I own a standard giant 26-speed road bike. Its a recent purchase and still in near perfect condition. Needless to say i hope to keep it that way. Also, sorry in advance if i use the wrong terms or have a false understanding of some things, i'm new. Im a high gear biker, i tend to keep my bike shifted in either 3-5 to 3-8 on staight aways and 3-4 to 3-2 for climbing. My father recently informed me that these habits could wear out my high gears while the others would be fine. A terrible reason to have to buy a new cassette. Anyway my question is; does anyone know what the rough equivalent of 3-5 would be with the front gear set to 2 on a 26 speed?

Welcome to the Forums .

Could you double check how many sprockets you have on your cassette? I'm trying to do the math in my head and I can't quite wrap my head around what combo would provide 26 gears...

If you have 3 chaingrings and 8 cogs that gives you 24 gears. You can count the teeth on them all and then look them up on a gear chart. Or just shift on the other chainrings and learn by doing.

What he is warning you against is "cross chaining".... Being in a gear that forces the chain to go from the most inboard cog to most outboard chainring or vice versa.

Shift into the middle chainring and easier cogs for uphills, experiment.

Post your exact bike model. From there, we can find out what setup you have, and get a more specific answer. Without knowing how many teeth you have on your front chain ring, and your cassette, its not easy to give a good answer.

Take a look at this.

https://www.gear-calculator.com/#

When we talk about gear ratios, its easier to talk about them as the number of teeth on the front chainring, and the number of teeth on the rear cog, such as 53/12 or 39/23.

It's not useful to talk about 3-2, or 3-5 because we don't know the size of your third chainring (which I'm assuming your referring to the outside big ring) or your fifth cog (or even whcih direction your counting from).

+1. Merlin is absolutely right. It is remarkable how many novices (including moi lo these three decades ago) start out thinking that you talk about bike gears like car gears, by some order that you would use to identify them or move through them. As Merlin says, there is not enough standardization to make that practical. With experience most folks just say the number of teeth front and rear as in 32/12 or some such.

i second the idea above, just put it in the second chain ring in the front and experiment. Coming from a 26" wheeled bike with relatively low gears to a larger framed 700c wheeled bike with higher gearing I've had to relearn how to shift, whereas I would almost always keep the fornt chainring in third before, now I keep it in second most of the time till I really need to build up speed in downhills and flats. Your fitness level and cadence preference makes what fits YOU different too.

Ride enough and you WILL wear out the gears and chain, but that's what they are for - to be used. You should get many 10's of thousands of miles out of each. When possible try to keep the cross chaining to a minimum, that is having the chain go from the smallest to the largest gears front to back- or visa versa, if that's the gear you need then by all means USE IT, if you can shift up in the front and down in the rear (or visa versa) to get a similar gearing that works then that would be a tad easier on the chain / gear wear.

Again, just try and use what fits YOU.

Being in high gears typically means low cadence, high torque, also known as mashing. It works reasonably well on flats, but if you're doing hills it can put a lot of stress on your knees. Starting out, its good to be able to get your cadence up above 60 rpm.

Also, I assume you mean 24 speed (3x8)?
With a triple, the best shifting strategy is to match the front gear to the terrain, and fine tune with the back gear. This allows for quick shifting and you'll hardly be cross-chained (small/small or big/big).

Inner front -- Mostly climbing
Middle -- Small rolling hills, strong headwind
Outer -- Flats & downhill

Infrequent cross-chaining is perfectly fine, the realistic amount of wear is small. So if you're in the largest gear and you come to a small rise, its perfectly acceptable to downshift and go big/big for 20 sec to get up a hill. You don't want to be cruising like that for 15 minutes though.

Wow, a reply within twenty minutes. Very impressive! To answer your question you guys have reminded me that 3 times 8 is 24 not 26. Sorry about that