PowerCranks have been around for a while, but with more and more pros turning to them, including Discovery’s Race-to-Replace winner A.J. Smith, Pez Cycling has returned to take a second look. Different from your standard crank system, PowerCranks use a one-way clutch in each crank-arm that prevents one rider’s leg from assisting the other. The company says the benefits of such a system include, training of the hip flexors and hamstring muscles, neuromuscular changes that improve efficiency, more balanced muscle effort, and increased basal metabolic rate. When Pez contributor Jered Gruber took a set of PowerCranks out for spin, he thought the leaning curve wouldn’t be too steep – nothing could have been farther from the truth. Gruber found the cranks to be hard both mentally and physically: “Mentally of course because I couldn't pedal for the life of me, and physically because my muscles were having to work very very hard to attempt to keep the pedals in a correct position.” In the end he managed just 20 minutes with the cranks on the first day. After working with the system though, Gruber seems to indicate that PowerCranks are worth the effort he put into them, claiming his threshold has increased by a solid 10 percent, and when he pedaled on traditional cranks he found that “what had once been hard, became easier and easier.”
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