Gear Ratios, Decoded: Why the Age of 1x Has Arrived

On any group ride, there’s one question that always comes up: “What gear are you in?“
We shift without thinking most of the time, but the moment you try to match the rider in front of you, or wish for just one more cog on a climb, you suddenly start caring about your gear ratio. Gear setup reveals a rider’s legs and style — which is exactly why cyclists get fired up the moment the topic comes around.

This time, three LOVE CYCLIST core members got together: Tats, Ryuji, and Mei.
Tats and Ryuji are on the edgier side, both already running 1x setups on their road bikes. Mei, meanwhile, is the brute-force type who declares, “I just adapt my legs to whatever gearing I have.” With three riders this skewed talking about today’s gear-ratio landscape from their own angles, where does the conversation go? As an extension of mid-ride chatter, we dug into all things gear ratio.

Members

←Mei Currently based in Melbourne, where she builds her life around the bike and enjoys blending the local community with her own style.	↑Tats Editor-in-chief of LOVE CYCLIST. Enjoys unpacking the road bike and sports bike industry through a marketing lens.	Ryuji→ After a career spanning cycling magazine editing and apparel brands, he now runs his own company in Ehime while staying actively involved with cycling.

Edit / Tats（@tats_lovecyclist）

Cyclists Just Love Talking Gear Ratios

Mei, who finds the right answer by feel

Tats: When we ride as LOVE CYCLIST members, we don’t really talk about bikes that much, so gear ratios rarely come up. But the moment you roll out with other cyclists, gear setup almost always ends up on the table.

Mei: When we’re climbing, people always ask “What’s your cassette?”

Ryuji: When the climb gets nasty, you hear “28 looks tight” or “32 and you’re golden.”

Tats: Classic. You’re gasping for air and the guy next to you launches into gear talk.

Mei: Some people are genuinely shocked — “You really think about gears that much?!” To be honest, I’d never really thought about it…

Ryuji: So Mei, you don’t really pay much attention to your gear setup?

Mei: Nope, I just shift on feel. I don’t really know the numbers, so I figure I just need to grow legs that match whatever I’ve got.

Tats & Ryuji: Total brute force.

Mei: (laughs).
It’s more like “feels like I can push a bigger gear today.” For me, gear ratio is feeling, not knowledge.

Tats: But Mei, you climb the mountains just fine, so your gear choices actually can’t be that off.

Ryuji: I think that’s true. There are people who can arrive at the optimal answer purely by feel.

1x on a road bike

Tats: That said — today we’ve got the feel-based Mei alongside Ryuji and me, both already running 1x. A pretty skewed lineup.

Ryuji: Way too skewed. This isn’t going to be about general trends or averages — it’s basically going to turn into personal philosophy.

Tats: But I think that’s exactly what lets us talk about today’s diversifying gear setups in a real way.

The Gear Evolution of the Past 15 Years

Ryuji back then: 53-59T front / 11-23T rear

Ryuji: Around 2009, when I was racing actively, I was riding an aluminum frame with carbon rear stays, and my go-to setup was 53-39T front / 11-25T rear.

Tats: Looking at it now, that’s a brutal setup.

Ryuji: Yeah, I was using 11-21T and 11-23T a lot back then too. For flat races, 11-23T was the standard — a setup you could still spin even when the pace pushed past 50km/h.
These days 52-36T up front is the norm and a 30T at the back is taken for granted, but at the time, those big gears were just “how it was.” In racing, 53-39T was the default, and there was a strong culture of “bigger is better” when it came to gearing.

Tats: That was still the era when “high-torque, heavy-gear” riding was the dominant style in racing.

Ryuji: Exactly. But it gradually shifted, and by the early 2010s, 52-36T started settling in as the standard, and compact cranks were finally gaining acceptance.

Tats: I started riding road around 2014, I think, and that was probably right in the middle of the transition. I just rode my complete bike’s stock 52-36T front / 11-25T rear. Being new to it, I had no clue what any of that setup actually meant.

Mei in her Anchor days. The cassette size really shows the era

Mei: I bought my Anchor road bike in 2015 as a high schooler, and it came with 50-34T front / 11-25T rear.

Tats: So you were on a compact crank. Wasn’t 25T at the back rough?

Mei: Back then I didn’t know anything about gear ratios, and I just thought, “I can’t climb because my legs are weak.” It took me about two years to finally figure out that going to a bigger cassette would change things — that’s when I switched to a 28T (laughs).

Ryuji: I bought a Canyon Ultimate in 2016, and that was the first time I had an 11-30T at the back. I remember thinking, “Wow, this is so much easier.” It was 6800-series Ultegra, the shifting was smooth, and the difference in how much my legs had left was obvious.

Tats: That’s when “light gears, high cadence” pedaling started taking hold, and the rear was gaining more cogs (10-speed to 11-speed). For Shimano, 52-36T up front with an 11-28T or 11-30T rear became the standard spec on complete bikes.

Ryuji: The climbing intensity in racing was rising too, and setups that “let you climb” became more and more in demand.

Where Our Gearing Stands Today

SRAM Red XPLR AXS E1 (46T front / 10-46T rear)

Tats: My current setup is SRAM Red XPLR AXS E1 — 46T up front, 10-46T out back. 1x. Flats, climbs, all of it handled with one ring.

Ryuji: XPLR in that configuration is incredibly practical. Having a 46T rear means even on the road you can spin up climbs easily, and one bike covers a huge range.

Tats: My previous bike ran Red AXS D1 with 46-33T front and 10-33T rear. When I went 1x, I wanted to keep roughly the same ratio coverage, so this is what I landed on. I’m not a high-torque masher, and I haven’t raced in over five years, so this front size feels just right.

Ryuji: With 13-speed covering that wide a range, there must be some gaps between shifts. How does that feel in practice?*
*XPLR cassette: 10-11-12-13-15-17-19-21-24-28-32-38-46

Tats: The low end doesn’t really bother me. When it gets steep I just drop to 38 or 46 and spin, and honestly the feel isn’t much different from my previous bike.
What does catch me is the jump from 13 to 15. I do a lot of mid-to-high pace group rides, and having a 14T in there would make holding cadence so much smoother.

SRAM RED eTap AXS (48T front / 10-36T rear)

Ryuji: I’m running two bikes right now. One is a Cannondale SuperSix EVO (SRAM RED eTap AXS D1/E1 mix, 48-35T front / 10-33T rear), and the other is a Factor Ostro VAM (SRAM RED eTap AXS D1/E1 mix, 48T front / 10-36T rear). Both start at 10T in the rear, so whether I’m running 1x or 2x, the high end is well covered.

Tats: The Factor is 1x, but isn’t the low ratio pretty brutal?

Ryuji: On climbs it’s 48×36 (ratio 1.33) and I’m just enduring it.

Tats & Mei: Enduring it (laughs).

Ryuji: Ideally I want a base ratio around 1.3. I’m a torque rider, so I tend to stand and stomp through the climbs.

Tats: You actually race, Ryuji, so it surprised me that your front ring is on the smaller side.

Ryuji: My personal situation right now doesn’t allow for serious training, so for everyday rides 48T up front is plenty. SRAM starts at 10T in the rear anyway, so the ratio is still pushable. But if I were racing seriously, I’d want something like 50×10T — a setup that lets you push 60 km/h.

Shimano ULTEGRA R8070 (52-36T front / 11-30T rear)

Mei: I’m on Shimano ULTEGRA R8070, with 52-36T front and 11-30T rear. My previous bike had a 28T rear so I wanted to lean a bit more toward climbing, but 32T felt like a statement I couldn’t really back up — I’m not that much of a climber, visually speaking. So 30T was the compromise.

Tats: Mei, you’ve said before that you “just kind of ride in the middle of the cassette.”

Mei: Yes, really just “kind of” picking gears (laughs). My average cadence used to hover around 80, but lately I’ve been consciously aiming for 100 and trying to spin a bit faster. I use the low gear when I’m climbing anything above 8% and want to sit and spin my way up.

Ryuji: The fact that you’re getting up the climbs that way means you’re choosing the right gear by feel. That’s its own kind of answer.

Mei: It’s probably because over the past six months, riding with the Melbourne community has changed how I ride. Before, my theme was “one mountain, one café” — long rides at a steady pace. But lately it’s been all middle-to-high pace group rides with sharp tempo changes. So naturally I’m shifting gears more often, and I’ve started paying more attention to my pedalling too.

Tats: Anything about your gearing you’d want to rethink?

Mei: Honestly, I feel like I should fix my legs before I fix my gears (laughs). It’s more of an “I’ll adapt to the gearing” mindset. But hearing you two talk today, I think changing things up could be worth trying — maybe at my next component swap or some other turning point.

1x Up Front — Is It Actually Worth It?

Tats: When SRAM Red XPLR was announced last year, it was aimed at the gravel market, but I immediately thought, “This is going to shine on a road bike.” So I decided to build it onto a Standert road frame. At the time it might have felt like a pretty pointed choice, but at this March’s E3 Saxo Classic, a Lidl-Trek rider was running Red XPLR in a 1×13 setup — and I thought, yeah, that was always going to happen.

Ryuji: He was on the aero chainring, 52T front with a 10–46T cassette, right? It’s pretty wild that he chose that setup to race a Classic. Pedersen took his career-best 2nd place and called it “the perfect setup.”

1x went hot the moment Lidl-Trek put it on the road

Tats: Ryuji, you actually went 1x on the Factor before I did. What was the thinking behind it?

Ryuji: I’ve thought this for a long time — front shifts are just mentally annoying. With a double, you’re constantly deciding “which chainring should I be in?” Especially on long training rides, you’re already tired and it eats up brain bandwidth for no good reason.
So I went 1x, and it was a completely rational call. It’s just one less thing to think about, but shifting stress drops to nearly zero and rides feel less fatiguing.
And 1x almost never drops a chain. There’s no front derailleur to begin with, so no fiddly adjustments, and even when you pack the bike for travel, you don’t have to baby it.

1x asks less of you, in every way

Tats: And — to put it diplomatically — SRAM’s front shifting is a bit more, let’s say, delicate than Shimano’s. So choosing not to front-shift in the first place is wildly rational.

Mei: I appreciate your careful word choice with “delicate”…

Tats: (Glad you caught that.)
Also, Red XPLR is genuinely stable. Six months in, zero issues. Nothing happens. That alone makes it trustworthy enough to take far from home.

Ryuji: One thing I unexpectedly love is the look. The front end is so clean — with less mechanical clutter, the whole bike reads sharper.
A 2x is definitely more flexible across every speed range, and for racing it makes sense. But for those of us who mostly ride outside of racing, 1x is the best overall choice.

Tats: XPLR’s 13-speed cassette is massive, so at first it looked very gravel-bike and felt a bit off, but once your eye gets used to it, it absolutely works. Now that Lidl-Trek has adopted it, there’s cultural credibility behind both the look and the performance — so I think we’ll gradually see more everyday cyclists go this route too.

That oversized cassette won’t look strange for much longer

Mei: I’ve only ever ridden double, but listening to you two, 1x is starting to sound really appealing. When I’m riding rolling terrain, I still occasionally glance down at the front to check “wait, which ring am I in?”

Ryuji: For someone like Mei who has those “which one should I pick?” moments, 1x is a great fit. On long rides, the comfort difference is huge.

Mei: Honestly, swapping the front ring between climbs and descents can be a hassle, so losing that stress is really appealing.

Tats: 1x isn’t just about easier maintenance or saving weight — it frees up your mind too. Not having to think about your gear and being able to focus purely on riding is probably the biggest benefit.

You can talk about it in pure numbers, yet there’s no single correct answer. That’s what makes gear ratio conversations so interesting.
The three of us who gathered this time all ride in different styles, and our gear setups were just as varied. Tats and Ryuji optimize their setups through logic, while Mei picks “by feel.” Yet the fact that each of us rides perfectly well on our chosen gearing proves there isn’t just one right answer.
Take 1x: a setup once dismissed with “really, on a road bike?” is now chosen by top pros. The way we think about gearing isn’t simply “race” vs. “cycling” anymore — it reflects an era in which choice has become broader and freer, shaped by riding style.
When you’re stuck on what gearing to run, the answer isn’t on a spec sheet — it’s in your own riding. Let’s keep that perspective as we keep the gear ratio talk going.

Members / Tats, Ryuji, & Mei
Edit / Tats（@tats_lovecyclist）