Cycling Upgrade Priorities

 Everyone wants to know: "What can I buy to make my bike faster?"

And the stock answer is, for some reason, so unsatisfying.

The best bang-for-the-buck looks like this:

  1. Bike fit
  2. Coaching/training plan
  3. Power meter
  4. Heart rate monitor (slightly cheaper than power meter, but also less bang-for-buck)
  5. Yoga and strength training
  6. Actual bike components
Getting a bike fit is boring. You spend a bunch of money so someone can tell you to spend even more money on unsexy stuff like stems and handlebars. Maybe some spacers for your pedals and a shoe insert. These changes have two huge effects: you're more comfortable on the bike (and can train more), and you'll be more efficient about putting power down (and can go faster/train harder).

The next thing is actual coaching, or a training plan of some sort. If you're not training smart, then you'll eventually plateau. Training harder, at that point, just leads to burnout and injury. A coach will help you figure out how to actually get stronger and fitter, and these things will lead to a big improvement in the efficiency of the time you spend training.

Training plans are helped with a power meter (or indoor trainer). A power meter allows you to be mostly objective about your training. In the same way that a weightlifting plan can prescribe five sets of three reps at 90% of your one-rep-max, a power meter allows you to prescribe four sets of eight minutes at 90% of threshold, separated by two minutes of rest at 50% of threshold. This gives you a super precise means of measuring and making progress, as well as providing invaluable feedback during your ride about the sustainability of your pace.

A good heart rate monitor is about a fraction of the price of a power meter, so you can get some objective feedback here too. However, this feedback is not nearly as precise, and so the training recommendations are much more vague. "Forty minutes at Zone 2 heart rate" or "Twenty minutes at Zone 2 heart rate." You can't do precise smaller intervals because heart rate is slow to respond and isn't precise enough to differentiate between interval types as much.

Finally, yoga and strength training will help with your ability to hold a posture without injury or pain. This allows for a more aggressive bike fit, which makes you faster. Stronger legs from strength training will make you faster, especially on the sprints, and the improved core strength will allow you to ride longer. If you're doing mountain biking or gravel cycling, the extra arm strength will also help with technical maneuvers.

And then there's upgrading your actual bike. Upgrading your bike will make you faster, right now, and then that's it. It may give you a few seconds edge over where you were previously, but it's not a real fitness gain, it's an equipment gain. If you aren't pushing yourself to get stronger, then you won't ever get stronger. There's only so much that a maximally aerodynamic 13lb bike can do for your speed, and you're going to notice improvements to your body and training far more than most components, even if they take longer to become apparent.

Thus the advice to "don't buy upgrades, ride up grades."

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Jamis Bike Comparison: Coda vs Sequel vs Renegade

Jamis released the Sequel recently.  It's a more modern competitor of sorts to the Jamis Coda series.  The Renegade is their gravel/adventure bike, but these kinds of bikes are fantastic commuters typically.  Let's compare these bikes. EDIT: I've appended a brief "test ride" comparison to the end. Frame The Coda and Sequel are running a Reynolds 520 steel frame.  The Renegade has a 6061 aluminum frame.  The Coda and Renegade have an extra water bottle mount on the bottom of the downtube. Geometry Here are the geometries for a medium bike on both: +----------+-------+-------+---------------+------------+------------+------------+------------+-----------+---------+-----------+-----------+ | Bike     | Stack | Reach | Top Effective | Head Angle | Seat Angle | Chain Stay | Wheel base | Fork rake | BB Drop | Head Tube | Standover | +----------+-------+-------+---------------+------------+------------+------------+------------+-----------+---------+--------
Read more

Lezyne Mega XL GPS vs Wahoo Elemnt Bolt

Image
EDIT HISTORY: This post was initially published in February 2019, and updated in the summer when some firmware updates landed. Those firmware updates fixed a number of problems, but not all of them. It was updated again in October 2019 to try out the new firmware, which caused many of the old problems to resurface, effectively ruining the device. I've owned the Wahoo Elemnt Bolt for a while, and I like it. It has poor in-app route creation, and the battery life could be better. ( see my whole review here ) The Lezyne Mega XL GPS came out recently and seems like a better fit for bikepacking. Lezyne advertises a 48 hour battery life and much improved offline navigation and maps. It's also $50 cheaper. If the Lezyne delivers on it's promise, then it would be a compelling choice. I got it to test out and see how it works in real life scenarios. Side by side comparison tl;dr: The Lezyne has dramatically better route creation from the phone app. The Lezyne has bett
Read more

Drop Bar Conversions

So I've got a drop bar Mukluk. It's awesome. Here's what you need to know in order to successfully do a drop bar conversion: Geometry This step is really important, because it will determine if the end result will fit you. It would really suck to finish the rather expensive conversion and have a bike that was too big! The geometry of the bike will change. While flat handlebars are, well, flat, drop bars have significant extra reach associated with them. The Salsa Cowchipper has a reach of 68mm, and the Woodchipper has a reach of 56mm. The Salsa Rustler handlebars that came stock on my Mukluk had a 11 degree backsweep, which worked out to roughly -20mm of reach when I measured it. So, we're talking a total reach difference of 88mm. The stock stem on the Mukluk is 60mm, and you can get 30mm BMX stems, which gets us to a 58mm difference. What I found is that your lower back angle doesn't change as much as you might expect due to the narrower bars. If we d
Read more