How can I become more efficient with my pedal stroke?

The off-season is a good time of the year to work on improving cycling efficiency. The more efficient a cyclist is, the less energy he/she needs to do a given amount of work.
A few things that you can do to continue to help with your pedal stroke are as follows:

1. Focus on using your hamstrings. A lot of the inefficiency in the pedal stroke occurs because we concentrate too much on pushing down rather than engaging our hamstrings. I find that if you just focus on using your hamstrings, the quads and glutes will naturally engage.

2. Try one legged pedaling drills with regular cranks on the rollers. These are really effective because if your stroke is sloppy, you’ll crash. The guys I know with the best pedaling stroke can actually ride rollers with one leg with no hands. When you get to this point, your stroke is close to perfect.

3. Ride your mountain bike up sandy roads. Keeping traction on sandy roads is really difficult if you don’t have a really smooth pedal stroke. So this is a great off-season and sometimes mid-season tool we use to give feedback to the guys about their pedal stroke.

4. Make sure you’ve got a proper bike fit and cleat placement. Sometimes a bad or unequal stroke is simply due to bad cleat placement or a bad position on the bike. This is where going to see an experienced professional can really help.

5. Spin..spin…spin…On your recovery days or even on your harder days, focus on keeping a higher cadence. You can also do high cadence drills once or twice a week to help. In some cases, I’ll have guys do 2 to 3 days in a row with one day off, for 1 to 2 weeks, of high cadence riding where they are forced to try and keep their cadence above 100 rpm the entire time.