Tire Pressure: Something to Pay Attention To

Every person who has ever ridden a mountain bike wants to know the best way to get the best ride. To confuse this matter every company that has a product swears their product revolutionizes the sport of mountain biking. In fact millions of dollars a year are spent by enthusiastic mountain bikers looking to get the best ride they can. The funny thing is that while good gear is good gear, one of the easiest ways to adjust the experience of your ride is by knowing how to set the correct tire pressure.

This may seem like a no brainer, and it may also seem like it’s a very small part of the overall riding experience, but air pressure in your tires is very important to the over all quality of the ride. Physics, which controls almost every aspect of riding a mountain bike, has several laws that must be obeyed. However these rules, which must be obeyed, can also be manipulated. The key to manipulating these rules is to understand how they work and how they affect your riding experience.

The most basic law involved in riding a bike is the law of friction. Friction is the force we must fight in order to achieve even the slowest of movements. When riding a bike you are essentially operating against two forms of friction. The first is the friction between your tires and the ground, the second is the friction created by you and your bike moving through air. There are many things you can do to reduce the friction you create in the air, however, the only way to increase or reduce friction between your tires and the ground is to find ways to increase or decrease the surface area of the tire that contacts the ground. To explain this simply, less tire on the ground means less traction and friction, while more tire on the ground means more traction and more friction.

With this basic theory in hand do the following. Inflate your tire to around 35 to 40 psi. This should be almost as full as it can go without bursting. Now get on the bike and pedal around a bit. It should feel like you are having a bit of a difficult time controlling the bike, but pedaling is easy. This is because friction has been reduced, but so has traction and thus control.

Now deflate the tire around 5 psi or so. Again get on the bike and pedal around a bit. While the change may not be drastic, you should notice an increase in handling as well as an increase in effort. This is because you have created a bit more area for the tire to grab and thus increased both friction and traction.

Finally spend some time adjusting your psi until you feel the amount of effort and the amount of control are as well balanced for your riding style as they can be. For heavier people this will probably not be far below maximum while lighter people may go as far down as 25 psi (which is about the lowest you want to go). While this may seem a small change, you will notice the difference pretty quickly.

Stay tuned for the next article in the series which looks at using air pressure for specific trail conditions.

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