Bouncing on the saddle and overspinning at high cadence

[withm]

I have no idea to figure out how fast I'm spinning (do comps tell you that?) but know when i'm going 'fast' versus spinning 'slow'. This morning I noticed the bouncing thing on my commute. It was cold, and I wanted to go fast. When I shifted into another gear though, it felt too much like mashing. So I dropped my heels a bit, particularly during the upstroke, and immediately noticed a difference. I'll have to work on doing this technique naturally, but at least I've had a bit of a lightbulb!

K.

I made a little Excel cheat sheet that I taped to my stem. It looks like this but with black borders around each. I set my computer to elapsed time mode, so that it shows me a readout in seconds. I start counting the pedal revolutions when the seconds are on "1" and count for 10 seconds, or when the readout is at 10 seconds. When I am working on cadence, I will do this several times just to get the feel for whatever cadence I am running, then periodically check to see that I'm still running what I think I'm running. Of course you need to be in a place where you can ride for 10 seconds without worrrying about stops, traffic, pedestrians, etc. You don't want to be glued to the computer readout - just glance back and check it. And if you get distracted, just start again when conditions are right.

Here's what it looks like. But the actual table has lines and borders for easy reading.and I can't seem to duplicate that here.

12 72
13 78
14 84
15 90
16 96

And sure, I could just do the math in my head, but I found that having the thing taped to the stem reminds me to work on cadence periodically. Without the reminder, I'd probably never think to check it. My next computer will do this for me.

Martha