If you feel your child is ready, don't hesitate to begin lessons on bicycle safety. Every year there are more than 200 bike related deaths involving kids under 15. Over 300,000 kids per year are treated for a bike related injury at an hospital or emergency care center with over 8,000 needing hospitalization.
It's believed that the figures would more than double if kids did not use bicycle helmets. Helmets save lives and there is no reason not to demand that your child wear one, no matter how much they protest.
If you are going to teach your child to ride a bike, make sure the lesson begins with teaching bike safety. The most important lessons of bike safety can be taught to kids who are as young as three. The first lesson can be taught by example when a child's parent regularly wears their bike helmet when riding.
While very young children might not be ready to learn all there is to know about bicycle safety, they can begin to grasp important concepts. In addition to consistent helmet use, mom and dad can drill their kids on the basics of bike safety. Point out safe zones for riding (sidewalks). Always make safe stops at intersections and remind your child why you do this
Learning balance is a critical aspect or learning to ride a bicycle, but surviving is an even more important skill to learn. Make teaching your child how to avoid a collision a top priority.
These recommendations from the Bicycle Helmet Safety Institute (BHSI) are rules worth following:
1. Always stop before riding into the street.
2. Obey stop signs.
3. Check behind you before swerving, turning or changing lanes.
4. Always ride on the right side of the street.
5. Never follow another rider without obeying rules 1-4.
Your three-year-old son or daughter is certainly capable of learning to ride a bike, especially if they begin on a balance bike. However, young kids don't have the capacity to understand the danger of the activity. They don't understand how to protect themselves.
Make bike safety an important part of every bike riding lessons. Show them the safe areas to ride, how and when to stop and remind them of the rules to avoid a crash.
The gears in mountain bikes just keep getting more and more intricate. The bikes of today have as many as 27 gear ratios. A mountain bike will use a combination of three different sized sprockets in front and nine in the back to produce gear ratios.
The idea behind all these gears is to allow the rider to crank the pedals at a constant pace no matter what kind of slope the bike is on. You can understand this better by picturing a bike with just a single gear. Each time you rotate the pedals one turn, the rear wheel would rotate one turn as well (1:1 gear ratio).
If the rear wheel is 26 inches in diameter, then with 1:1 gearing, one full twist on the pedals would result in the wheel covering 81.6 inches of ground. If you are pedaling at a speed of 50 RPM, this means that the bike can cover over 340 feet of ground per minute. This is only 3.8 MPH, which is the equivalence of walking speed. This is ideal for climbing a steep hill, although bad for ground or going downhill.
To go faster you'll need a different ratio. To ride downhill at 25 MPH with a 50 RPM cadence at the pedals, you'll need a 5.6:1 gear ratio. A bike with a lot of gears will give you a large number of increments between a 1:1 gear ratio and a 6.5:1 gear ratio so that you can always pedal at 50 RPM, no matter how fast you are actually going.
On a normal 27 speed mountain bike, six of the gear ratios are so close to each other that you can't notice any difference between them.
With actual use, bike riders tend to choose a front sprocket suitable for the slope they are riding on and stick with it, although the front sprocket can be difficult to shift under heavy load. It's much easier to shit between the gears on the rear.
If you are cranking up a hill, it's best to choose the smallest sprocket on the front then shift between the nine gears available on the rear. The more speeds you have on the back sprocket, the bigger advantage you'll have.
All in all, gears are very important to mountain bikes as they dictate your overall speed. Without gears you wouldn't be able to build speed nor would you be able to pound pedals. The gears will move the pedals and help you build up speed.
There are all types of gears available in mountain bikes, all of which will help you build up a lot of momentum if you use them the right way.
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