How to Improve Your Pedal Stroke for More Efficient Riding

Small technique tweaks = big performance improvement.

BY MOLLY HURFORD | 18 September 2024

Photo: Pexels.com

If watching Olympic track racing or the Tour de France has you wondering about your cycling technique, we got you covered, particularly when it comes to your pedal stroke.

But before you start stressing about how decidedly clunky your revolutions are, it’s important to understand the benefits of an efficient pedal stroke—and where you’re already doing things right.

So we asked experts to crack the pedal stroke code and offer a few simple techniques, cues, and even gear swaps that can help you improve your pedal stroke and increase your power so you can get up a hill or to the finish line faster.

5 Technique Tips for Improving Your Pedal Stroke

Before we get into how to make your pedal stroke more efficient, you should know you probably don’t have to overhaul your form. As with running and gait, this is the eternal debate: If it ain’t broke, should you fix it?

“I’m not big on the idea of the perfectly smooth pedal stroke.”

Master bike fitter Phil Cavell is of the mindset that your pedal stroke may be just fine—if you’re not having any issues, and you feel like you’re putting out reasonable amounts of power. “I’m not big on the idea of the perfectly smooth pedal stroke. I’m big on having a functional pedal stroke. Functional is where you get the big driving muscles engaged at their most optimum calibration,” says Cavell.

But while you may not need to stress about if your pedal stroke feels like a hot knife gliding through butter, Cavell still has a few tips to improve the functionality of your pedal stroke. These tiny tweaks may help you increase your power without working harder, or lead to less fatigue during big rides.

1. Focus on the Power Muscles

“Really, what you want to do when you cycle is to get your prime driver muscles engaged, and that means the glutes, quads, and calves,” says Cavell. “Everything else is nonsense. Yes, you can say a ‘perfect pedal stroke’ pulls up with the one leg as you press down with the other, and that’s mathematically correct and going to shift the load to smooth out your pedal stroke.”

But we didn’t evolve to do that, we aren’t strictly mathematical beings. A much safer strategy is just to use the prime drivers to exert the maximum power at their maximum efficiency, according to Cavell. That means primarily using your glutes and your quads rather than focusing so much on getting your hamstrings into the mix. (Of course, your hamstrings will still be doing work, and you can certainly use them more if you’re fatiguing, but they shouldn’t be the primary workhorse of your pedal stroke.)

As you’re pedaling, Cavell suggests focusing on engaging the glutes as much as possible through the entire revolution, and driving down on the pedals with your quads. You’ll still exert a small amount of pull naturally, but it shouldn’t be an equal effort.

“When you look at a professional cyclist’s pedal stroke, it’s actually often a lot shorter than ours. They pedal in a very kind of dynamic way to produce a huge amount of power in a relatively short amount of time,” he says.

2. Do a Self-Assessment

It’s always helpful to get mindful and truly check in on how you’re pedaling, considering it’s easy to take your pedal stroke for granted and do it on autopilot.

Cavell suggests riding with both clipless and flat pedals, and noting how each feels. “Very simply, think about how it feels different riding flats versus pedaling clipped-in. Make a list: What feels better, worse, or the same? Think about the big things like pain in certain spots all the way down to the tiny pieces of information like feeling more pressure on the little toe on the left versus on the right,” he says. “This is hugely important feedback to share with bike fitter, physio, or coach, or can help you start thinking about ways to make changes on your own.”

The next time you’re riding, also ask yourself:

Does it feel like you’re wasting energy rocking in the saddle with every pedal stroke? If yes, your saddle may be a bit high, so your hips are forced to bob down every time you hit the bottom of your pedal stroke.
Do you feel like you need to pull up in order to make your way up a hill, rather than focusing on pushing down? You may need some strength-building for your glutes, or you may simply need to focus on activating them when you pedal.
Does it feel like one leg is pedaling well but the other is a little bit funky? Some single-leg drills may help even out your pedaling.

3. Get to a Gym

As Cavell says, a solid power-producing pedal stroke relies on the big muscles. “If you think about your big pedaling muscles, the biggest is your glute, which extends the hip; the second biggest is the quadricep group, which extends the knee; and then there’s the calf, which flexes the ankle,” he explains. (Do a quick google image search of some pros calves, glutes and quads to see what we’re talking about.)

The trickiest to turn on while you pedal is your glutes—they’re the biggest muscle, but they can be hard to activate to their full potential. “To activate glutes, you need your pelvis rotated into a neutral position, as if climbing stairs or doing a squat. It can be tricky on a bike,” says Cavell. You can play with your pelvis position on the bike, especially when climbing or putting down power on a flat, and see if there’s a position that allows your glutes to do more work. You won’t always be in this position, but it can help when you need to maximize watts!

You’ll naturally strengthen your legs by riding, but you can also do some work in the gym to boost these muscles, which will in turn give you more power on the bike. Add exercises like glute bridges and deadlifts to your strength training for glute strength, and split squats and walking lunges to build the quads.

4. Go for a Bike Fit (Maybe)

If you notice that your pedal stroke feels as though you need to point your toes or flex your feet awkwardly to make it around a rotation, that’s a sign that your pedal stroke may be fine, but your bike fit is off.

“The same is true for a wobbly pedal stroke that feels like your hips are rocking from side to side on the saddle, or if your knees feel like they need to wing out at the top of your pedal stroke—these are all inefficiencies in your stroke that can be corrected by a bike fit, not by any cue or drill,” says Cavell.

5. Try the Gum Scrape Method

A tried-and-true cue to instantly help you improve your push down on the pedals is to picture scraping your shoe as you come down to the bottom of your pedal stroke. Scrape hard as you press down from the 4 to 6 o’clock position, then let the momentum help you out as the load shifts from the glute and quad and into the hamstring, where you want to be doing the least. This works on flat pedals or with clipless pedals.

3 Gear-Oriented Ways to Improve Your Pedal Stroke

Cheap: Swap to Flat Pedals

“Most clients find pedaling on flat pedals and trainers an epiphany,” Cavell says.

In fact, he recently worked with a young pro racer to correct some minor but chronic injuries and a slightly inefficient pedal stroke by putting the pro on flat pedals with trainers (yes, while wearing Lycra and on his road bike) and says the results were impressive.

Flat pedals force you to tune into the most optimal places to push for power in your pedal stroke, and because your feet aren’t fused with the pedals, you’re able to feel when you’re not being efficient. For example, if you’re someone who uses their hamstrings a lot when pedaling normally, you’ll notice that your feet will often come off the flat pedals as you try to pull up. Again, a bit of pulling up is fine—but most of your effort should be focused on generating power from those big muscles as you push down, and flat pedals underscore that.

Cavell adds that it helps to use flat pedals on climbs, not just on flat surfaces.

Medium Bucks: Try the Track

Want to train like an Olympic gold medalist? Road and track Olympian Kristen Faulkner says that her time on the track helped to smooth out her pedal stroke, and it made her more efficient. That’s because of how a fixed gear bike works—there’s no coasting. So as the bike moves, your legs are moving to increase or decrease the speed, so you’re forced to pay very close attention to what your pedaling is like, and where there are hiccups in your pedal stroke.

“I’m now able to apply power more efficiently at different cadences,” she says. “Before, I may have had a good pedal stroke at my preferred cadence, but track broadened that range.”

Pricey: Get Pedal Power Sensors

A good pedal stroke is efficient on both sides of your body, so if you sense that one side is pedaling smoothly but the other is struggling, you may want to address that specific issue. If you’re really into data and nerding out on what each leg is doing, a few longtime cyclists swear by the dual-sided power meters that give you readings from your left and your right leg when you ride.

“Different power delivery or function between left and right needs to be addressed,” says Cavell. A few watts of difference from leg to leg isn’t a big deal, but if there’s a significant discrepancy that’s a good sign that you may need to strengthen your weaker side in order to smooth out that power.

Working with a biokinetisist and/or a bike fitter to address your leg strength issues may also help in this case, because you’ve likely been a bit off balance for quite some time and have some deeper physiological issues to address. (If you can’t afford a dual-sided power meter, the single-leg drills we mentioned earlier may also give you insight into if one leg is stronger than the other.)