How To Sprint Faster, Climb Better, Descend Smoothly & More
Five easy steps to improve your cycling and reap instant speed.
To be clear: Improving your fitness, raising your lactate threshold, and building your ability to produce enough wattage to toast bread (or at least your riding buddies’ legs) takes time and hard work. There’s just no shortcutting that. What often gets overlooked, however, is all the little (call them marginal, if you must) gains you can make by refining your technique and becoming a better rider overall. Working on these skills now can make you faster on your very next ride.
With that in mind, here’s one quick change you can make to each riding skill in order to ride faster and more efficiently.
To climb a hill faster, you often have to start slower so you can ramp up your pace as you get closer to the top instead of fading back to a grind. Exercising this discipline is nearly as hard as the hill itself for most riders. But it’s well worth practicing. Just as with sprinting, the first step is starting in an easier gear. Punching a tall gear—no matter how good you feel at first—into a climb is a recipe for cooked legs. Click into a gear you can spin at least 70 rpm and keep your effort level below threshold, at about a six effort level on a one to 10 scale. As you work your way up, gradually tick up the pace, increasing your effort to a seven, then to an eight. When the top is within sight, get out of the saddle and crank it over the top.
RELATED: 6 Steps to Faster and Easier Climbing
3. Shift More Seamlessly
4. Descend More Smoothly
Ironically, some of the best climbers lose the most time on the descents, because they never bother working on the downside. Obviously, if all descents were a perfectly straight line, it wouldn’t be an issue. It’s those corners that cause a quandary. To carve them more confidently, concentrate on one thing: Your weight distribution, says Verheul. “Put your inside hand on the drops and the outside foot down with the crank at 6:00. Those two points are where 80 per cent of your weight should be, with the remaining 20 per cent on the saddle.” That position keeps enough weight on your front and rear tires to help them grip. You want less weight on your saddle than your outside pedal because your leg is better at absorbing little bumps and keeping tires on the ground than your butt is, says Verheul.