As outlined by an post in the Bike Radar magazine there’s a lot of myths that are relevant to road bikes and are concerned with boosting fitness. These common myths have been challenged by researchers and from experimental data.
These myths are all too often factors of which we are all conscious or have at least heard of previously. For instance, it is frequently said that cyclists of road bikes should shave their legs in order to enable them to go faster – and many do. Nevertheless, there are no studies to show that this is effective – even though a lack of hair may increase one’s muscle definition, or make cleansing one’s legs easier. Riding road bikes nevertheless is different to swimming, where minimizing the friction with denser water does carry sizeable benefits to the athlete in terms of speed over distance.
Another supposed myth is that those users of road bikes who perspire more quickly and more intensely as compared to those that don’t are less in shape. This is seemingly false according to Dr Nick Gant of Loughborough University. He stated that “after repeated training your body becomes more efficient at cooling, so you start to sweat earlier and produce a greater volume of sweat.” If this is the circumstance, then the sweatier users of road bikes could quite possibly be the very best – even though they may not appear it of course!
Riding road bikes can take a lot out of an athlete, such as water leading to dehydration. However, the misconception that biking without eating will lead to your entire body drawing on the undesirable fat that can be located around your pot-belly, and thus lessening the size of it, is also apparently unfounded. This is very simple to comprehend. If road bikes are used for physical exercise before dinner, the road biker will at some point for the period of the day intake calories comparable to that lost when performing exercises without meals.
Yet another myth is that when riding road bikes pumping up the tyres to be very hard will make the bicycle go more quickly (presumably by reducing the friction between road and tyre). Apparently, through an experiment performed by Dr Timothy Ryschon when at the University of Texas, it was found that there was very little difference between tyres that are pumped to the correct or normal pressure and those that were over inflated to make them very hard, rendering the rewards of this advice as minimal.
