Learn Road Bike Gearing Tips

Video Transcript

"Like we want on a mountain bike, we have a choice of several different size ranges for both our smallest cog and largest cog on a road bike. If you're used to mountain biking, you probably want to go with one of the larger available sizes. In this specific case, for the Shimano nine speed, the largest cog you can get is a 27. The overall gear range that gives me is 12-27, which, there's a drawback to that in that I have a wider range -- a bigger jump -- between cogs, which isn't quite as smooth, but it allows me to have significantly lower climbing gears than I would otherwise. I can swap things out, like a 23-tooth cassette like this -- this is just the top three cogs, but the 23-tooth cassette is going to give me tighter spacing in the mid-range of the cassette, where I should be spending most of my time. Which is nice, for those slight changes in pace, you can really keep putting out the same effort instead of having to really spin a gear that's far too easy or really chug in a gear that's too hard. So, just know that the largest cassette that you can run with a road-style derailleur is between 27 and 30 teeth, depending on the manufacturer. If you want a bigger cassette like you could have on your mountain bike -- what you can do, if you're running Shimano stuff, is you can change out to a mountain bike derailleur from a road derailleur -- something with a longer cage. It's designed to shift across more teeth, and it's going to enable you to work a little bit easier getting up the hills."