Originally Posted by
ItsJustMe
In emergency stopping situations, only the front brake matters. If you are using your front brake to maximum efficiency, there won't be enough weight on the rear wheel to make any difference anyway.
You should practice in a parking lot or something until you can judge how much to pull your front brake so you're stopping as fast as possible without flipping over the front wheel.
Also, you'll get more stopping power if you can shift your weight back. If you have the reach for it and practice it, you can even drop your butt off the back of the seat and drop your weight way down. I wouldn't suggest trying that until you're pretty good at modulating your brakes though.
Here we go again
Both brakes matter in maximum stopping efforts. The front brake does the bulk of the braking work but the rear brake is still offering a not insignificant fraction...10%... of the overall braking ability of the bike. If you are braking so hard that the rear wheel isn't involved in the equation, you passed the limit of maximum braking power. Ask any mountain biker and they will tell you the same thing - once the rear wheel starts to skid, release pressure on the
front brake. This puts the rear wheel back in contact with the ground and increases the overall braking ability of the system.
You can also increase the deceleration capability of the bicycle system by moving your center of gravity down and back as you brake the bike. This does not increase the front wheel's ability to brake but increases the rear wheel's ability to slow the bike. A tandem, for example, with it's longer wheelbase and greater weight over the rear wheel will decelerate a bike at 0.8 g vs 0.5g for a single rider bike. Moving back and down while braking makes your single bike more like a tandem.
If you want to learn how to brake, Dheorl, get a mountain bike and go use it like it was intended...off-road. The kinds of riding conditions that you find will much worse than any conditions you'll find on pavement. Learn how to brake on mud, loose dirt, roots, rocks, gravel, etc. and you'll never need to worry about panic stops on the road.