I am trying to figure out what percentage of leg muscle mass is active during maximal cycling exercise. I need to normalize leg VO2 for muscle mass, but am not convinced that the entire leg muscle mass is involved in the exercise. There has to be a paper out there using T2 weighted images, glycogen depletion or even EMG that probes this but I cannot find it. Any references or insight you could give me would be helpful. Thanks.
Perhaps not as scientifically detailed answer as you wanted but it may give you some idea:
http://www.pinkbike.com/news/Which-Muscles-are-Really-Used-During-the-Pedal-Stroke-2012.html
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HMGUYsSLwBY
Since I do bicycle a fair bit myself, including daily commuting to my hospital, I know that there is some difference in proportions of forces when bicycling with or without cleats (pushing and pulling both versus mostly pushing). Your instinct is correct that not all the muscle mass of legs is used in bicycling.
if you do not find any quantitative data (I have never searched myself), you may have to generate some. I will look forward to the information.
Regards
For one, define max cycling. Intuitively, one would think that you are talking about the max power that can be exerted in one pedal stroke, i.e., analogous to a 1-RM strength measurement. However, I doubt that is what you want.
I am attaching a couple of papers that might be of interest.
Thanks Gordon for your insight. The articles have been pretty helpful.
To clarify, we are looking for muscle recruitment during maximum aerobic cycling (i.e. recruitment at VO2max).
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