Are You Riding In The Wrong Bike Gear?

Don't be that person that has the wrong gearing on their bike during a race. Instead, work it out in advance. You should be changing your gearing for different courses. If you're not, you could be throwing away valuable time. Gearing is so often overlooked but can have a huge impact on our performance. The last thing you want is to be spinning out or grinding a massive gear because you have literally run out of gears. Let's help you out. First of all, let's go back to basics. Now, if you know your way around a bike fairly well already, then feel free to skip forward by about a minute. I'll see you then. Those that have stayed, well, let's crack on. Here we have our chainrings up front. Quite often, you'll find you have two of these on your bike. Those are connected via a chain to a cassette on the rear where it'll often have something like 10, 11, or maybe even 12 cogs. Now, in terms of the gearing, if you're in your biggest chainring up front, that is going to make the gearing harder. If you're in the smallest chainring, it's going to make it easier. Conversely, on the cassette at the back, if you're in your smallest cog, that's going to make the gearing harder. Then if you're in the largest cog, that's going to make the gearing easier. Your gears convert your input of the cranks into the output at the rear wheel. Your gear choice will determine how many times that rear wheel will turn for every single revolution of the cranks, which is called your gear ratio. To give you a bit of an example on this, if you're in a 52-2 chainring on the front and a 26-tooth cog on the rear, that's a two-to-one ratio, meaning that the rear wheel will turn two times every one revolution of the cranks, meaning that your gear ratio can have a big influence on our cadence. There's your quick gearing lesson. Welcome back, you more techie and experienced folk. That wasn't far off a minute. Pretty close, I'd say anyway. Now, when it comes preparing for a race, not only do you want to prepare physically, but you should also be preparing mechanically. All these parts can be changed to improve the gear ratio for that course, making that gear ratio greater or smaller, or just simply more suited to the course you're going to be undertaking. Now, you might be wondering right now, what on earth have I even got on my bike? Well, you can quite easily find out. Now, there's normally some numbers on the side of the chainrings and the cogs. For example, I can quickly check and I can see that I've got a 53-tooth larger ring at the front and a 39-tooth smaller ring, a 53-39. On the back of the cassette, I've got an 11-tooth cog, the smallest cog, and a 28-tooth cog as my largest or easiest cog, which is what we call an 11-28 cassette. Now, it is important to note that gearing is not a one-size-fits-all situation. Even the pros will be riding different gear setups on the same course because we all have different physiologies and different preferences. Is it simply a case of swapping out lots of different gears until you find the right gear setup for you? Well, sort of, and also not really. By now, you're probably used to the gears that you have on your bike. You know exactly what gear you need to pop it in when you're out riding. For instance, you hit a hill, you know exactly what gear you pop it in for that certain incline. Do you ever find you're running out of gears? For instance, on that incline, you actually wish you had an easier gear or two, or equally, as you start to go faster, you're running out of gears and you find you're spinning out. These are all things that you need to start being aware of as you start trying to dial in and find out that exact and right gear choice for you. In fact, let's have a bit of fun with this. I'm going to show you the importance and the impact of gearing choices. To do this, I'm going to hand the controls over to our cameraman, Marek. He's got control of this TrueKinetics TrueBike, which I'm going to be riding. The plan is I'm going to ride for 10 minutes at an effort level of 150 beats per minute for myself with a certain gear setup. Now, what's really cool about the TrueKinetics TrueBike and their trainers is that they have virtual gears built in that you can change within the app, which Marek is going to be controlling. I have up to 400 virtual gear options without having to change a single part. I'm going to repeat that 10 minutes a few times over with completely different gear choices each time. I'm going to have no idea what Marek is choosing for me. I'm going to hold at 150 beats per minute each time and see what my power output is on each of them and see how much they affect me. All right, let's have some fun then, Marek. Here we go. You ready? Okay, all done. Marek, can I have my phone back now, please? What on earth did I do to make you punish me like that? Right, time for results. Now, it appears that Marek, you have me doing the first ride in a 53-15. 53-tooth big ring at the front, 15-tooth cog at the back. I had a power output of 241 for 150 BPM heart rate. Next up, I was made to ride in a 50-17 power output of just 195. Then we went to 52-15 and had a power output of 206. Then finally, we went for a whopping 55-12 and had a power output of 232. That was really cool just being able to switch between the gears like that with so little faff and really interesting actually just being able to see the genuine data and difference for myself. Interestingly, that 53-15 was so clearly more efficient for myself and would make sense because most of my bikes these days are set up with the 53-tooth outer chainring on there. Although, on my old race bike, we're going back seven years now, I did quite often used to race with a 55-tooth outer chainring on there. It's really interesting actually to see how close that was to that 53-tooth chainring, although a bit different because I'm not that trained on it at the moment. Then when we went to that super high cadence, it's just not my cup of tea. I don't like that and I was clearly super inefficient. My power was low for a relatively high heart rate. Really interesting to be able to test that out and just see what worked for me. If you thought that was cool, do you fancy being able to prep like a pro? Yes, I thought you did. Why not go one step further and actually recon the actual course you're planning to race over? Trial the gears ahead of time and find out if they really work for that terrain. I don't know what you're thinking, how on earth am I going to do that if that race is halfway around the world? I hear you. I'm not necessarily saying you need to do this in IRL, real life. You could potentially do this from your garage, from your living room, wherever you've got your trainer set up. In this instance, what I can do with the True Kinetics True Bike and trainers is get a GPX of that course, which will have the terrain, the profile all in there. I can connect that to this setup through a bike computer and simulate that terrain. Then obviously, I'll be able to just change gears as I go and really make sure I'm prepped for that. You'll probably be able to do the same with whatever setup you've got. You may have to change the gears yourself physically rather than virtually. You can even find on some virtual training platforms that they've actually got courses already built in. Literally, this is like prepping like a pro from your living room. How cool is this? Before you turn up to your next race, please, please do me and yourself a favor and take a look at the gearing on your bike. I'm not over-exaggerating when I say it can completely transform your race day experience, performance, and enjoyment for that matter. Another final point and one that, if I'm honest, requires a whole video in itself is chainline efficiency. Now, let's take a 10-mile time trial as an example, just because it's a simple example all about speed. You might see in a 10-mile time trial, athletes playing massive chainrings like this on their bikes, a 62-tooth chainring. The whole reason being partly because they're going faster, they want to make sure that they are over the pedals and they're applying force and pressure on the pedals at that given speed, but also is around chainline efficiency. They want that chain to run nice and true and straight to the middle of the cassette. Now, actually using the bike behind me as an example, if I'm in the outer chainring here, but then I'm spending most of the ride in the smallest cog, the 11-tooth down here, the chain is going through an angle there that is less efficient than if it's running true. This is something you want to consider, figuring out the average general speed that you might be riding, the gearing for that, and trying to think about that chainline efficiency. This is next-level stuff, the pointy end of racing, but something you might want to consider. Ultimately, it's important that you feel comfortable with that gear and you feel stable on the bike and feel like you can deliver power. You want to make sure that you are able to pedal efficiently. You've got a nice smooth pedal action where you're able to deliver power throughout that whole revolution with as little dead spots as possible. Make sure you consider your gears ahead of your next race. Don't just leave it down to training and turn up on race day and hope for the best. This really could, as I say, transform your race day experience and performance. If you enjoyed today's video, please do give it a thumbs up, give it a like, make sure you subscribe if you're not already, and I'll see you next time.