DMF wrote:
KWalker wrote:
DMF wrote:
I gotta say that I hade some serious soreness in some new musclegroups the first couple of weeks. And that's perfectly normal as you do start using some other muscles more than earlier, and these need some time to develop, so it's not just a mental aspect, it's a physical one aswell. And this takes way more than 10 minutes.
There is no way ou are even close to getting the full advantage before you let these "new" muscles develop and grow a bit stronger.
Studies show this to be false- the Q-rings do not alter firing rates of muscles unless you rotate between the most extreme orientations. If you feel increased soreness its actually bad and generally indicates an unfavourable increase in static/dynamic loading.
Here is a fun fact for you. I suffered pretty badly from 'jumpers knee' earlier this year. Didn't matter how I rode, nor if mainly on the small or the big chainring. Changed the small ring to Q-ring as I had it laying around and remember reading somewhere that they can relieve some types of knee problems. Said and done, keeping mainly in small chainring my jumpers knee was gone over night! I'd har it for months... Changed the big ring after a few weeks and now I can ride that gear without killing my knee too...
It changes which muscles you use. Period.
Your fit must suck then, because every non-rotor funded study has found otherwise. The only thing that can really change firing patterns is overall position on the bike. The people that I have found that claim they reduce muscle fatigue usually have calve fatigue from their seats being too high or too far back, people with hamstring fatigue being the same. Altering the ring position from 3 to 4 isn't enough to offset the STA and really change where you are relative to leverage points in the pedal stroke. Glad you like them, but the data just isn't there to support them.
I have used both Rotor and O-Sys. I never noticed the Rotor rings. They were neither good nor bad- no real tangible results. They took about 30 minutes to adapt to and about 30 minutes to go back to round rings. I have hundreds of power files and dozens of tests for both round and Q-Rings and there were no considerable differences in any metric.
This new study is laughably flawed in so many ways, but the following stand out:
-"In order to facilitate compliance with this request, subjects were also provided with a training journal to record mileage and average speed of their training rides." So if I train at 20mph, but up a 6% grade and another participant trains at 20mph but up a 1% grade is it the same? Or how about I set my computrainer to 20mph with drafting turned off and put out 300w for an hour and another subject does the same but with drafting on and puts out 280w? This is where the shoddy controls start.
- No round control group, just a switch to round rings after the last test. So there's no way to determine if the subjects improved simply from training and adapting to the same test protocol or if the rings were what made the difference. The length of the study is more than long enough to see these kind of improvements simply from just riding.
-They chose a 1km TT, which is pretty stupid IMO. This kind of test greatly depends on AWC, which is not that trainable. It would make much more sense to choose a longer test duration.
-"There was no significant interaction found between week/chainring type and power (p = 0.998). Although slight differences can be seen during each workstage (i.e., 150, 180, 210, 240, 270, 300 watts), these data display increases that are generally indicative of an increase in exercise workloads. Oxygen consumption was not significantly different when comparing the final week of testing (i.e., week 5 Post-test) to the initial week of testing (i.e., week 0) on circular chainrings (p = 0.11) (see Table 5)."
-"No main effect was observed for week/chainring type for measured blood lactate concentration (p =0.86). There was a main effect for power (p < 0.05), however, the increases in blood lactate correspond to the increases in workload during the graded exercise test (see Table
. There was no interaction between week/chainring type and power (p = 0.99)."
So really, nothing significant was gleaned from this study, which is weird because they claim otherwise in the summary.
O-Sys took about 5-7 days to get the feel for. They are way different, but once I did adapt I felt as if they did everything that Rotor rings are supposed to do. The only reason I ditched them was because they don't make them for MTBs and going back and forth would be too much effort.
I will say that they're not for everyone though. The O Sys rings seem to benefit riders with more muscular strength/endurance as they do noticeably increase time spent in the power phase of the stroke. You will notice a weird resistance affect where you suddenly slow your cadence from 1 to 5 o clock in the stroke and then it rapidly spins around, but you get used to that. Riders who have a higher cadence and tend to rely more on aerobic endurance might not see much of a benefit from the rings.
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I do think they are far too expensive, however.
