Whether you're preparing for your first cycling vacation or a local ride, these beginner-friendly tips will help you ride safer, smarter and farther. Learn how to use bike gears, brake safely and ride confidently in traffic with practical tips for new cyclists.
Welcome back to our Beginner Biking Basics series, where I (a Trip Leader and Backroads staff writer) introduce non-cyclists to the basic workings of this unique sport. Think of it as Biking 101—though this article is more like Biking 102. In Part 1 of this series, we tackled bikes and gear. Today, read on for some more hands-on tips about being out on the road.
Of course, I can’t teach you how to ride a bike from my screen to yours. The balancing, steering and pedaling—that part is all you. But what about traffic? Braking? Using your gears for climbs and descents? Believe it or not, there’s plenty of intel that you can take from this page and try out in the real world.
Pedaling & Pausing
Let’s pick up where we left off with a reminder from Part 1 of this series: every Backroads Biking Trip starts with a Day 1 meeting during which we fit each guest to their bike.
Among other things, this means raising or lowering your “saddle,” or seat. The ideal height is such that, at the bottom of a given pedalstroke (when the pedal is at 6 o’clock), your leg is about as fully extended as it can get without locking your knee. Ideal height for what, you ask? Allowing your legs to extend fully like this gets more power out of your pedalstrokes, so you can go farther with less effort.
With that said—and as long as you know that you might be making a trade-off that forces you to work harder—comfort is king. Some newer cyclists feel safer if their seat is low enough that they can sit on it while their tiptoes touch the ground. I personally don’t recommend this: it’s way too low for ideal pedaling, and anyway, this bilateral tippy-toe-touch is not actually the safest way to dismount or kick off. But if this is what you’re used to, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. Run with it for now! Your Trip Leaders will be happy to show you some mounting and dismounting tricks that will help you level up when you’re ready.
Oh, look! The support van! The blessed moment of ice water has arrived... but how do you lean your bike against a wall without it rolling over into a heap? You always want two points of contact, forming a sort of triangle where both the back wheel and the handlebar are touching the wall. This works best when the bike is facing uphill, not downhill. In addition, it’s best practice to lean your bike (or lay it on the ground) with the chainrings facing outward, into the air. That way you minimize the chance that these delicate parts will scrape against some part of the surface they’re leaning on.
Braking Bad
Your Trip Leaders will teach you a mnemonic about your brakes: “Right is rear; left is launch!” This refers to the fact that if you jam on only your front brake (the one in your left hand) while moving at high speeds, you run the risk of turning your bike into a human-sized catapult.
Braking with both hands simultaneously is almost always best. And the best results come from “feathering” your brakes: many short squeezes in quick succession. This also keeps your fingers from getting tired on long downhill sections.
Get Your Rear in Gear
Let’s talk about gears. There is an immense amount of physicality and muscle memory to this, so I’ll warn you: it won’t really make sense until you do it. But read on for an orientation.
Lower gears make it easy to pedal, but give you less power per pedal stroke. Higher gears make it harder to pedal, but a single rotation of the pedals has more power. You generally want to start off in a low gear, much like when you’re driving a manual car. In fact, the whole system works very much like the gears in a car, minus the concept of downshifting (because unlike in a car, when you slow down your pedaling, the bike just coasts). Gym-goers may be served by a different analogy: the highest gears are low weight, high reps. On the lowest gears, you pedal with high weight and low reps to go the same speed.
You can only shift when the wheels are turning. If you shift at a standstill, the bike will seem to do nothing, then once you start moving it will click and ker-chunk laboriously as the chain attempts to fall into its new slot. So plan your shifting a bit ahead, i.e., shift to a low gear before you come to a stop so it’ll be easy to start again. Similarly, if you’re shifting down to climb a hill, it’s best to do it a few seconds before the uphill actually starts. Once you’re crawling up the hill with those high-weight, low-rep pedal strokes barely turning the wheels, shifting becomes a pain.
Most bikes have two shifters, one on each side of the handlebars. The shifter in your left hand is for the front chainring, which only has two or three gears. The shifter in your right hand is for the rear chainring, which can have from seven to eleven gears.
The rear chainring—the one with many gears—is the one you’ll shift with most often. Its gears only have small differences from each other; you can fine-tune freely with them and not interrupt your pedaling rhythm.
On the other hand, the front chainring has just a few mega-gears. Think of these like larger modes, and the gears of the rear chainring like sub-settings within each mode. Use the front chainring to switch into easy, medium or high-resistance mode. Then choose your exact gear within that mode.
It also bears mentioning that when the front chainring is on its highest gear, and the rear chainring is on its lowest gear, they cancel each other out and you get a riding experience somewhat similar to both chainrings being in the middle. This is called cross-chaining, and it can damage your bike and cause a choppier ride. It’s not the end of the world if you end up cross-chaining by accident. But keeping it in mind will allow you to self-diagnose and fix many a mysterious clicking noise.
Rules of the Road
The final thing I want to address is traffic. If you go on a biking vacation, you will share the road with cars at some point. Even if we follow every bike path in town, never using car roads at all is just unrealistic. And that’s okay! What’s important is learning how to do this safely.
The best thing you can do is ride in a predictable straight line, so cars can pass you easily. It also helps to ride single file on roads where there’s a lot of car traffic or less passing space.
While it’s good to ride near the edge of the road surface, don’t ride too near the edge. The center of the road tends to be better maintained and is naturally swept clean daily of gravel and debris by the passing cars. Meanwhile, more bumps, cracks and potholes tend to lurk on the edges. If you’re positive nobody is behind you, feel free to use part of the lane! And when cars do appear behind you, stake out and predictably occupy the amount of space you need to navigate safely along the shoulder.
Compared to the very rare incidents we’ve had with drivers, FAR more accidents happen when our guests become flustered by passing cars and wipe out on the bumpy edge of the road... or fly off the road altogether! Remember: it’s cars’ job to pass you, not yours to move out of the way. Your job is to navigate your own vehicle safely.
In this vein, be aware that bike paths, while wonderful, are not a magic panacea to avoid danger. Accidents often happen due to the blissful brain relaxation that feels possible when you’re cruising along bike paths... blissful but illusory, because even bike paths eventually intersect with roads, are used by pedestrians or encounter other X-factors.
The most important lesson about navigating on your bike in a new place is an obvious one: pay attention.
If you’re an American, you’re likely a driver. That means that you have a fabulously sophisticated set of neural pathways that keep you paying attention to traffic with minimal effort. However, you probably also have a neural switch that shuts this capacity off when you’re on a bike and activates zone-out mode in its place.
I repeat this plea to my guests over and over every year: in order to bike safely, just turn your driving brain on! Keep an eye on what nearby cars, bikes and pedestrians seem like they’re about to do. Don’t do anything suddenly. Pull over if you ever need to regroup—which means getting safely off the road as soon as possible, not coming to a halt blocking traffic. And look both ways before crossing the street.
These basics go a long way, and I’m sure you already know them. All you need to build is the multitasking circuit that pairs them with pedaling. The only way to learn to bike on the road is to get out there and bike on the road!
If you don’t have a bike that works for road rides, rent one. If you feel your town is not safe for biking, drive somewhere better suited and make a day of it. If you don’t know where that might be, ask the staff of your local bike shop! Neither your driveway nor a spin class nor even a car-free greenway will cut it. That’s because what you’re training isn’t the cardio—it’s the driving itself.
Welcome to the Cult (Ahem, Club)
There’s a reason biking is the activity that started Backroads in 1979. It’s just so well suited to seeing the world.
On your bike, you sail along fast enough to activate the endorphins that come from speed—the ones that make us love roller coasters, skiing, surfing and even driving with the windows down. And it’s certainly fast enough to traverse a remarkable set of landscapes in just a few hours, activating that road-trip sense of wonder. Yet, biking allows you to be part of your surroundings in a way that driving does not.
There are so many ways to dip your toe into the magic of biking. Take an e-bike on any one of our trips with bike routes. Sign up for a Dolce Tempo Biking Trip and join a group of fellow e-bikers. Or try a Multi-Adventure Trip with only a few days in the saddle.
Who knows, soon enough you may be embarking on a Biking Trip or joining battery-free enthusiasts on one of our new Unplugged departures, where we leave the e-bikes at home.
If reading this article was the furthest your bike curiosity takes you... that’s okay too! Our Hiking & Walking Trips are still labors of love, and a way to explore hundreds of destinations.
But those of you who suspect that biking might be for you, and you just haven’t discovered it yet…
Go get ‘em.
We’re waiting for you.
