You know the look. You roll up to the group ride or the bike shop on a drop-bar bike with flat pedals, and somebody’s eyes drift down to your feet.
Or maybe you remember the other version: toppling sideways at a stop sign, still attached to the bike, the first week you tried clipping in.
So, are flat pedals okay for road cycling? Yes. The lab research found no measurable efficiency difference between flats and clipless at the steady efforts most of us ride at.
There is one real exception (all-out sprinting), and there are a few kinds of rider who are actively better off on flats. We’ll cover both, plus what to look for in a flat pedal and shoe, without turning this into a shopping list.
What the Research Actually Measured
The surprising part is not that flats hold up. It is how thoroughly the “clipless is more efficient” idea has been tested and come up empty at everyday power.
👨🏫 Quick vocabulary first. “Clipless” pedals are the ones your shoes lock into. The name is backwards because they replaced old-style toe clips, so “no toe clip” became “clipless.” Confusing, but we are stuck with it.
In 2016, Straw and Kram had 11 healthy adults ride an ergometer at 50, 100, and 150 watts at 90 rpm in three setups: running shoes on flats, running shoes in toe clips, and cycling shoes clipped in. They measured how much energy each setup cost. The answer was no difference, and the authors said outright that cycling shoes may bring comfort or safety benefits but do not improve efficiency.
Eight years earlier, Mornieux and colleagues had 8 elite cyclists and 7 non-cyclists ride at 60 percent of their maximum aerobic power on plain pedals and on clipless. Same result. No difference in efficiency, pedaling effectiveness, or muscle activity between the two, published in the International Journal of Sports Medicine in 2008.
Two boundaries keep those findings in their lane. The Straw and Kram test stopped at 150 watts, and both studies used young adults, not 60-year-olds.
So the rule is this: at steady hobby power, pedal type does not measurably change what a ride costs you. Harder tempo and threshold riding sits between the lab and the sprint, and nobody has settled that middle ground properly yet.
The Pull-Up Myth
“Clipless lets you pull up on the backstroke, so you use more muscles and go faster.” We have all heard it at the café stop, usually from someone who has never checked.
Think of your two legs as a two-man crew. The pushing leg is the strong one. The upstroke leg can be made to help, and it will, but it burns a lot more energy than the little it adds, and the strong leg ends up doing less of its best work.
That is what the lab found. In the Mornieux study, riders were told to deliberately pull up, and their upstroke “effectiveness” jumped. Their net efficiency fell by 9 percent in the trained cyclists.
Korff’s 2007 study found the same shape. Pulling up raised force effectiveness but dropped gross efficiency from 20.2 to 19.0 percent.
Laura Henry, a USA Cycling Level 2 coach and certified bike fitter, puts it bluntly on the Full Circle Endurance blog. Flat pedals, she writes, “are appropriate for all cyclists and all ability levels,” and her standing advice, clipped in or not, is don’t pull up.
File the pull-up alongside the other cycling myths that won’t die. It sounds right, and it costs you energy.
The One Place Clipping In Genuinely Helps
Now the part the flat-pedal evangelists skip. If you sprint flat out, clipping in helps, and the numbers are not small.
In 2020, Burns and Kram took 12 healthy male cyclists outdoors for maximal 330 ft (100 m) sprints up a 4.9 percent grade. Toe clips raised peak sprint power 9.7 percent over flat pedals with running shoes. Stiff-soled cycling shoes clipped in were then a further 16.6 percent above the toe-clip setup.
Notice two things. Those are two separate comparisons, not one flat-to-clipless number, and they were measured during all-out efforts lasting seconds. The gain comes from foot security and sole stiffness at maximum force, not from a magic upstroke.
So, do you sprint for the town sign every ride? Then clipless earns its keep. If your hard efforts are a long climb at a pace you can hold, the sprint studies say nothing about that and the steady-effort studies found no gap. You will likely find bigger gains in how to bike faster than in your pedals.
Dual sided pedals are also an option!
Who Flats Suit Best
Most of us are not sprinters. Here is where flats stop being merely “okay” and start being the smarter choice.
Newer Riders and Anyone Who Has Toppled at a Stop
REI’s pedal guide notes that many cyclists have toppled over at some point while learning clipless. If you are still building road confidence, adding a clip-in system before the basics feel automatic is one more thing to get wrong on top of the usual beginner commuting mistakes.
Commuters and Frequent Stoppers
Every red light, every driveway, every “is that car going to pull out” moment is a foot-down. REI recommends flats for riders who need their feet off the pedals quickly, and on a road bike for commuting that is most of your ride.
Riders Coming Back From Injury or Surgery
BikeRadar’s senior technical editor Warren Rossiter has described starting on flats as a sensible next step for a rider returning after knee surgery, to rebuild confidence and balance. He also warned that high clipless release tension can add strain to the knee. Flats do not fix knees, but they take one variable off the table.
Wide Feet, Bunions, and Heavier Riders
Chris van der Kaap, a Dutch bicycle ergonomics consultant with thousands of bike fits behind him, points to flats for three groups. Riders with big feet or a wide stance usually get better hip, knee, and foot alignment, heavier riders get a bigger platform to spread the load, and anyone with wide feet or bunions stops squeezing into narrow cycling shoes.
Long-Distance Riders Who Like to Move the Foot
Van der Kaap also notes that flats let you shift your foot on the pedal through a long day, which relieves pressure points. Worth remembering when you plan your next big day out with our long-distance cycling tips.
Riders 60 and Over Who Want a Fast Foot-Down
This one is a BikePush rule, not a study finding. We could find no research on fall or injury rates by pedal type in older riders, so nobody can hand you a number. But if getting a foot to the ground instantly matters more to you than the last few percent of a sprint, flats are the sensible default.
When Clipless Still Earns Its Place
None of this means clipless is a con. It means it is a tool with a specific job.
Race, ride group sprints, or repeatedly go all-out and you are in the regime where Burns and Kram found a real advantage. Dan Joyce, editor of Cycling UK’s Cycle magazine, draws the line neatly: “For most kinds of racing, clipless pedals are better than flats. For most cycling that isn’t racing, no; they’re an alternative that you may prefer, not an essential upgrade.”
If you already ride clipless happily and your knees are fine, there is no reason to change. The point is that you do not have to.
What Makes a Flat Pedal Work on a Road Bike
A flat pedal is not a flat pedal. The cheap plastic thing that came with your first bike is not what we are talking about here.
Grip comes from small metal pins or a slightly concave platform, so your shoe stays put without being locked. Size matters too: van der Kaap calls anything under about 3.9 by 3.9 in (100 by 100 mm) a small platform and anything over 4.3 by 3.9 in (110 by 100 mm) a large one, and says a small may be all you need if your feet are US men’s 8 or under.
Then the shoe. A stiffer sole spreads the load, and on a good platform even a moderately stiff shoe works because the pedal supplies the rest of the stiffness. Position the pedal axle somewhere between the ball of your foot and your arch, further back than a road cleat would sit.
One caution. Those pins bite shins as happily as shoes. If yours keeps finding your leg on remounts, shorter pins are the fix.
Safety at Stops and the Learning-Fall Reality
The slow-motion tip-over at a stop sign is practically a rite of passage. REI’s guide says as much and recommends 50 to 60 practice releases on grass before riding clipless in traffic.
That is fine advice at 25. At 65, a low-speed fall onto a hip is a different proposition. The pedal that lets your foot leave without a twist is a safety feature, and it is the single strongest argument for our 60-plus rule above.
Cleat “float” (the few degrees a clipped-in foot can pivot) exists because early fixed cleats caused knee pain even with careful placement. A flat pedal gives you unlimited float for free.
Morton, Briefly
If you need proof that flats do not stop serious riding, look at Lachlan Morton in 2021.
During his solo, self-supported Alt Tour of the full Tour de France route, the EF Education pro developed knee pain on day three. He swapped to flat pedals and sandals and rode most of the ride that way, Alpine stages included, until a broken sandal strap sent him back to clipless.
One rider, one event, and not evidence of anything beyond itself. But a pro riding the Alps on flats and sandals rather takes the sting out of a raised eyebrow at the café.
FAQs about flat pedals and Road Bikes
Do pro cyclists use flat pedals?
Not for racing, where clipless is the norm and the maximal-effort regime is exactly where clipping in measurably helps.
Outside racing it is a choice, not a rule. Lachlan Morton rode most of his 2021 Alt Tour of the Tour de France route on flats and sandals when his knee demanded it.
Are flat pedals slower on a road bike?
At steady effort, no.
Two lab studies (Straw and Kram 2016, Mornieux 2008) found no efficiency difference between flats and clipless at everyday power. In all-out sprints, Burns and Kram 2020 measured a real gain for clipped-in stiff shoes, so flats are slower only if sprinting is your thing.
Can I put flat pedals on any road bike?
On any road bike with a standard crankset, yes. Flat pedals use the same pedal thread as clipless pedals, so it is a swap with a pedal wrench or hex key and no other change to the bike.
Pick a pedal with pins or a concave platform rather than a plain plastic one so your foot stays put.
Are flat pedals better for bad knees?
Sometimes, but the evidence is thin. BikeRadar’s Warren Rossiter suggests flats as a sensible starting point after knee surgery, and a flat pedal removes the fixed foot position that made early cleats a knee problem.
We found no study measuring knee outcomes by pedal type, so treat it as worth trying, not a cure.
The Bottom Line
Flats are fine for the riding most of us do, and for a fair number of us they are the better call. The one clear clipless win is maximal sprinting, and you know whether that describes your Sunday.
Here is the next step. Fit a pinned flat pedal and a stiffer-soled shoe, give it a month of your normal rides, and notice how many stops feel easier and whether anything feels slower. If you race or chase sprints, keep the clipless and stop apologizing for that too.
💡My personal take: Clipping in solved something for me that flats never did. The hot foot eased.
Though I should be honest about what probably fixed it. Moving to clipless meant a stiffer, wider sole and a foot that stopped hunting for position every mile. The attachment itself may have had nothing to do with it. A roomy shoe on a big platform pedal might have got me to the same place.
The evidence on stiffness cuts both ways too. This is my experience, not a mechanism I can prove.
I still use clipless pedals for the vast majority of my cycling – but on learning from researchign this article, I may have to incorporate more flat pedal riding goign forward!
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