a long stroke. Because the peak force is less than before there is the advantage that fatigue is also less, even though more power is being outputted.

There are two distinct halves to this stroke, and the second is the upstroke where you pull the ankle back to a dipped position ready for the next kick forward. Perfect timing can make such a difference to the fluidity and power of this stroke action.

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