The Top 4 Basic Bike Riding Skills for Beginners
Imagine the thrill of riding fast. You feel absolute confidence with your basic bike riding skills. Your pedals spin with ease. It feels like there’s no chain.
It’s an absolute rush!
You finish your ride and put a foot back down to the pavement. Look at your average speed: 40kph!
Your face becomes a wide happy smile. Life feels like one beautiful ride.
Let’s get you going on this beautiful ride … your Ultimate Ride.
It’s all about beating back your anxiety, getting out there and getting started.
Put comfort, skill and safety together, and you’ll become the confident rider you want to be.
1. Find Comfort in the Different Hand Positions
Changing hand position is good for more than hand comfort. It’s also good for your neck, low back and butt.
Road bikes have three basic positions to hold the handlebars: the tops, hoods and drops. Each position changes your torso angle, creating a chain reaction of adjustments: how you hold your head, the tension in your low back and the pressure points on your seat.
A. The Tops
We call the straight flat top part of the bars the tops. Putting your hands up here shifts more weight onto your sit bones.
It’s a good position when you’re riding uphill, because it adds leverage for pushing the pedals over. But it makes you the least aerodynamic, as your chest catches a lot of wind. It’s also a little less safe because your fingers are far from the brake levers.
Here’s an expert way to use the tops for greater safety though.
Look at one side of the tops and you’ll see it’s a long lever extending from your stem. It’s the lever that turns your wheel left or right.
Remember your high school physics class about levers, and the “leverage” they create? The longer the lever, the more work it can do with small movements.
Now, think about grabbing your water bottle for a drink. One hand falls to the water bottle, the other stays on the bars.
As you fumble about to grab the bottle, the hand on the bars will also wiggle about. If it’s wiggling around on the long end of that lever – i.e. the hand is near or on the brakehood – the lever-effect will amplify small movements. Your bike will start wobbling across the road.
Instead, put that hand on the tops and very close to the stem. Those little movements lose most of the amplifications from the lever-effect. Your bike will stay riding almost dead-straight as you grab your bottle and drink.
B. The Hoods
The best hand position for comfort and control is with your hands cupping the brake hoods.
A good Local Bike Shop (LBS) bike fit should tune your fit starting in this position. On the hoods your wrist angles are comfortable. And your torso-to-hip angle will settle in a range for low back relief.
Your fingers will be ready to squeeze the brake levers for speed control or click the levers to change gears.
C. The Drops
The drops are the lower hooked areas of your handlebars. Getting your hands down here improves your aerodynamics because it makes your torso almost horizontal.
It’s also the best position for bike handling. Your centre of gravity drops. Your fingers can wrap completely around the bars, yet easily grab the brake levers.
But it has a few drawbacks. Otherwise we’d be riding in the drops all the time. It strains your low back, neck (as you must crank your neck to look up), and adds pressure onto the front area of your seat. Work on your core strength and you’ll be able to ride in the drops for longer chunks of time… and ride faster too!
2. A Simple Skill: Save your legs, not your gears
Do you know what “cadence” means? In bike-speak, it means the number of times one foot makes a complete revolution each minute. Many bike computers will have a sensor that calculates cadence for you.
If your bike computer doesn’t have a cadence function, it’s still quite easy to estimate it yourself. Watch the elapsed seconds on your computer. Count the down-strokes of one pedal during a 6-second time interval. Add a zero to that number and you’ve got your approximate revolutions per minute (rpm).
Everyone has a natural best cadence, usually in the range of 80-100rpm. It’s a good range that balances your power output with your endurance to ride longer distances.
To keep your cadence within this range over varied terrains, we use the gears on our bikes. Hence the saying, “Save your legs, not your gears.” On hills and flats, in headwinds and tailwinds – change your gears to keep your cadence in the 80-100rpm range.
Too many times I see new cyclists mashing their pedaling in a 60rpm range. “But if feels so hard, I must be getting a great workout,” you might say…
Probably not.
If you’re a beginner this will likely mess up your knees. Over time, after you’ve got many miles in your legs, you’ll build up more strength in your knee tendons and ligaments. Then you can try some low cadence / high tension intervals. For now, though, when you’re starting out, use your gears and learn to spin.
3. Look down the road
You will naturally steer your bike where you look. So where do you want to go?
Down the road, through a clear path.
Scan the road ahead for obstacles and debris. See something like a sewer grate? Stare straight at it and it’ll become a target in your mind. You’ll possibly hit it!
Concentrate on a spot about a foot to one side of any road hazard and you’ll be sure to miss it.
When riding with other cyclists, don’t stare down at the rear wheel right in front of you. Look up at the rider’s back and shoulders. Allow your peripheral vision to mind the gap between their back wheel and your front wheel.
Then keep glancing up, over, and around that rider. Be aware of everything else that may be coming your way. The sooner you know what’s coming, the sooner you can react to get out of the way.
4. Be predictable!
A predictable rider is a safe rider. Drive like a car by following all the rules of the road. You see, drivers are expecting everything moving on the roads to be doing the same things they do.
So, use hand signals when turning. Stop for all traffic lights and stop signs – but I’ll allow you a rolling stop if there’s absolutely no traffic coming.
When faced with traffic at an intersection look the other drivers straight in the eyes. Even if you’re both wearing sunglasses, the way they hold their head can tell if they’ve seen you. Even with the right-of-way, you should ride defensive. Expect riders will cut you off. Have your hands ready to brake!
Cycling is one of the best activities to keep you energized for life. Take command of these basic riding skills and become a comfortable, proficient and safe rider!