#pro tips

As some of you may have surmised, I am Dutch. We never had need for a car so I have cycled a lot in my life. Recently, however, I moved abroad to a university city with a big international student population. It is supposed to be bike friendly, I find it more bike tolerant, but that is another discussion. The reason I made this post is because I noticed very few people know how to properly ride a bike. So here are some pro tips.

Put the ball of your foot on the pedal. That is the part of your foot that your toes are attached to. It gives you the most economy of motion as it allows your calves to get involved with the pedaling motion as well. Try it, feel the difference.

Power comes from your butt. Proper cycling is like a proper squatting form. If most of your power comes from your knees you are doing it wrong.

Economy of motion also means keeping your upper body still. Do not move it side to side (if you cannot reach the pedals when they are at their lowest point your saddle is too high. Good news: this can be lowered), do not move front to back, and definitely do not stand. All you are doing is wasting energy. If you are going up against a lot of wind or up a steep hill it sometimes helps to lean forward, but moving your upper body does nothing to make you bike better or easier.

When taking a sharp turn, it can help to move the pedal on the inside of the turn to the top. This helps prevent contact between it and the ground when you make a sharp turn. This is due to the next point:

Steer with your hips first. When cycling, shifting your weight in the direction you are going in makes it easier to control your turn and make it smoother, but it is good to practice it. This does mean that your bike will be at an angle when turning, hence turning your pedal up.

Finally, cycling is like any other exercise. You need to build stamina in it, and other kinds of stamina (like walking) don't necessarily translate. Oh, and plastic coats are wind-resistant. They make cycling harder when there's even a little bit of wind, as they let the wind blow you back. Like a sail. If you're struggling a lot and don't know why, this might be the reason.

Additional tips for autists:

I like to listen to music while cycling. The wind tends to interfere with this, so I wear cloth over my ears. I crocheted a bandana last year that had closed fabric over the ears part for warm weather, and the rest of the year I wear a Buff (brand name), which is a tube-shaped piece of fabric that can be folded to fit over the ears like a sort of headband.

I also wear sunglasses a lot. It helps with sun, wind, and bugs. There are also special neutral glasses (not uv-filtering or with any kind of strength like the ones for people with bad eyes) that merely protect your eyes.

DO NOT BE LIKE ME.

As soon as I gave a few colleges my email, my inbox got flooded with emails from colleges—a good chunk of whom I’d never heard of and had never shown interest in. And it only got worse after test scores got released. I’m talking 10 or more emails per day, every day, since at least last year.