Learning Gears

You've made it this far and you feel good about your mountain biking skills and yourself. But it isn't enough. You want to be able to ride long distances at a good rate of speed without burning out. You want to be able to climb tough hills, hammer out of tight corners and generally whip the butts of your fellow riders!

A better understanding of how to use your gears to your advantage is what you need to make all the difference.
You might want to jump back over to the First Timers article Gears and Speeds 101 (link) and skim over it real quick. I did. In that article we discussed that we are going to refer to everything by front and rear gear / ring combinations. We do not use the word 'speeds' as it has no real meaning. We covered how gears work and basically how to use them. That was about it. Now we get into some serious stuff.

How well you use your gears will have a direct affect on how well you manage just about every aspect of mountain biking, including: sprints, long distance riding, difficult terrain such as mud / sand / roots, climbs, going over obstacles, quickly regaining speed lost on tight corners, and... well... everything!

You'll need the ability to feel what gear you are riding in and know ahead of time what gear you want to use for any and every type of situation / trail / obstacle. It takes years of experience to develop these abilities, simply through having done it over and over again. The aim of this article is to give you an understanding of how to develop and fine tune this process as quickly as possible.

Part One: Concepts
First, it's important to understand the concept of 'maximizing effectiveness'. During your average mountain bike ride you are bound to encounter many different types of terrain / obstacles / situations, thus one gear probably won't work for your whole ride. Conversely, changing gears too much is bad also. Even the best gear systems aren't perfect. And most of us don't have the best gear systems, do we? Anytime a chain is moving from one gear to another there is risk of missing, skipping, snapping, and worst of all loss of effective pedaling. You can minimize all this by knowing your effective strength and how to apply it to the gears for all different types of situations and thus acheiving maximum effectiveness.

Here is my concept in gears. I submit to you that there is a small range of gears that is the best possible ratio to maximize your effectiveness for different situations. Whether for slower riding through sand or root traps, for high speed areas, or for highly technical areas if you work out this concept well enough it's likely you will regularly use no more than five or six of those 18 plus gears you have on your bicycle, and you'll be the better for it. I routinely use only three gears for virtually ANY type of riding.

Let's take as example a loop I ride when at Morris Bridge, Tampa, Florida, USA which is a fifteen mile loop through Morris Bridge park, Flatwoods park, and Trout Creek park. The first six miles includes a combination of trails that are mostly sand and / or root-infested, including the typical two or three fallen tree trunks over the path (Morris Bridge park), followed by four miles of high speed hard-pack (including some pavement) with some tight cornering mixed in (Flatwoods), followed by five miles of a mix of slower hard-pack and root-infested trails that are mostly tight quarters (very narrow trails between trees) with a couple segments of wide open hard-pack trails, ending with a very short segment of fairly extreme roots combined with narrow trails and tight corners (Trout Creek).

So, this loop begins with leg-killing (for some) sand and root traps with the occasional obstacle that may force the rider off the bike, areas where high speeds are out of the question and massive energy can be spent. In these types of situations even doubling the amount of energy you exert is not going to significantly improve your speed or reduce lap times because your going to have to slam on the brakes in a few feet to take the next obstacle. So it's best to simply maintain a decent average speed, exerting your effort mostly on mentally getting through everything without coming to a halt. By selecting the best possible paths through sand and root traps you can save some time but mostly you'll save energy, energy that can be used to make up time later where there are open areas where higher speeds are easier to attain. So, in this section of my loop, I primarily need power. Power means I have the strength to pedal through sand and burst up to speed on the other side. If you have proper power, you should be able to lose at least half of your speed and while having enough strength to pedal through deep sand and with four or five hard pedal strokes be right back up to speed. Same for roots and other traps.

For me, there are two gears I use for this entire section of Morris Bridge. I can power through sand and root traps with my speed dropping a few mph, but still shoot back up to speed in a few pedal strokes. I can sprint up an extra few mph for short straight sections by changing only one gear. It's best to not let your speed ever fall too low as low speeds for any significant period of time really damage your average speed and increase lap times. If I am forced to get off my bike to go around a really large fallen tree, I can jump on the bike and pedal up to speed in only several strokes. All with only two gears, a minimum of shifting, and never reducing my effectiveness. In this section of trail I use the middle front ring - fourth and fifth back ring and it is my goal to maintain at least 10mph at all times, and average closer to 12mph.

How about the next section of my loop? Four miles of hard-pack with tight corners mixed in sounds like an opportunity for speed. Anytime there is an option to go fast for a long period of time you should, this is an excellent way to increase your average speed and decrease lap times, not to mention it's an optimal training area for cardio. So in this situation are goal is speed. The only issue of power is regaining speed lost on corners.

Again, I use two gears. Using the middle front ring / fifth and sixth back ring I can easily maintain higher speeds while still having the strength to come out of speed-draining tight corners and get right back to speed in a few pedal strokes. I try to maintain a speed of at least 15mph, and if desired I can hit 20mph or more for a period of time for those long hard-pack segments.

The final section of my loop is mostly slower hard-pack with roots and narrow trails with some real high-speed stuff mixed in. I use middle front ring / fifth back ring for most of this segment since I need a combination of power and speed. When I hit the sections that are high-speed hard-pack, I shift to the outer front ring (the large one) and drop to fourth back ring. In this manner I only change one gear in the back so I am close to my power range, but at the same time I can reach speeds of 24mph or greater. When the fast section ends, a flick of the left pointing finger and the right thumb and that puts me right back into power mode with the chain only moving one ring in back.

What I am trying to get across is that by fully knowing your strength and how to use your gears you can maximize most if not all situations without a lot of gear changing. Developing that understanding isn't easy, though.

The concepts covered in Pedaling 101 come into play here. We'll re-cap. The concept here is to not pedal TOO fast or TOO slow. Your body has two types of muscle, strength and endurance. Pedaling too fast means you are overworking your endurance muscles, which won't necessarily wear out, but you are forcing them to do most of the work and your body may find it difficult to maintain a continuous flow of energy at the higher rate. Pedaling too slow means you are relying mostly on your strength muscles to do most of the work. Strength muscles wear out, and pedaling too hard means you are using up this resource. Both elevate your breathing patterns and heart rate level too much.

Obviously the secret here is to find the happy medium which is really breaks down to this: a rate of pedaling (cadence) in combination with a difficulty level of the pedal stroke (back to maximum effectiveness). The pedal stroke shouldn't be too easy, or too hard, at the same time the pedaling rate shouldn't be too fast or too slow. Let's figure them out and put it together.

Pedal Stroke Difficulty
Now we are going to try and figure out what your effective leg strength is. You'll need a good set of stairs for this. At least ten steps. Four or five isn't enough. Climb (start at the bottom) those stairs by putting up one foot onto a step, then putting the other foot next to it. Taking only one footstep per second, tackle the next step. Both feet will touch each step. Continue to the top. This is the easiest possible way to climb the stairs, requiring the least amount of effort. In this manner, climbing ten steps will require a total of twenty footsteps. It'll take a long time to get to the top but you'll probably feel you have hardly made any effort at all. Start over at the bottom. This time put one foot up on the first step, then the other foot on the step past that one, still taking one footstep per second. This is the manner you would normally climb stairs and would require a total of ten footsteps to reach the top. The work is more difficult because each leg has to lift your body weight through a greater distance with each step (twice the distance). But chances are your legs are easily up to the challenge. You'll get to the top faster and you still won't feel like you've worked very hard. Start at the bottom again. This time try to take two steps at a time. That is, skip every other step. Some folks may find this difficult. The effort required with each step is very high because of the great distance of lift in each step and the large bend in the knee at the start of stepping up. Even if you have strong legs, you might begin to tire before you reach the top. But it's only five steps to the top and it's fast!
Let's go over each of these situations and see what they mean.

In the first case you are making twenty footsteps and moving at a very slow pace. The effort is easy because there is very little work per footstep (small distance to lift your body), but a lot of footsteps. You could probably carry a lot of extra weight up the stairs in this manner. Or you could go slowly for a very long time if you wanted and climb a very large number of steps. You could try to take those small footsteps very quickly to make it to the top more quickly, but you might get a little winded from all the rapid footsteps, and there is a drastic increase in the chance of making a mistake in foot placement and falling on your face. This is equivalent to pedaling in too EASY of a gear. The going is easy because there is very little work per pedal stroke, but there is very little result also. Pedaling as fast as you possibly can, you'll never get up very much speed or go very far.

Second situation: ten footsteps, much faster progress, more work per footstep. You are doing much more work per footstep (lifting your body twice as high), but your legs are probably more than sufficiently strong enough to handle the work with no problem. You can very likely climb a large number of steps in this manner without tiring too much. You could probably double your rate of stepping and reach the top twice as fast, or carry a some weight up with you like laundry, still without a problem. This is equivalent to pedaling in the RIGHT gear.

Third situation: five footsteps, much faster progress only if you have strength to spare, quite a bit more work per footstep. This drastic increase in work is because of the extended leverage working against you. You have to be able to reach your foot far out in front of you resulting in a significant bend in your knee. The combination of these two dramatically increases the effort spent and also the stress on your knees. Again, I mentioned much faster progress if you have strength to spare. If you are reaching the limits of your strength because of the leverage working against you (which is likely), chances are you can only manage a slower pace than what you manage in taking each step and you wouldn't use this technique to carry extra weight up stairs. This is equivalent to pedaling in too HARD of a gear.

Finishing Up
And now we come to the point. In any type of situation on the trails you should work on identifying that certain ratio of gears that are the RIGHT gears to maximize effectiveness. Yes, we are back to that. Maximize effectiveness by identifying those gears which match your leg strength, balancing effort with pedal speed. Much in the same manner as we did with the stairs exercise. It might help to ride through the same sections of trails over and over, trying out different gear combinations through the trail.

Here is the summary. At any point you should be pedaling at a comfortable pace, not too fast and not too slow. At any point you should have the extra strength available to slow down and power through / over obstacles. At any point you should be able to kick up the speed at least two or three miles per hour in a quick sprint without having to change gears. This is your goal. You can acheive it by more and more riding. Go to it!

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Riding / Manuevering
Dealing with Sand
Riding in Wet Conditions
Getting Over Small Obstacles
Reading the Terrain
Setting a Pace
Balance Part 1 - Two Wheels
Target Heart Rate / Monitors
Target Heart Rate / Monitors
Staying Hydrated
Staying Hydrated
Learning Gears
Using the Front Brake