harvillo

My cycling adventure is coming along nicely. Thanks to this forum I avoided some common mistakes (learned to repair a flat prior to riding, road safety, hydrating, etiquette, and many other newbie probabilities). That being said, I road 50 miles the other day. I know that doesn't sound like much but it's a huge accomplishment I was proud of. Those muscles that would ache at first aren't as much anymore.

To avoid injury, is it best to use a lower gear with higher RPM and then increase gears as lower body strength increases (within reason of course)? I say lower body strength because I have found out that it's more than your legs that get worked out.

livedarklions

I did a little research on this because I use very high gears all the time, and became convinced the notion of knee injury by too high gear must be a myth. Frankly, the mechanical reasons people gave for it simply don't make sense. There are a lot of articles out there that say this is a risk, but what I found was that none of them are written by medical people, they're almost all articles by coaches in cycling magazines. When I actually looked for medical literature on it, what I found was that there doesn't appear to be any correlation between the rate of knee injury and gear preferences, but that there was a slight difference in the types of injuries between high and low gear riders. Long story short, pick the gears that are comfortable for you at the speed you want to ride at, and there's no real reason to worry about injuring yourself.

There will now be about a hundred posts disagreeing with me. You have been warned!

horatio 

rumrunn6

Haven’t heard of threat of injury dictating cadence but I can understand the question for me I change cadence/gearing to find comfort and change as I ride to stay comfortable. You rode 50 miles so you must have been comfortable how long were you in the saddle?

HTupolev

Use the gear that feels reasonable. If the pedals aren't smoothly giving way to your leg force, gear down. If you feel like an undue amount of your effort is being spent turning your legs in circles, gear up.

Unca_Sam

Cadence and gearing is a personal thing, and there's no set rule. Even accepted wisdom is challenged and upended by the pros (Chris Froome, anyone?). However, cadence and gearing is how your top speed is determined, it's mathematics.

Here's an article from Cycling weekly. Spinning too much is inefficient. Gearing so high that you have to stand on the pedal to keep going is inefficient. You'll end up somewhere in between, and learn when you need to shift to maintain your preferred cadence. You'll maybe build muscle or gain cardio efficiency, and your ability will shift. The contrast is that spinning will make you suck wind and your legs burn, but will train your body to use oxygen more efficiently. Using really tall gears can train your muscle groups to resist the forces so you can push more energy through the pedals. There are potentially easier ways to gain both of those things. Like any training, don't overdo it because an injury can erase all of your gains.

Easy ways to build fitness:
Don't coast (within reason).
If you have a regular route, pick some sections for intervals. Sprint all out for a period of time, recover for a period of time, and repeat. You're training to recover faster, and since it's dictated by effort and not speed, it's always hard! Hard is how you improve!

burnthesheep

Welcome!

It's as personal as a personal toothbrush, your rpm or cadence.

I'm a believer in targeting something 85 or more for "general" riding. It may go under if the gear you are in for a hill (or head wind) is all you have available. I feel that spinning a bit more than grinding is easier on the knees.

85 isn't magic, it just seems like a number to me that slower is starting to grind a bit and over it might be tougher to achieve for some. We're not all built the same.

Even when I was new and weak on the bike, I always spun a lot. Live average mid-90s for a ride counting the slower parts.

That said, so long as your body tells you it's OK, you can do some lower RPM workouts once in a while so that you do have that capability.

Hope that's at least a tiny bit helpful, and enjoy!

harvillo

Thanks everyone. Good thing (and don’t laugh) but I started at an average of 10 mph. I’m pushing 14 now. I ride a combination of flats and hills so the cardio is doing well. Heart rate down to about 57 from 76 resting.

zandoval 

Man... That's the secret. Stay comfortable. Years ago I got a good ride in. Stopped to talk to a few people, ate a sack lunch, checked out some cows, even took a nap... I got back in the evening. Oddly I had travelled about 62 miles... Fun Fun FUN.

Here is another thing you'll find. Modern bikes have about 24 gears but you really only use about five gear combinations on a relaxed ride... Go Figure.

livedarklions

Keep doing 50 mile rides and you'll continue to get faster (or lots of 20 mile ride or whatever). It pretty much happens no matter what you do, the more you ride the faster you get. Like I said above, I ride in very high gears because that's what's most efficient and comfortable to me. I vary my cadence and, to tell you the truth, I don't bother measuring it. I've done many dozens of rides greater than a century (solo) in the past three years, and my knees are, if anything, better than before I started this. I'm typing this while getting ready for a 140 mile ride today, btw.

I doubt that you'd like my gearing/cadence combination because I am admittedly something of a mutant, but the point is that we all have varying combinations of muscle and cardiovascular strengths and weaknesses that will make what is comfortable for you different from other people.

livedarklions

I do absurd amounts of riding (my record is 168 miles in a day, and have done several 140+ mile rides this summer), and the secret for me is to keep it fun. Take breaks whenever I feel like it, stop for a meal, go to a zoo, whatever. Ride fast when I feel like it, lay back when I don't. For me, the fact that the bike can actually take you places is its biggest advantage as a fitness activity, even if the place it's taking you is just a good place to see cows. No one ever got hit by a car on an exercise machine, but they never get to know how much fun it is to have a deer cross your path, either.

drobotnik

Somehow I wind up not biking for long stretches and then throwing myself back into it. Back in my early twenties I stopped racing and then just decided it was time to get back on the bike. But my right knee was killing me. It clicked and clicked and felt like someone was running a drill through my kneecap.

Orthopedist was a cyclist and he did two things: 1) fit me for a brace to keep my knee in line, 2) told me not to push a hard gear, either go with a higher cadence or a compact crank.

I didn’t want to give up membership to the big ring club so I adjusted my chain line and ran 53xsomethingdumb at high cadence. Eventually as my muscles came back they held my knee in place and I ditched the brace.

So now when I jump back into cycling, my mindset is this: high cadence for cardio and general fitness, hard gears for strength training done in structured reps.

Less force on easier gears at high cadence will still build muscle, but it will also fine tune the muscles to support that faster movement and make strength training easier on the joints.

WizardOfBoz

There is physiological knowledge around "optimum" cadence, but anything in physiology is highly variable depending upon the individual. Basically, if you have the cadence fast enough so that the force you are exerting is low enough your legs can recover on each revolution. If you get to too high a force (too low a gear), your legs have a hard time recovering and your overall sustainable power output falls.

But generally folks feel most comfortable in the 60-90 (or so) rpm for cadence. I like about 85 myself.

Sounds like you are finding your way in this matter - good luck and good riding.

sheddle

Recent article I read said that bikes were one part transportation, one part exercise, and one part therapy. I love the third part the most.

livedarklions

I'd add one part excuse for finding a good lunch 50-80 miles from home, but I think that might just be me.