Road Bike Tips & Advice

"Hi, this is Aaron Phillips for Expert Village. Let's talk about choosing the right bike for you. I am here with a road bike. This is a road bike that is made for racing. So let's say you know, you have been hanging around on the couch the last few summers and you are certified member of the I watch the Tour de France club and you are ready to get off the couch, stop watching that TV and start trying to turn it out like those guys do and you know forgetting and you decide you don't want to go and you just actually want to ride. This the bike for you. So head down to your local bike shop and start talking road bike with those guys. Road bikes are a wonderful thing to have, if you just want, if you just got to have a dose of speed and you want to get out on that road and just get that sort of adrenaline rush of arching through the turns, leaning into those turns and really testing your tires, your spirit, your will, your aerobic capacity, you name it, the road bike is the thing that you want to be on. This road bike as you can see, you have got a little bit of a higher saddle than your bars and what that does is put you in a little bit more aggressive body position, so when you are riding on this bike and you are riding on a typical position with your hands and these brakes hubs, ready to shift and you are sitting in that saddle, you are pretty aerodynamic. You can also, with the bar that you have on a road bike, this is called a drop bar or a racing handlebar, you can get into these drops on the downhills or even on a flat if you are in a head wind and you can get a lot of aerodynamic advantage with this bike and there by allowing you to just keep your speed up whether you are racing, you are training, you are just that weekend warrior wanting to have a little dose of speed on the weekends. The frame material of most road bikes; road bikes focus on lightweight. This is, the frame material here, is aluminum, it is a Columbus scwadge aluminum and it is extruded and butted. I won't get into the sort of engineering details but there is all kinds of stuff that makes this bike lighter. For example, the tubes are thicker at the junctions, inside you have got multiple thickness of the junction and then in the middle of the tube you are almost completely hollow, it is like your Easter bunny rabbit there, almost completely hollow here. So this is aluminum the main two triangles, this front triangle and this back triangle of the bike are made of aluminum. There is a little bit of carbon fiber on this bike. The seat post is made out of carbon fiber, as is the front fork, this is a carbon fiber front fork, carbon fiber seat post. And carbon fiber is a wonderful way to make a bike light and rigid and strong and very responsive. So, that is what you are looking for. A lot of new road bikes, if you are into spending a couple of thousands of dollars or more, are going to come with fully carbon frames. That gives you a little bit more just lightweight than aluminum and you can get bikes that weigh as few as fifteen pounds. In international competitions like the Tour de France and the Tour de California here in the U.S. in the climbing stages the riders have to keep their climbing bikes below about fourteen point eight pounds and they have difficulty doing that because light bikes with today's frame materials can be so light, that they can easily come under that fourteen point eight pounds weight limit."