Mountain Biking - Drive Train Fundamentals

Hi! My name is Scott Scudamore and we are talking today about how to ride a mountain bike with confidence. In this clip we are going to talk a little bit about the Drivetrain and how it works and how it effects how you ride. The Drivetrain is actually broken up into two components. We have the chain rings in the front; there are usually three of them, you have a little ring which is going to be the easiest gear in the front. You have a middle ring, which you will find most of the time you will be in the middle ring for most of your ride and then we have a large ring which will be used primarily for long downhills where you want to have a harder pedal to be able to do that. That is the front and then at the back we have what is called the Cassette or the Cogs in the back and you have anywhere from seven to ten gears in the back. Typically, you will have eight or nine. If you have a little ring in the front, it is easy and in the back the big ring is the easiest. So, the concept here is when you are in the middle ring, you are going to be using all of your gears. In the little ring, you are probably going to be using the bigger ones here not these little. There is one concept here that is important is you never want to be in the big ring here and in the big ring there or the little ring here and the little cog there. So, you never want to have little, little or big, big. So, little ring can run through all the gears but the big ring you want to focus on the harder gears in the back because typically you are trying to go faster and then when you are in the little ring you really want to concentrate on the three or four biggest ones in the back because that is where most of your -- that is going to be the easiest gears. So, when you are riding, it is very important that when you are going downhill and you are getting ready to transition to an uphill that you actually shift through gears prior to getting to the hill. The significance of that is that if you try, if you go up into the - if you startup up into the hill and you go to shift that is when you can break a chain or it is really, really hard on the Drivetrain when you are waiting to -- like the shaft.

This gets back to what we talked about earlier, about planning ahead when you are doing your ride. So, same thing when you're going downhill, you want to shift before you start going downhill and get into that gear, make it a nice, easy shift. If you are bouncing on the saddle, you probably got too easy of your gear. The whole idea is it should be what we call soft pedaling. You want to just be able to be nice and easy pedal. In the gear of the train, you should not be bouncing up and down. If the gear of the train is too hard for you to pedal, you want to get in to an easier gear. If you are trying too hard, you are losing momentum, that is when you lose your balance and momentum and that is when you fall over. So, what we have tried to show you in this clip is that you have two sets of gears, one in the front and one in the back and use together, make sure ride through the trail, a really nice experience.