Cycling For Beginners Pt1: Your Local Bike Shop

Описание: Cycling has had a bit of a renaissance in the last few years. It’s no longer the domain of strange middle age men who wear skin tight lycra and shave their legs; now you can wear skin tight lycra, shave your legs and still be considered a perfectly respectable adult.

This new found popularity is possibly due to many factors: Its fun, good for the environment and has amazing health benefits. What ever the reason, more and more people are getting on their bikes be it for sport, leisure or for transport.

The big question, then, is how do you get in to it?

At the risk of stating the bleeding obvious, you will, at the very least, need some kind of bike and the best place to pick up one of these is actually your local bike shop or LBS as people in the know call it.

If you’ve not bought one recently, buying a bike can be a little intimidating but a chat with someone at you local bike shop should help with demystifying most, if not all of your initial choices. They will be more than happy to give you plenty of help and advice and suggest different bikes best suited to your needs. At this point I would getting on first name terms with the owner because if you stay with cycling for any length, you’ll probably end up spending a lot of time there.

Bikes come in many different flavours but for the sake of brevity, lets just talk about the main two: road and mountain. As the name suggests, road bikes are designed for riding on tarmac, be that in the city or in the country. They have thin wheels and are relatively light.

Mountain bikes, on the other hand, are generally heavier and more sturdy and were originally designed for off road use but they do work pretty well on the road and make excellent commuting bikes.

Choosing which type of bike you want to ride will probably be your first decision when taking up cycling and this will depend very much on the type of you riding you want to do. The next decision will be how much you want to spend.

While cycling isn’t exactly cheap it doesn’t have to be prohibitively expensive. Luckily, there is a bike for every budget. The important thing is to get a half decent bike- either new or used- that fits you and you will enjoy riding. Its much better to buy a well fitting, low cost bike than a top of the range, expensive machine that you’ll ride a couple of times and never ride again because you don’t like it. A correctly fitting bike will not only help you to ride further and faster, it will also prevent potential injuries and strains.

So what about buying a bike on-line? The main potential benefit of buying from an internet retailer is the price. While it may well be slightly cheaper, you will not have anywhere near the same level of help and advice that you would get if you went to your local bike shop. If you are lucky, an on line retailer may have some kind of telephone help line or chat thing but this is usually to answer technical questions about the item you are interested in. Your local bike shop comes in to its own because they will not only advise you on make and model but, more importantly, sizing. Just as you wouldn't buy ill fitting shoes or clothes, you wouldn’t want a bike that didn’t fit properly.

If you can afford it, you could always pay and couple of hundred pounds or dollars for a full-on bike fit. These will take a series of body measurements and very accurately calculate the exact dimensions of your perfect bike. Most shops, though, will do a basic bike fit for around a hundred pounds or 150 dollars which can sometimes be discounted from the price of a new bike. If nothing else, your local bike shop will give you free sizing advice based on actually looking at you and measurements that you give them.




If you would like to follow my efforts on the bike you can follow me on Strava. My profile is here:   / strava  

You are also very welcome to join my virtual cycling club on Strava. By sharing our rides we can help and encourage each other to reach our fitness goals.

You can join the club here:   / strava  

and the Chernobyl Cycling Club Facebook group here:
  / chernobylcyclingclub