Cycling

6 responses so far ↓

• 1 GOD Bless the USA // Feb 22, 2009 at 10:58 pm

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  Lower the gears when needed to go up hill….

• 2 rowlfe // Feb 25, 2009 at 7:29 pm

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  It depends on your cadence. The idea is to maintain the same rotation speed of the pedals for any given terrain. Which means higher gears for flat land and lower gears for hills, You change gears to maintain a comfortable number of beats per minute as the terrain changes.

• 3 WJ // Feb 28, 2009 at 3:01 am

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  the steeper the hill the lower the gear you want to use. Lower gears mean the smaller gears in front and larger gears in the rear.

• 4 tweekerzach // Mar 1, 2009 at 9:56 pm

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  Or you can change use the gears in your legs and power up the hill in the same gear, like on a single speed bike.

• 5 Henry L // Mar 4, 2009 at 6:19 pm

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  I like WJ’s answer because he’s the only one that mentioned using the small front ring and the big rear ring combo. Many newbies don’t understand what a high vs. low gear is. A small front/big rear ring combo makes it easier to spin the pedals which is what you want as your speed drops while going uphill. When I was a teenager and didn’t know anything about riding, I insisted on using a higher gear going uphills (because I thought that’s what men did) and I thrashed my legs in the process and went nowhere.

• 6 CKS // Mar 7, 2009 at 8:19 am

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  it depends how fast you are goig before you get to the hill, if going slow shift down right before the hill and muscle it up, if going fast and you want to try to maintain that speed shift down to a gear in the middle well before you get to the hill then muscle up the hill then shift up when over the hill and pick your speed back up, finally if you don’t want to use muscle on the hill either shift to the lowest possible gear, or pick up enough speed coming at the hill to drift over.

  i forgot to add: try to avoid using the small front gear with the small rear gear, and also the large front gear with the large rear gear. The reason for this is that the deraillures have to put the chain at such a great angle to reach those gears that the chain will end up wearing out the crank very fast and the chain itself will also wear. this results in the chain skipping and the gears slipping