Road Bike Gears How To Shift

A low gear combines a smaller chainring on the front with a larger cog on the cassette located in the back.

Road bike gears how to shift. Learning to shift properly and at the right time can cause fewer mechanical issues and improve your overall efficiency resulting in a. Steps for shifting gears on a road. The best way to get a hang of what your gears feel like is to take your bike to a safe place away from traffic like an empty parking lot and shift through all the gears in the front and rear to. Shift the rear gears to the smallest cog.

The gears on your bike are there to make your life easier you can shift down when the hills ramp up and crank them higher for speedier riding when you get a flat stretch of road. A bike with 30 or more gears is not an indication of a machine designed to break the land speed record any more than a bike with only a single gear assuming similar ratios. With that roughly as clear as mud here s how you actually go about using your road shifters. I am often asked how to fix a bike that won t shift gears or will only shift to some gears.

I walk through the steps to isolate and locate. The lowest gear is often used when you want to spin easily when recovering from high intensity road bike exercises or a long steep climb. When you shift to the lowest gear pedaling becomes much easier. Bike handling is integral to riding outdoors and this series covers the basics from cornering to descending handling rough surfaces riding out of the saddle riding in a paceline doing tricks on the bike drafting and now shifting on a road bike.

Pull on the gear cable manually not with the shifter. You can shift from the hoods. It s pedaling that allows the chain to climb onto and drop off the different sprockets on your bike as you change gears. The problem will be the shifters derailleurs or cables.

The key thing to know for shifting a road bike is that you have to simultaneously turn the pedals with your feet and move the shift lever in order to change gears.