In line with an posting in the Bike Radar magazine there are lots of common myths that are applicable to road bikes and are concerned with boosting health and fitness. These common myths have been questioned by scientists and from experimental data.
These myths are quite often factors of which we are all aware or have at the very least heard of before. For instance, it is quite often said that cyclists of road bikes should shave their legs in order to assist them to go faster – and several do. Nonetheless, there are no research projects to show that this is effective – even though a lack of hair may increase one’s muscle definition, or help make cleansing one’s legs easier. Riding road bikes nevertheless is different to swimming, where bringing down the friction with denser water does carry significant benefits to the sportsperson in terms of swiftness over distance.
Another supposed myth is that those riders of road bikes who perspire faster and more heavily as compared to those that don’t are less fit. This is seemingly not true 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 situation, then the sweatier users of road bikes could possibly be the best – even though they may not appear it of course!
Riding road bikes can take a lot out of an athlete, including water leading to dehydration. On the other hand, the belief that biking without eating will lead to your body drawing on the unnecessary fat that can be located around your pot-belly, and thus lessening the size of it, is also apparently misguided. This is quite straightforward to comprehend. If road bikes are used for exercise before breakfast, the road biker will at some stage for the period of the day intake calories equivalent to that lost when doing exercises without meals.
An additional myth is that when riding road bikes pumping up the tyres to be very hard will make the cycle go more quickly (presumably by reducing the friction between road and tyre). Purportedly, through an experiment carried out by Dr Timothy Ryschon when at the University of Texas, it was found that there was very little distinction 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.