Some Easy Tips to Help You Find Your Ideal Tyre Pressure
Dialling in tyre pressure for lower rolling resistance and improved comfort isn't hard - listen to learn how.
For a long time in cycling, tyre pressure wasn’t much of a talking point. For a good part of my career, tyre pressure stories weren’t a thing. On the road, the typical advice you’d hear was “Pump your tyres to the maximum pressure printed on the sidewall.” When I started mountain biking—which was just prior to the suspension revolution—my tyre pressure was “as much as necessary to prevent flatting constantly on rocky East Coast rails while riding a rigid steel bike.” (That was about 45 psi, as I recall.)
But today, tyre pressure is a hot topic. We are now more aware of the role it plays in speed and efficiency. You can give credit to many factors: the rolling resistance investigations of Jan Heine, Al Morrison, and Tom Anhalt; equipment trends such as riding with power meters, tubeless tyres, and disc brakes (which improve clearance and allow the use of wider tyres); and wider tyres. Then there are the advancements in the tread design, casing materials, and tyre construction. tyres and tyre pressure are among the topics I get asked about most.
Tyre pressure is both cool and frustrating. Cool because you can literally make your bike faster for free; it doesn’t cost you anything to experiment with air pressure. But frustrating because there is no such thing as a perfect tyre pressure. Variations in equipment, road surfaces, and rider weight make it nearly impossible to come up with an easy answer to the question, “What pressure should I run?”
Still, I can help you get closer to a more ideal pressure for your needs. Up top, there’s a short audio story where I chat with Silca’s Josh Poertner. We offer up some advice on some relatively easy, low-tech ways to seek out your best pressure. Note that this advice is predicated on one of the key findings of the more recent research into tyre pressure: Lower is almost always more efficient than higher, so when searching for your best pressure—or if you’re unsure—it’s usually best to go lower than higher. And, as always, remember to be safe.
Still unsure what pressure you should be riding? Silca has a great online calculator RIGHT HERE.
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