Today on the Ask Coach Parry Cycling podcast we inspect tyres and tubes on your bike.  There is an easy way to avoid this frustration.  Devlin Eyden helps us out with a few quick tips on what to check for.

Transcript

Brad Brown:         You’re listening to the Ask Coach Parry Cycling podcast and I’ve got our cycling coach with us once again, Devlin Eyden, Devlin, welcome back. Nice to touch base and this question I love because this is something that I struggled with forever and I nearly pulled all my hair out trying to figure out what the problem was, and it comes in from Peter.

Peter is saying: I’m a heavy roadie and I’m constantly getting punctures, I’m not sure why, when I inspect my tubes, it looks like a snakebite of sorts, with two holes. What could be causing this?

Easy fix to tyre troubles

Devlin Eyden:      This is a pretty simple fix to this problem more than anything else.

It’s firstly, making sure that your tyre pressure is correct. Be it a roadie, be it even a mountain biker at the same time, you need to make sure that being a slightly heavier rider, you are putting a little bit more pressure and if your tyres aren’t hard enough, you’re at more risk of getting that snakebite effect. Especially when you start hitting the odd obstacle that might be in the road that you haven’t spotted.

Yes, it pretty much is going to come down to one, your tyre pressure, making sure that that is correct.

Typically on the road bike you’re looking at anything up of 8 or 9 bar, it sounds quite a lot, but again, it needs to be really hard on your road tyres.

Have you checked the condition of your tyres?

Then secondly, also just making sure that your tyres are new, when I say ‘new’, that they’re not weathered and old. When you start noticing a bit of wear in the tyres, especially some of the tyres that might have a bit of a wire bead in them, some splits from some glass you might have ridden over and all that. It’s also something that does just increase the risk of having punctures on your bike.

Just make sure your tyres are always in a good condition and there’s a little bit of tread, obviously, on the tyre and making sure that they are fresh.

BB:         Something that I also made the mistake of often there too Devlin, and it was obviously tyre pressure for me, but also when I was putting the tube back in after changing a tyre, obviously not checking properly if it was pinched between the rim and the tyre. And if it is pinched, often that’ll happen as well, it’ll cause that pinch to once again do exactly the same thing.

DE:         Correct and also on that note as well, that if you do get a puncture and it might be a thorn or something and you take the tube out, put a new tube in, remember to check that there isn’t a thorn still stuck in your tyre. Otherwise that gets really frustrating when you put a brand new tube in and suddenly it’s punctured straight away as well because the thorn is still sitting in your tyre.

BB:         Absolutely, Devlin Eyden, thank you very much for that.

We’re back again in just a couple of days’ time, if you’ve got a question you’d like answered on the podcast, all you need to do is head over to coachparry.com and submit the question there, it’s as easy as that.

Until next time, we look forward to chatting, stay safe on the road, we look forward to catching up again soon, cheers.