![10 vs 11 speed cassette 10 vs 11 speed cassette](https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/21/2019/03/shimano-11-42-cassette-1-of-4-1530712357126-1p4sx0nw518eq-9a513c8.jpg)
The same is true of your body pedalling a bike. Just like a car, bicycles benefit from a low gear to accelerate from a standstill, or to climb a steep hill, and at the other end of the scale a high gear helps you to achieve high speeds without over-revving.Ĭontinuing with the car example, using too low a gear at high speed would result in high fuel consumption. It’s about efficiency and having a much broader range, or choice, of gears for a given situation. A bike with 30 or more gears is not an indication of a machine designed to break the land speed record any more than a bike with only a single gear, assuming similar ratios. Let’s be clear about one thing - having lots of gears is not about making the bike faster. Vice versa, combining the smallest front chainring size with the largest rear sprocket size results in the lowest available gear, which will help you keep the pedals spinning when the road points steeply up.
![10 vs 11 speed cassette 10 vs 11 speed cassette](http://www.sjscycles.com/supersize/52698.jpg)
The highest, or biggest gear on a bicycle is achieved by combining the largest front chainring size with the smallest rear cog or sprocket - expressed as ‘53x11’, for example. Why have gears at all? Well, in a nutshell, gears are there to enable us to maintain a comfortable pedalling speed (or cadence) regardless of the gradient or terrain - something that no one single gear is capable of.Ī high gear, sometimes referred to by cyclists as a ‘big gear’, is optimal when descending or riding at high speeds. Likewise a double chainring paired with an 11-speed cassette is a 22-speed set-up, and so on. A triple chainring set-up with a 10-speed rear cassette is therefore a 30-speed bicycle - in other words, it’s possible to use all of the 10 sprockets in combination with each of the three chainrings. It’s a simple multiplication of the number of sprockets at the rear with the number of chainrings at the front.