One of the biggest goals many cyclists aim for is to ride faster. It could be for your own satisfaction or even to reach the top of a segment leader board on Strava. Whatever your reason, you won’t want to miss our seven simple top tips to help get you riding faster than ever before.
1 - Lower Your Body Position
One of the main things slowing you down when you cycle is wind resistance. By reducing your frontal area and drag you will be able to slice through the wind and increase your efficiency.
You don’t need a TT/Tri bike to get into an aero position
One of the easiest ways to reduce drag is to simply lower your body position. You don’t need a TT/Tri bike to get yourself in an aero position for short periods of time. Instead of sitting upright in the saddle and being hit by a wall of wind, try lowering your body by leaning closer to your handlebar and tucking in your elbows. This will make a huge difference and you will notice the effect immediately.
2 - Ride With Others
Riding with others can help increase your speed in several ways. It can help to encourage you along your ride and increase your effort levels in order to keep up with others that may be a little faster than you. This will not only help to increase your average speed, but will also increase your fitness levels for future rides.
Riding in a group is not only fun, but can improve your speed too
You can also take it in turns to ride at the front I order to share the brute force of the wind. By switching the cyclist order during group rides, it allows for members to rest, recover and regain some strength ready to face the wind again, which will help you all travel faster.
3 - Pump Up Your Tyres
Having your tyres inflated correctly will help your bike to roll along the road faster, which will help to increase your speed. You should check your tyre pressure before every ride, as even a slight change in temperature can make your tyres go soft which will slow you down.
“More isn’t always better!”
Having them rock hard won’t make you faster though. It used to be believed that you should have super narrow tyres inflated to their maximum PSI in order to go faster. While rolling resistance does increase with lower pressure, several studies show that across various road tyres, rolling resistance increases only slightly, on the order of a few watts of power, even at pressures down to 60 psi on standard road tyres.
Check your tyre pressures at least weekly
Rolling resistance makes up only a tiny fraction of the forces we have to overcome (most is either wind resistance or, on hills, gravity). The biggest differences in rolling resistance aren’t in pressure, but the actual tyre you’re using.
SRAM has an excellent tyre pressure calculator. Click on the button below to try it out.
4 - Get a Professional Bike Fit
Having a well fitted bike will help you to get the maximum efficiency on your rides. It can also improve your comfort, which is definitely a bonus and will mean you can push harder to increase your speed without worrying about hurting yourself.
A professional bike fit consultation will help increase comfort as well as speed
By being professionally fitted to your bike will also help to better your cycling position, which as we said above, will boost your aerodynamic efficiency and therefore your speed.
At LIOS we have a wealth of bike fitting experience.
5 - Listen To Music
Research shows that listening to fast-paced, uplifting music can reduce your perceived effort levels throughout your ride. This is because the music blocks out many fatigue relating symptoms like the feeling of a heavy heartbeat and the lactic acid build up in the muscles meaning you can cycle harder without even noticing.
“Using music that has a beat similar to your target cycling cadence will help you to pedal faster if you are able to match your cadence to the rhythm of the song.”
Cycling with music can really help to give you rhythm on your ride, but remember it may reduce your ability to hear traffic around you. So, make sure you don’t have your music too loud in order to let outside sound in. Also, check over your shoulder at frequent intervals.
6 - Adopt Interval Training
One great way to increase your average speed is to train at speeds above it. This includes cycling for short bursts at higher speeds than your average pace, followed by a period of recovery before you go on to pick up speed again.
You may choose to ride as fast as you can for a set period of time maybe 30 or 45 seconds, then recover for a similar amount of time, or you could use landmarks to decide when to change your speed. For example, riding as fast as you can to the end of the road (or to the village sign when it comes into view!), then slowly down until the end of the next road, then pick up the pace again. We recommend that you trial a few different methods until you find the one that works best for you.
7 - Brake Less
Yes, you may think this is extremely obvious, but it’s surprising how many of us brake too much!
As we all know, braking slows us down, which then requires us to pedal harder to get back up to speed again. By braking unnecessarily, it wastes energy and momentum, which you should try and save for the trickier parts of your ride.
As your confidence grows, as will your rolling speed
One way to do this is to eliminate comfort braking. This happens when you’re rolling downhill or along a fast road and you start to gain speed and go a little faster than you are used to, so you brake to get back to a more comfortable speed. This is fine if you are really finding the speed just a bit too much, but before you decide to do this, check out the route ahead and your surroundings. If it’s nice and quiet, with a good road surface, then why not carry on rolling and enjoy the speed. By adopting this simple rule, it will help to increase your overall speed and riding efficiency; just remember to stay safe!
By incorporating all of these small changes into your cycling routine, it will help you to get on the right track to improving your ride and average speed.
Do you have any tips that you use to help increase your speed? Drop us a message and let us know. We would love to hear from you.
