RALTech | Fixed vs Gears

This is an age-old question which still tends to polarise opinion to an almost religious extent. We can look at the use of gears or not in two phases; training and racing.

Many fixed gear fanatics will extol the virtue of training on a fixed:- "It increases your souplesse."
"It makes you pedal faster."
"You have to pedal all the way round."

Let's look at those statements. The first two are saying more or less the same thing: you get used to pedalling faster and therefore smoother. How? Half the time you are overgeared and pedalling slower than you would otherwise. And when you are really pedalling fast downhill, you are mainly concentrating on 'getting your feet out of the way' and not actually applying any positive power to the pedals at all.

The third statement makes no sense, either. You always pedal all the way round. Unless your pedalling action is so appalling that the top of the chain goes slack at any point, then there is no way that a fixed wheel can 'help your feet get over the top'. It's just physics.

My own experience is of pedalling squares trying to get up mountains in way too big a gear and then holding the entire clubrun up on the way down. Trying to slow a bike by back-pedalling down a hill uses exactly the wrong muscles and muscle firing order for training to go faster. If you want to improve your pedalling speed and smoothness, just train on smaller gears using your regular geared bike.

None of this is to say I do not like fixed gears, in fact I race on them out of preference.

Racing on fixed is a different matter. There can be significant gains to be made under the right conditions. The bike can be made lighter and simpler. The drivetrain can be more efficient, by up to 1 or 2 percent. The lack of a derailleur hanging in the breeze will improve aerodynamics, as will removing the back brake. Psychologically, it can be easier to just keep pedalling when you know there are no alternative gears to chose from.

However, just converting your geared bike to fixed or using a track bike still leaves a lot of potential speed back in the shed. To get the most from racing fixed, the bike should be designed from the ground up for this purpose. This is one of the principles of the design of RALTech bikes and some of the opportunities are explored in our products section.