(gentle music)
- Now here's a question for you.
When you're braking, should you be doing it
with your front brakes, rear brakes, or both of them?
- Now, that is a very good question,
and today we're gonna be covering just that.
And after all, being able to slow down or even stop quickly
is a pretty essential skill with cycling,
and ironically can also help us to cycle faster
whilst being in control of the bike.
So today we're gonna be covering how to brake.
(brakes squeal softly) Oh.
(dramatic music)
- First things first, don't be afraid to use your brakes,
and certainly don't leave them till the last minute
when actually you're really gonna need them.
- Well, with all things in sport
it's important that we practise our braking
to really understand how it feels,
and that feedback of the brakes
and even the tyres on the road.
- Yes, so I have to say that you're gonna find a quiet road
to see exactly what's gonna happen
if I just use my front or my rear brake, as opposed to both.
Okay, here we are on a downhill section of road.
I'm gonna hit about 30K an hour
and start using just my front brake.
(gentle music)
So now I've stopped just using my front brake.
Now I'm gonna do the same but just my back brake.
(gentle music)
(tyre scraping) (tone beeps)
So we've just done the second part of the experiment
using just the rear brake, and these are excellent tyres,
and I think this establishes exactly why
you shouldn't rely solely on your rear brake,
because if you skid this can happen.
So that's the little experiment over with,
used the front brake in the first part,
the rear brake in the second part.
As you can see, you definitely don't want to rely solely
on your rear brake, and that's why we recommend using both,
but largely using your front.
Now, this sounds a little bit counterintuitive to me,
actually, because a lot of us fear
by grabbing on that front brake
we're gonna, well, flip right over the handlebars,
and that is actually a real worry and concern
if you pull awfully hard on that front brake.
But that's where this feeling and understanding
of our braking comes in.
- So why the front brake?
Well, this calls for a little bit of a science lesson,
I'm afraid, and what happens when you brake
any sort of vehicle, or bike in this instance,
you experience something called dynamic load transfer.
So when we brake the bike,
our weight suddenly moves forward on the bike,
so essentially the front of our bike
is heavier than the rear,
and therefore also means that we have more grip
through the tyre of that front wheel
as opposed to the rear wheel,
and that happens every time we brake.
- Okay, so if we're exclusively braking
through the front brake, then should we have a rear brake?
Well, yes we should, and our bikes do come with them.
They're really useful for scrubbing speed
and also for just general varying conditions
that we're riding in.
- Yeah, exactly, and I normally try to advise
there is somewhere around 70% front brake
and 30% rear brake,
and that's just, I guess, a rough figure.
But what happens if you want to stop suddenly,
as you said before?
Well, this calls for a little bit of a change in our weight
and distribution of that weight,
not our weight because we're not gonna change our weight,
but the distribution of our weight is going to change.
So we want to actually get our weight
slightly further back on the bike,
so we're gonna push our bum into that saddle
to try and make the back of the bike
slightly heavier than the front.
- However, when we're riding in wet or slippery conditions,
these rules do change a little bit.
Our front wheel is more likely to slide out
when we're on a wet and slippery road surface
when we use our front brake.
That's basically due to this added weight over the front end
that Mark's been talking about.
So that means you've got to think about
using that rear brake if you think
there's gonna be a higher chance of skidding.
- Yeah, exactly, and on that note, it's really important
to actually start braking sooner and earlier
in these wet conditions,
because firstly, not only are your wet brake pads
going to struggle to slow down a wet wheel,
unless of course you're using disc brakes,
they're a little bit better,
but secondly, also your tyres are gonna have
less traction on the wet road.
- So I guess on that note, Mark,
we should probably head back on the bikes.
- Yeah. (gentle music)
- Now, let's move on to talk about
the timing of our braking.
I'm sure that you will have maybe heard lots of people
talk about getting all of your braking done
before you enter a corner,
and try and do none of it in the corner,
and I guess for the most part this is true.
- However, yeah, I would say there are some exceptions.
We obviously always want to strive
to do all of our braking before a corner,
but I reckon if you speak to
some of the best bike riders out there,
they might still quietly admit
that they do a little bit throughout a corner,
particularly if it's a very sharp hairpin
or perhaps the corner tightens up as they're rounding it
and it takes them a little bit by surprise.
But what I would say is that,
really try to avoid doing this in wet conditions.
- Yeah, and that's a really good tip.
And another good tip is to try and, well,
look where you're wanting to brake.
A really bad trap that a lot of us fall into
is looking down at the wheel right in front of us
rather than looking at where we want to stop.
- And another thing I would add to that
is really try to make sure
that you stay relaxed whilst you're braking.
Try not to tense up and straighten your arms out,
because not only is that
gonna affect your braking, obviously,
it will really affect your handling on the bike.
And finally, it's important that we consider
our braking surfaces and the wheels that we're using,
because their performance does differ very slightly.
So if we talk about alloy surfaces or braking surfaces
then they perform really rather quite well
in dry conditions, but,
as we find with most braking surfaces,
they perform a little bit less so in wet conditions.
And we talked about carbon braking surfaces now,
well, the technology's really improving on these.
They typically used to be quite poor all round
compared to alloy surfaces,
but they're really very good now, and in the same way
they've almost declined a little bit in wet conditions.
- Now, a lot of bikes, TT and road alike,
are coming equipped with disc brake technology now.
Now, quite frankly, these are game changers.
They're really good, especially in the wet conditions.
Now, one final point to note about your brakes,
whether they be regular carbon, alloy, disc, whatever,
is you need to be careful on the pressure
that you put through your levers
to be able to figure out how to brake safely.
So really, you just need to practise, practise, practise.
- Well, there we go, that is how to brake.
We hope you found that useful,
and do let us know how you get on
in the comments section below.
- And before we go, one other thing to be mindful of
is make sure you know which way round your brakes are.
If you're going abroad and hiring a bike
then they might be swapped over from what you're used to,
and that could be serious,
- Yeah. - so just check that.
- Or even if you're buying a bike from a different country,
yeah, really do be mindful of that, it's very important.
Now, if you liked this video today,
hit that thumbs-up button.
If you'd like to see more from GTN
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And if you'd like to see our Ask The Pros
where we asked them whether they prefer
traditional or modern bike tech,
then you can see that by clicking just down here.
- And for a video on rim versus disc brakes,
you can get that here.