Should You Stand to Pedal on Climbs?

On a long climb, you're better off staying in the saddle to conserve energy and keep a steady pace. When you stand out of the saddle, it's more difficult aerobically and your muscles will fatigue quicker. While it can increase your power and speed for a short period of time, it's not sustainable for really long efforts.

However, there are times when you standing out of the saddle will give you some benefit. If there are sections of steep road or the competition in a race is close near the finish, a surge of power and speed might be necessary. The climb might also be really long, and standing on the pedals every once in a while can provide mental and physical relief from the change in position.

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Regardless of why you do it, you should take advantage of your time out of the saddle. If done correctly and for short amounts of time, you can make the added work on your legs less difficult and climb more efficiently when you do decide to stand.

Vertical Motion of the Pedal

To understand how, we need to first think about the vertical motion of your pedal through the crank cycle. Let's assume we have a 170 mm (or 17 cm) crank arm. Between the time when your crank arm is pointing straight up in the air to the time that it's pointing straight down (a.k.a., top dead center and bottom dead center, respectively), there is a 34 cm vertical displacement.

When you're sitting on the saddle, your leg does all the work to make your foot push the pedal through those 17 centimeters. But wouldn't it be great if the crank would do you the favor of moving up a little?

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That's exactly what you can make it do when you stand on the pedals. Just be sure to emphasize what already comes naturally to you—and rock the bike side to side.

How Rocking the Bike Helps You

The diagram below exhibits a rudimentary head-on view of our bike.

 

On the left, we see a steadily vertical bike. On the right, we have a bike that starts 15-degrees to the left of vertical, then goes 15-degrees to the right (the angle has been exaggerated here for visual purposes).

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As we move the bike from side to side, the bottom bracket goes through a vertical displacement of its own. After accounting for the offset of the spindle (which contributes slightly to the vertical displacement of the pedals), we find out that this reduces the total vertical distance the pedal has to travel by 2.32 centimeters.

Doesn't sound like much, right? It actually makes a significant difference. In Bicycling Science, probably the seminal treatise on the subject by MIT Professor David Gordon Wilson, Jim Papadopoulos wrote that:

Example: The bicycle is tipped from 15-degrees right to 15-degrees left, a total of 30-degrees. The pedal's offset from the frame plane is about 5 inches (125 mm). So foot motion is reduced by 65 mm from its original 170 x 2 or 340 mm; that is, the arms are doing 19 percent of the work. Presumably the legs can then push harder or move faster, for an overall increase in power output.

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I came across this passage (on page 98 of the third edition) while doing research for my triathlon-oriented book, Faster. It interested me enough to work through the equations and contact Papdopoulos. What I found is that he used approximate values and discounted the contribution of the spindle. When you do that, the reduction of foot motion is less, hence my 2.38 cm compared to Papadoupolous' 6.5 cm.

This would mean that the arms are doing "only" 7 percent of the work instead of 19 percent. However, this variable is dependent on your crank length and how much you actually rock the bike, so it's probably best to say that you can save somewhere between 7 to 19 percent of our energy expenditure. Either way, this is a huge savings during a time when your legs are severely taxed.

The bottom line is that there's a way to work smarter, not harder. If you get out of the saddle during that last stage of a climb, make sure your arms get in on the act.

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