Ranking The Internet s Best Worst Cycling Advice

You can find advice online about pretty much anything these days and cycling is no exception, but that doesn't always mean it's good advice. So this week I thought it would be fun to troll some popular Facebook groups, Reddit threads and news websites for cycling advice so that we could rate it brutally. You may remember our brutal rating system from a previous episode. I have reinstated it. At the very top we have God tier where you can rate the very best pieces of advice. The next category down is solid, followed by it's complicated, then no thanks and at the very bottom get in the bin. So I'm going to read out the advice. The caveat as always with these things is it's just our opinion. This is just a bit of fun. It's just a bit of fun guys. Don't get up. Don't get too upset. You can get upset if you want, but we're just going to have some fun with it. Yeah, cool. Okay. The advice. This is all advice I have read from the internet. Number one, it's not worth going lower than a 105 group set. You'll just end up upgrading anyway. Bin. Yeah, it is in the bin. 105 is now 12 speed wireless hydraulic. You don't need that. Well, it's not just wireless, but there's presumably a mechanical version, isn't there? Yeah. I think the trickle down on group sets has happened. We rode the new Claris. It's old Claris. It's been out for a bit. No, Tiagra Hydraulic. Oh, it's Tiagra Hydraulic. The Tiagra Hydraulic. Oh, that's brilliant, isn't it? It's basically like Ultegra Dura-Ace from like 10 years ago or something or other. It's absolutely fantastic. It's like properly, properly good. I was chatting to... it depends on the type of rides you do, of course. I was with Jake Thorpe, the guy who cycled most of the world. And he was like, he wishes he could downgrade his group set. Next time he'd buy a group set, he wouldn't be going for 10 speed, one by force, which I think he has ridden. He got it second hand, has ridden it the whole time he's been exploring, adventuring. And he's like, I wish I could go for nine speed. Nine speed mechanical. Barely have to lube your chain. There's enough gear range. The gaps in the gears are fine. It's kind of true. Yep. Interesting. We actually have an opinion that if you are upgrading stuff, the group set is going to be one of, if not the last thing that you faff about with. Obviously, you know, there's scenarios where that isn't perhaps true, but in most it is. And yes, if you're going for your fastest ever time, then whatever. So it's going in the bin? Yeah, I'd put that in the bin. Nice. Okay. Strong start. Brutal. Next piece of advice. If you want to get faster, you need a coach. Without upsetting all of our friends who are coaches, they are not a necessity to get faster. I see. I'm going to take a different stance on this. And I think it's more about how you define faster. Oh, faster. So if you're talking about faster, because you are a junior athlete that is legitimately trying to become a semi or actual professional athlete, then you probably are going to benefit from a coach. I think probably a lot of club riders would benefit from coaching, not necessarily a coach for fitness, but things like how to ride in a group safely. I think coaches do have a place, but I don't think for most people they need a coach to be faster. And I'd probably challenge them why they even need to be faster in the first place. It's the word need, which is not quite right in that statement. So where are we putting it? We can go different places. Does it have to be defined? I would like it to be defined so I can do a little graphic where it's on a... So if you said it's complicated... It is complicated, thinking about it more. Because you're right, in the example of junior who wants to get faster, the net result of having a coach, which is not like, okay, he'll give you some training plans, but really they will give you some training plans. It's more having someone to talk to when things aren't going right, and keeping your head screwed on, and helping that process, and just making sure you don't go crazy because it's probably going to take you a few years to get good. I also learned a hell of a lot from having a coach when I did, that was then I was able to apply for lots of things afterwards. But that was at a point where I basically said to myself, I am going to train like a professional athlete and see what happens. I was just really curious to see how strong I could get. And as a result of that, I got a coach, and I had a good experience of it, and I got really fast. Because that was what I was specifically trying to do that. I was trying to see how far I could get into the elite space. What I learned is I can't. But what I learned from it is that I couldn't, and that was actually a good thing for me. But I think for people that just are thinking, right, I just want to be faster than my mates on the group ride, or I want to keep up with the group ride, I would probably say there are lots of other things that you can do. There's so many generic training plans these days that will get you faster. And most of the time, actually, all you need is just better consistency. And actually, Coach Pete, which we have had on the podcast, Pete Hawkins, that was actually one of the things that he said that I took away of and helped me get back into being more consistent on the bike is just getting that consistency throughout a week, week after week, week after week, obviously, making sure you have sufficient rest. It does make a huge difference to getting faster if that's what's important to you. Do you need a coach? No. Will some people benefit from a coach? Yes. If you're thinking about getting faster, is that the starting point? Absolutely not. So I think for me, it's complicated, but most people don't need a coach. Fair enough. Agreed. Okay, next one. I'm in a right ranty mood today, aren't I? Yeah, you are. I love it. It's the opposite. I thought you were going to go with the coach thing. He's paid by a big coach. Right, okay. Avoid using your front brake. It'll send you over the handlebars. So this is a no thanks for me. I've definitely heard that. Well, in some situations, it will. You squeeze it really hard when you're going down a hill. I've taken that to heart, and I barely ever use my front brake. So if you are new to cycling, it, as a piece of information, is probably useful. However, the power of your front brake is significantly more than the power of your back brake. And therefore, if you are an experienced cyclist, or if you ride lots, you want to learn how to modulate your brakes, which effectively means not just being on or off, having different degrees with which you pull your brakes. And what you will learn over time is that your front brake is how you stop the fastest. Especially if you're going in a straight line, much safer. If you're going around a corner, touch your front brake. You're going down. Well, you're not going down. You're more like you're not going around a corner anymore. It will straighten you out. Brake before. If it's wet slash slippery, then that's when the front brake potentially becomes more problematic. If you're going around a corner, you can drag your back brake without any issues. I think you should have done your braking before the corner. So there is actually a really good article on this. So some of the old school listening to this will have heard of Sheldon Brown before. Sheldon Brown was like a legend of old school cycling. I think it was maybe in the noughties. He basically built a website, which is like cycling encyclopedia. And he has a whole article on braking and how brakes work and effective braking. So that is actually a really, really good thing. And I ended, I don't know why, but I ended up reading this article many, many, many years ago. And that was what made me realize, oh, actually, the front brake is really, really important. But the important thing is you don't just smash it on, especially now there are so many more disc brakes, which are unbelievably fantastic. I was actually riding my bike on Sunday a couple of days ago, and it was greasy road tires on a greasy bit of tarmac. And I absolutely hooned on my back brake. Well, I was actually just trying to scrub some squeak off of my brakes because they've got a bit dusty and a bit dirty. So one of the ways I do that is I just like smash them on to try and like burn off the dirt. So I whacked on my back brake and the back end just locked up and just like properly like snake. Did like one of those snake wibble, wibbly wobblies. Whereas the front brake, it didn't wibbly wobbly at all and stopped much quicker because the back one just locked up. But anyway, yeah, check out Sheldon Brown's article on braking. For me, it's a no thanks because it will only send you over the handlebars if you just mindlessly go oosh, which you shouldn't be doing. No thanks. Okay. Next one, basic bike maintenance skills will save your ass one day. It could be God tier, but it is definitely solid. It seems solid, doesn't it? And I think what this means is stuff beyond just how to change a puncture. Because obviously, yes, you need to know that as well. But I feel like it's the stuff like what do you do if your chain snaps? Well, that happened to you, didn't it? You were out on a gravel ride and your chain snapped. What did you do? I had a spare link and I had a little tool that cuts off the bad one and puts on the good one. And how difficult was it? Oh, it was easy. But yeah, I practiced it. I learned it. And I don't know what the technical term is, but I cut off the bad one and put on the good one. And then it worked again. That's it. Yeah. It can seem daunting, a lot of things on a bike, but most of it is easier than you think. Yeah, totally. And it's worth learning if you have the capacity to. And I think there's certain things that just benefit you as a cyclist out on the road. Like, for example, understanding how you can cut your chain down and get your bike working again so that you can get home. And it might just be an interim solution to be able to get you home. Something that we learned, if you get a puncture and you run out of tubes, you can use grass and you won't get anywhere at all. No, no, no, no, no. We've got at least 500 metres on the grass. Well, I got half a kilometre closer to home. 500 metres on the tyre on the rim with grass in it, completely compressed. Protecting the rim. Yeah. Snap, spork, I wouldn't know what to do then. Tape it. Tape it? Yeah. Or wind it around another spoke. Keep it out of the way and just keep riding. And your wheel just goes like that a bit. I think what you get from it from understanding some bike maintenance is knowing what is safe to get you home and what isn't. And there are little botches like that that you can do that will get you home. Or there'll be scenarios where you might go, oh, actually, this means I definitely shouldn't botch this and get home. I'm phoning a taxi or a loved one to collect me. I think it's probably not quite God tier, because most people, if they're going out on something, will go... Like, if I was going to go on an epic in the Pennines, I would say, Emily, I'm going to be out for six hours in the Pennines. Can you make sure your phone's on loud just in case? And that probably covers most scenarios or worst case scenarios. In the Pennines, which has no signal. I've got a Garmin inReach. Garmin inReach. And you press the SOS and Emily comes. Yeah. Don't press the SOS. Mountain rescue. Yeah. There's a YouTube video on that. What actually happens when you press the SOS on a Garmin device? Can we do it, please? No. The guy did it, but he was legitimately in the situation where he needed it. Oh, really? Yeah. What did happen? You have to watch the video and find out. People came. Okay. So I would put this personally in solid. Solid, Snake. Next one. The right bike for you is the one that makes you ride most. Yeah, yeah. Why hasn't this said more? That's a genius piece of advice. Yeah. I feel like we have said this before. God tier. Yeah. I think the wording of that works in all scenarios. I was thinking, well, what if it fits really badly and therefore you're uncomfortable? Well, then it wouldn't make you ride the most. So therefore, if you're getting off a bike and every single time you're in absolute agony, then you're not going to ride it. And therefore, that is fact into this. So yeah, this is a god tier. Perfect. Next one. Glasses go over your helmet straps. Get in the bin. They go wherever you want them to go. It's in the bin. Yeah. However. Yes. I always ride with my glasses over my helmet straps. Why? I'm leaving it at that. Do you tell why? No, there is no reason. No, there is a reason. I do as well. It's because we started cycling at a point where there was a lot of structure and elitism and hideousness in cycling. And there's certain hangover bits of our experience with that. Like, for example, I know you will still want to shave your legs if you went out on a proper road ride. You probably would because you're just programmed to do it. And I would not shave my legs. I would be on that proper, like, racy road bike group ride. And I'd be looking down at my legs going, I should have shaved them because it's just ingrained in us. With the leg shaving thing. You know, when you let your leg hair get to, like, long length. Yeah. Then your shorts don't grip. And then your shorts become really short shorts. But you like that. I do like short shorts. You want short shorts anyway. I do like short shorts. Yeah. But I have noticed that that is actually the consequence. Same with leg warmers. You put leg warmers on and then if you have hairy, fuzzy legs, they come down. Yeah. Just annoying. That does happen. Yeah, you're right. But ultimately, the helmet strap, we both do it still because it's just the way we put a helmet on a pair of glasses. We're unlearning things slow. It just takes time, okay? It's like therapy. One day, I might be brave enough to wear short socks. However, what I will say about helmet over straps is, on the occasion that I stop somewhere and I want to leave my sunglasses on and take my helmet off, the glasses come off with it. So it actually makes more sense to put the glasses straps under, sorry, the glass arms under the helmet straps. It's easier to get the glasses off, isn't it? But you can always just get the glasses on and off. Yeah, whatever. I do agree with you that when I had a look into this one, I was like, oh, is that one of those Voluminati rules? And then you look at it and you're like, God, you realize how much, definitely when I came to cycling, I feel like this was meant to be a tongue in cheek thing. But it really became quite insidious in cycling culture. And definitely when I came to cycling, all of these unwritten rules, which then did get written down, became like a thing and a thing that measured whether you were a proper cyclist or not. And I think we've definitely been indoctrinated by it, haven't we? It is wild how much that became a Bible rather than a coffee table lols read, which is, you know, it was clearly meant to just be jest. When you look at them, it's clearly jest. Like so clearly. People take stuff too seriously. They do. So what we're saying, in the bin. Oh yeah, absolutely. Bin, bin, bin, bin, bin. I hate it, even though I do it. It's more a case of do whatever you want. Yeah. Next one. Want to be fast? Ride with people faster than you. I guess it works, if the difference isn't too big. But riding more is the most important thing. I think I've done myself a mischief, historically, by doing this too much. That was my method for getting faster at running and faster for riding bikes was always go out and play with the bigger boys. And I used to do it all of the time. And as a result of that, I just spent all of the time I was exercising at like way too hard an effort. So I think it is actually a really good tool for getting faster, but you just need to use it as part of you look at it as that's my like high intensity for the week. Because the way cycling works, you can sit on a wheel and save a lot of energy. So cycling is a sport which is much more compatible with something like running. For people of differing abilities to ride together. Yeah. Do it together. So you can go riding with some elite road racers. If you're a third cat, you can probably hang with their speed and you're fine. What you do on top of that is learn how they ride in a bunch. Yeah. If they start doing like a through and off or something like that, those kind of skills that you learn things they do on rides. Oh, they seem to be eating a lot more than the third cats that I ride with. So that kind of thing that rubs off on you. Yeah. And there's value there. The most of the well, a lot of the value I think does come from learning about etiquette, how to be safe. And of course, you're going to get some fitness benefits. But I think the key is to not go, right. Well, I will always ride. All of my training and all of my time spent outside will be absolutely burying myself. I'd say it's between solid and complicated. I think it is complicated, but it has a place. I want to put it into solid, but I don't want to misrepresent it. And people just think, well, that's what I should be doing. As a result of that, I would like us to put in, it's complicated. Well, hopefully the people that are faster than you are not d**ks. They're going to be though, aren't they? They're definitely going to be. There's a correlation. Yeah. The faster you get, the more a d**k you are. Absolutely. Okay. Next one. Getting faster doesn't have to be your goal. Yes. God tier. Yeah. God tier. It's like our chat the other day. What's healthy and what's, there's getting fast and there's getting healthy. Probably, you know, think about what matters more in the long run. Cool. Next one. You don't need food on a road ride less than 50 miles. That's mad. But literally I was seeing this. 50 miles can be a lot of hours. That is wild, isn't it? Is this an old piece of advice that, do people still believe that? Surely not. I'm sure there will be some people. There'll be old school people who are like, eating's cheating. In actual fact. Oh, my stomach's just rumbled. I wonder if the mic picked that up. It's not cheating. It's just sensible. In fact, now the fastest guy, like I, uh, I went for a training camp with team Ribble and they are elite team in the UK or were at the time. This is like two or three years ago. And I was surprised, pleasantly surprised at how organized they were with their eating and like fueling for those rides. Obviously they're, this is a training camp situation. So it's extreme levels of volume as much as they can possibly do in the kind of two weeks they're there. And you got to get your fueling correct. And they measure things by not even calories because it's a kilojoules because it's like an even finer scale. And they're like really organized with that kind of thing. Professional athletes mind. Yeah. For people listening to this, you do not need to do that. What the point is, is that they're fueling really well and they're eating a lot of food, which is the completely different to what we were doing years before where it's kind of like, yeah, like a couple of gels, a couple of bananas and like hope for the best under fueled almost all the time. And then you get home and then you binge eat and that's a bad cycle to get into as well. Bad cycle. In theory, if you have sufficient glycogen stores in your body, you don't need food for 60 to 90 minutes, but why take the risk? Just eat food, enjoy it. And don't don't think that you need like performance nutrition as well. Just eat what you like eating. Take a sandwich. I love it. Like my favorite thing is being on a bikepacking trip and literally eating like looking forward to the next burger. When we did Spain, do you remember we were getting like baguettes and cheese? Ocadillo. And then just sitting on the side of an orange grove and we were making ourselves little sandwiches. Okay, next one. Nearly at the end. Indoor miles don't count. I've heard this said before. Indoor counts as more. Oh, definitely. It's so hard and you can't freewheel and it's sweaty and it's boring. But also don't count for what? Who's counting? The Strava gods, I think. I really like indoor training because it's so efficient and functional, but it definitely is harder. Like 60 minutes on a turbo is worth more than 60 minutes outside in the real world, unless you are just doing a 60 minute climb up a mountain, which is no one. Coach Ken would say that officially to his coaching clients that if you're doing the session indoors, you reduce the times by a certain amount. Percentage. 80% less. That's what it feels like. I've got my stuff done in 10 minutes. Yeah, get in the bin. Are we putting too much in the bin? We're putting a lot in the bin, I'll be honest. Well, this is your fault, Emily, for choosing all these bin-like items. Have we ended up just in the bin and god tier and it's complicated? Okay, final one. Don't take cycling so seriously it stops being fun. No thanks. God tier. It is very true. And there is nothing wrong with taking cycling seriously if you're still having fun. Yes. And even if you're not having a bit of fun, if there's a goal or you're being paid or you really, really want to achieve a certain achievement. I think we should downgrade it to solid. Why? Because this implies that some people, that if you take it seriously, it can't be fun. And for some people, it can be fun. Yes, I agree. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It doesn't always stop being fun. And it balances out the chart for Emily. Sure, of course. I guess what I will say to that is, it being fun should be a given. Yeah. Unless it's functional because it's commuting and that's a whole different thing. Can I give an example of someone who takes cycling extremely seriously but still has fun? Can I guess who it is? Yeah. Harry Mack. Oh, that is a good one. Oh, that's a great one. He's our friend who won the National Hill Climb Championship and lots of other things. And drinks lots of beers. Yeah. I think it does crack him though sometimes. Oh, I'm sure it is. I'm sure it does. But he always has a vibe. The person I was going to mention is Phil Gaiman. He has a YouTube channel called Worst Retirement Ever. Yeah, I like him. Where he now chases Strava KOMs and he has personal sponsors. He used to be a world tour bike racer, a professional bike racer. And he did not enjoy his time when he was racing at pro level. So all of the stuff that's involved in that. And now he's found a model where he gets to ride his bike every day, but it's not unstructured. He's still doing training because he enjoys it. And from the outside and after chatting with him, he really enjoys what he's doing. I think that's a perfect example. Yeah. Cool. Well, that is the end. So feel free to tell us in the comments about the best and worst cycling advice you've ever received. Or you can email us at wildonespodcast at kademedia.co.uk. And I might put a little list together for listeners takeover next week. Jimmy's gone. He's gone.