If biking piques your interest, you can enjoy road or mountain biking, or both! Road biking takes place on the road, and allows you to travel long distances with speed. Mountain biking is more technical and requires a sense of adventure and a secure sense of balance. Although the name implies it, mountain bike riding does not mean you are limited to riding on mountains. To ensure you have the proper frame size and fit on a bike, talk to your local bike-store expert or bike club. As far as seat positioning goes, your knees should have a slight bend (15 to 20 degrees) when you are in the down phase of the pedal stroke, and your hips should not sway from side to side when you pedal.

Of course, if you have never ridden a bike in your life and have no idea what it feels like, you need to go to a different book first. Once you can ride a bike and can balance safely, come back to this page. Now, for the rest of you, if you are riding again for the first time in a long time, do so in an area where you can relax and familiarize yourself with the gearing and braking systems. They may seem complicated at first, but once you understand how they work, you'll breeze right through them. Your body will initially have to adjust to cycling, so limit your first few rides to shorter periods of time and build up to longer rides gradually.

The pedal stroke is a smooth, circular motion. You want to not only push on the downstroke but also pull on the upstroke. This is hard to do on a bike that does not have toe clips or clipless pedals (an explanation of these terms follows shortly), but it is the correct bicycling motion.