Road Bike Gear Ratios For Hill Climbing

Most road bikes will come with 11 12 or 13 teeth on the smallest sprocket and then will have anywhere between 21 and 32 teeth on the largest sprocket.

Road bike gear ratios for hill climbing. Road bike cassettes will have smaller sprockets with a smaller jump between the teeth sizes when compared to mountain bike cassettes. On your rear wheel the gear ratios work out the opposite of on your chainrings. Even if you have a bike with a standard front chainset 53 39 and rear cassette of 25 which gives you a lowest gear ratio of 39 25 1 56 you could achieve a similar gear ratio to a bike with a compact chainset 50 34 with a rear cassette of 25 ratio of 1 36 by switching your rear cassette to a 29 tooth lowest gear ratio of 39 29 giving a ratio of 1 34. Gear ratios can make or break your ride so choosing the right ones for you is vital to getting the most out of cycling menu expert road bike reviews and the latest road bike news features and.

Praxis sub compact cranksets 48 32t praxis works has managed to fit sub compact chainrings 32t instead of 34t on their current cranksets despite using the same chainring dimensions as a compact crankset 110bcd. If you haven t already become best friends with it you may need to start. For example strong experienced cyclists can use a high gear ratio while maintaining a good cadence to produce more than 200 watts of power while beginning or inexperienced riders reduce the gear ratio to produce about 100 to 200 watts. Most road bikes have either an 11 tooth or 12 tooth smallest cog and a largest cog with 23 25 26 teeth.

Where you plan to travel the terrain your experience how strong you are as a rider and of. If you wanted to fit an 11 34 cassette you d also need shimano s gs rear derailleur the 105 version c an be found for 36 which has a total capacity of 39t you d also need to fit a longer chain the shimano 105 one retails at 18 50 we ve found that this derailleur even works with a shimano 11 40t cassette 47 99 but don t tell shimano we said that. Gear ratios on touring bikes depend on a number of factors. With all of the options available to today s road cyclists it is possible to produce gear ratios that are as small as 1 0 and as large as 5 0 with increments of 0 15 0 40.

The cyclist guide to the right gear ratios for climbing. Similarly if you are growing in strength it might be time to spec larger gears to your bike. Road bike cassettes for climbing. In other words smaller cogs fewer teeth on the rear correspond to you harder pedaling and bigger cogs more teeth correspond to the easier pedaling.

Let s take a closer look at the cranksets that offer better road bike climbing gears.