Originally Posted by
Pezzle
Hello all, I am an Athena at 230 lbs trying to strengthen my legs, get my fast twitch muscles motoring and lose some weight.
Everywhere I ride around this part of New Jersey is anything but flat. For every downhill 'wee!' I get, I am met with another huff and puff hill. Sometimes, really steep ones. I'm starting to love it. I get all pumped up now when I see it and go "come on! bring it!" but I often end up going pretty slow by comparison, even though I'm working extremely hard. It's kind of embarrassing as other cyclists whiz past me.
I don't know how to gear up correctly for hills. I think my bike is TOO adjustable for me. I tend to stay on 2-3 or 1-5 for hills, but can't seem to get past that. I am starting to think that part of this stems from my saddle being too low and my knees hitting the bottom of my ribs. What do you think?
Who else loves hills?
It depends on your bicycles gearing, and your bicycles fit. If your knees hit your ribs when pedalling, your saddle is miles too low. On a standard bicycle, it should be impossible to have the bicycle upright, sitting on the saddle and touch the ground. There are two ways of fixing this, first is have someone who is knowledgeable about it, help you adjust the saddle properly. Some riders will get a professional bike fitting done. You want more of a touring fitting rather then a race fitting done.
The second method, have someone hold the bike upright or put the bike on a trainer. Put your feet on the pedals, now put one heel on a pedal and straighten your leg out the pedal crank should be pretty much parallel with your leg at this point, you should be able to lock your knee in that position, if it's bent, then your saddle is too low, if you can't reach, it's too high.
Now as to gears, if your bicycle has dérailleur shifting where the chain moves from sprocket to sprocket, there should be 2 or 3 on the front, and between 5 and 10 on the back. Forget the back (right shifter) for a moment, if you have 3 on the front, this is ranges of gears, one is quite small, the next on is larger, the next one is the largest. The small one is low range, used for steeper climbing and dealing with stiff headwinds. The middle range is for flat and near flat ground, the high range is for downhill and stiff tailwinds. What some riders do, is get a bike computer with cadence, which measures pedal RPM, the target range for RPM is between 80 and 100, so you pick gears that enable you to pedal in this RPM range easily. These days I don;t even look at speed, I just get to the proper RPM, and motor on. New riders are often quite a bit lower then 80, but once you can get there, you will notice things start to get easier when your up there.
You really need to deal with that saddle though.