GONE WITH THE WIND

Will getting more aero definitely make me faster?

W“Often people go after aerodynamics when they haven’t hoovered up all the low-hanging fruit first...”

hy do we obsess about aerodynamics in cycling? The truth is it’s not the most important thing to most people, but if all other things are equal and you want to be more aero, why go for aerodynamics over off-the-bike strength training to increase power? We investigated this at British Cycling because it’s important to focus your energies where they will make the biggest difference.

Any good practitioner can now drop a rider in a frontal area session and make them three to four per cent more aero. Once you’re a cyclist at a good level, aero benefits are one-to-one with power, so a one per cent decrease in TFA (total frontal area) is equivalent to a one per cent increase in power. If me and you went into a gym and got a three-to-four per cent increase in power over eight weeks we’d be a) very lucky and b) over the moon, and that’s with all the injury risk that involves and all the time – which is time you’re not training on the bike. But we can do that in two hours with a frontal area session.

That’s why it’s so important. In the environment I was working in that made sense, but in the real world you often find that people are going after the aerodynamics when they haven’t hoovered up all the low-hanging fruit that should come first: being flexible and strong enough to achieve a good aero position in the first place. It’s easy to say someone should be narrower in the shoulders, but the rider needs to be able to sustain that. It’s programmed into us to go lower and lower, but eventually people’s heads will pop up and they are much less aero.

I hear a lot about adopting the shrug position (dipping the head down between the shoulders), but I don’t really believe in that because, one: it’s not actually aero for everyone, and two: when you’re under duress, when you’re hammering it out, are you going to be thinking about ‘shrug’? Or are you going to start to move in and out of shrug, probably causing more drag than not being in shrug! If a shrug position is more aero for you and you find it relatively easy to maintain, then fine. But if it’s very hard to hold then there is a real risk of wasting energy and focusing on something that isn’t making you faster, probably at the detriment of concentrating on pedalling hard.

At that point, look instead at changing the environment, rather than the rider activity and making the cockpit as good as we can to allow you to be as aero as you can without the need to focus on holding unsustainable alien positions. Let’s get you into the most powerful pedalling position that we can without an increase in TFA. If we’ve got more power, we’re going to be faster; then we’ll shrink that frontal area from there to make it even faster. If you do it the other way round and produce a low frontal area but a position from which you can’t pedal as powerfully, then I’m sure that will result in you being slower. I see this particularly with riders who continually drop their front end without consideration of the consequences to their hips, which become more closed. The side effect of that being a loss of power at ‘top dead centre’ (the very top of the pedal stroke) as the glutes wait to engage from the deeply flexed position. The problem is easily remedied by dropping crank length to open the hips, while maintaining that low front-end.

It’s all about understanding which things you should go after and the process of getting to that understanding – what are the limitations of your package? What advice is suitable for you?

The best riders I’ve worked with are the ones that can take on the information that is important and disregard the stuff that isn’t, and if you want to be better that’s what you’re going to need to learn to do. In a world of social media and the internet we can all find out lots of stuff, but the worst thing you can do is go on Google and do everything that everybody suggests because, just like baking a cake, if you put everything in, it doesn’t make it taste very good.