Gears are the most under-used feature on a lot of bikes. Plenty of people pick one gear that feels vaguely normal, leave it there, and then heave against every hill and headwind as if the shifters were decoration. Using them well is a small skill that makes every ride easier on your legs, your lungs, and your knees, and it becomes automatic within a week of paying attention to it.
What the gears are for
The job of a gear is to keep your legs turning at a comfortable rate whatever the ground is doing. On the flat you want to roll along without spinning wildly or straining; going uphill you want an easier gear so your legs keep turning instead of grinding to a halt; on a fast descent a harder gear lets you keep contributing instead of pedalling thin air. The gear is the dial you turn to keep that feeling of comfortable, steady effort constant while the road changes underneath you.
Spin lightly, don’t grind
If there’s one habit to take from this, it’s to spin. A light, fairly quick turn of the pedals is far kinder to your body and easier to sustain than heaving a big gear round slowly.
Shift before the hill, not on it
The most useful timing habit in cycling: change down as you approach a climb, while you still have speed and the chain is under light load, rather than waiting until you’re already struggling halfway up.
A derailleur, the exposed type of gears on most bikes, can only shift while you’re pedalling, and it shifts badly when you’re stamping hard on the pedals. So if you wait until the hill has already slowed you to a desperate heave, the shift you need most is the one the bike does worst, and it may clunk, skip, or drop the chain. Change early, keep spinning, and the climb starts from a comfortable place.
The shift, in four beats
- AnticipateSee the hill, the corner, or the stop coming, and plan the gear you'll want.
- Ease offKeep pedalling, but take the hard pressure off for a moment.
- Shift one stepChange a single gear at a time so the chain moves cleanly.
- Push againFeel the new gear settle, then put the power back on.
Which lever does what
On a bike with two sets of gears, your left hand and right hand do different jobs. The left shifter moves the chain between the front chainrings, which are big jumps: think of them as broad ranges, an easy range for hills and a harder range for flat and fast. The right shifter moves the chain across the rear cogs in smaller steps, for the fine adjustments you make constantly as the road tips up and down. Most of your shifting is the right hand making small tweaks; the left hand is for a decisive change when the terrain really changes. Bikes with a single front chainring or a hub gear simplify this to one shifter, which is part of their appeal.
Skip the diagonal extremes
The chain doesn’t like being dragged across a steep sideways angle. Running the largest front chainring together with the largest rear cog, or the smallest with the smallest, stretches the chain diagonally, which is noisy, wears things faster, and can rub.
You don’t have to think about this hard. Just know that if the chain is complaining with a rattle or a grind in a particular gear, you’re probably in one of the diagonal extremes, and moving the front shifter to bring the chain back toward a straighter line usually quiets it.
It becomes second nature fast
None of this needs studying. Take a quiet, flat street, ride up and down it, and deliberately run through every gear so you feel what each does and where the shifters sit under your fingers. Then try a small hill and practise shifting down before it rather than on it. After a ride or two you’ll stop thinking about gears at all, which is exactly the point: they’re there to make the riding easier, so that you can forget them and just go.
Good gearing habits
That's all of them — you're set. ✓
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