- Gear right, you'll be fast.
Bouncing your bum up and down.
Bike gearing.
Trainiacs, trainiacs, trainiacs.
Bike gearing, bike gearing, bike gearing.
I get asked occasionally to do a video
on gearing for a bike, and I'm going
to totally sidestep the question about gear ratios
and what sort of front chain ring
you should be putting on and what cassette
you should be putting on.
This is just assuming that you've got
whatever gear ratio has been given to you
on the front and the back.
Tends to be standard across bikes,
and it's really a longer video about hills and descents
and strategy that is like not for the average triathlete.
Almost all triathletes should really just be going
with the gearing that is given to them
on whatever bike they go.
Okay, so that out of the way.
Then it gets to what gears should you be using
on your uphills, on your downhills, as you're going steady.
Do you use the big ring, the small ring, all that stuff.
I'll start answering this question
by answering the what cadence you should be using
as you're in a triathlon.
Typically you want to be in the range
of about 85 to 100 revolutions per minute.
Anything below 85 is really insanely low
that I haven't heard too many people going down
underneath that.
Anything above 100 and you're spinning
very incredibly fast.
The lower cadences of around 85 to 90,
you're going to be putting out
a fair bit more power, probably going a little faster,
but you're going to be knocking the stuffing
out of your legs a little bit more
and putting more emphasis on your muscular system
than your cardiovascular, so it's a bit of a trade off.
When you get up into the 95 to 100 and 100 plus cadence,
you're putting a lot more of the load
onto your cardiovascular system,
taking the load off your muscles,
so you'll be fresher for the run,
but you probably won't be going too fast.
What Coach Patton always gets me to do
is as we start getting close to a race,
he starts giving me a cadence target
of about 90 to 95 based off of our target power,
and he wants me to get in the habit
of spinning at 90 to 95 so that it feels natural.
Now how we relate that to gearing
is you basically want to set up your gearing
as hard or as easy as you need to go
to get into that 90 to 100 cadence.
I highly recommend getting a bike computer
that has cadence monitoring on the pedals
or on the crank arm, but it's not absolutely necessary.
We've actually done our entire coaching plans for beginners
without any sort of bike computer.
Once you get into the intermediate and advanced categories,
then you start wanting to incorporate things
like a cadence sensor and speedometers
and certainly in advanced you're getting
into power meters like this,
but it's not absolutely necessary.
Rule of thumb for that 85 to 100 cadence
is you want to spin as fast as you can
without bouncing your bum up and down
on the seat side to side.
You want to be steady on the saddle.
You don't want to be bouncing up and down on the saddle.
Usually ride around as fast as you can spin
without bouncing around is kind of in
that 85 to 100 cadence.
Anything beyond that and you start bouncing around
a lot, which is not what you want
because it's inefficient, it's unstable.
It's a bad platform, losing power.
All kinds of bad things.
Don't bounce, stay steady.
Now do you go onto your big chain ring
or your small chain ring?
Do you go onto heavy gear down here or a light gear?
How do we choose?
Here's how.
So typically, unless you're on a hill,
you're going to end up being in the big chain ring.
The small chain ring on the inside
tends to be for like emergencies only.
We're talking hills, we're talking major gusts of winds.
When you're getting up to a nice high tempo rhythm
on a triathlon bike, you want to be in the big chain ring.
Now where do you go on the back?
Basically, it's that you don't want
whatever's going on in the back to be crooked.
So what you can see right now is that
the chain comes from the front chain ring
and goes onto the cassette a little bit
at an angle like this.
That's not what you want.
So a bad gear ratio is where you're on
the big chain ring on the front
and way into the, we'll spin it up here.
Like this here is a bad gear ratio
because we are on the smallest cassette here at the back
and we are at the big chain ring,
so it's hard to see, but what's going to happen
is the chain is going to be pulled off to the side,
it's going to be pulling.
Vice versa if you're on the small chain ring on the front.
So you can see, small chain ring on the front,
not in the big, and then over here
on a really high gear, what ends up happening
is the exact opposite, that the chain
ends up being stretched out to the side.
And what we'll do here is I'll run the pedal up at the front
and you'll hear that the chain is actually rubbing
on the de-railer there, and when the chain is cocked
in this way, you'll get rubbing
on the outside of the de-railer.
When it's cocked from the big chain ring
to a smaller gear at the back,
it's going to be rubbing on the inside of the de-railer.
Should be able to hear that.
That's the chain rubbing on the inside of the de-railer.
So what you want to get to is as straight
a chain line as you can possibly get.
You don't want big chain ring at the front,
small gear, IE big cog at the back.
Ooh, you're slippy.
Or small chain ring at the front
and big gear, IE small cog at the back,
because that will ruin your chain,
it will create a lot of extra drag
that you're going to lose power and efficiency on.
It's bad for your bike, it stretches out the chain.
So when you look down, make sure you're in a gear ratio
at the back and the front, that the chain
is as straight as possible.
And then beyond that, get into that 85 to hundred cadence,
ideally 90 to 95, and you know what,
to give you a little bit of an idea
about what 87 cadence feels like,
here's a metronome for that.
(metronome clicks)
And here's 93.
(metronome clicks)
And here's 97.
(metronome clicks)
There you go, trainiacs.
Gear right, you'll be fast.
Dinner time now.