Sooner or later, all cyclists will fall, and the almost inevitable result is road rash. Such abrasions usually require only basic care. Here are a few solutions for fast healing.

First response. Before sizing up skin loss, evaluate the injured person's whole self. I've seen riders with cracked-open helmets, but no idea they had hit their head. If you're with a group and the injured rider has slowed or slurred speech, call for medical assistance, without delay. Solo? That's a good reason to carry a mobile phone. Got a gash that's more than a scrape? The rule is: If you can't stop the bleeding by applying pressure for 15 minutes, you need stitches.

Post-crash, a cyclist often sprays the wound with his water bottle. That's not a bad idea to get rid of dirt. But the bacteria on the bottle valve are bad. Antiseptic wipes are the top pick to clean the wound.

I'm female, 50, and have been commuting by bicycle off and on for more than thirty years. It started as a way to get around when I was young and too broke to own a car. After moving close enough to my then-workplace to walk in, I dropped bicycling for a few years.

I picked up bicycle commuting again in the eighties as convenient cross-training for running, and later bike racing.

When I got laid off in the early '90s and had to sell my car to avoid credit problems, cycling once again became mainly transportation. Favorite memories from that time: Riding around the outskirts of Bangkok, commuting to my part-time work on my flat-tire tourer with panniers full of papers and spare clothing, passing a people on lightweight racing road bikes. Taking off from an intersection on the same old-worn-out-bike, out-sprinting the fully dressed road racers on there lightweight road bikes.

Anatomically, your back is one of the most complex parts of your body. All those bones, muscles and cartilage work together to support many of your other body structures and protect your spinal cord. But it is surprisingly fragile, and many of us bikers do not look after it the way we should. You know, slouching on that sofa watching the television or sitting at your desk in the same position all day isn't doing you much good in terms of preparing you for riding your bike.

Also, even though we know that you all have the best, super-light gear for your bike, you can still damage your back if you don't bend your knees when you have to lift it over a fence. And if you are into duel riding, down-hilling of just a lot of hard-care riding, you need to make sure that your back muscles are up to the job so you don't cause any damage.

So, here are a few simple exercises that you could easily do each night before going to bed, to tone and stretch your back muscles, keeping, them in tip-top shape.

If you like me you often clean your bike and do some small maintenance: clean and re-lubricate the chain, check the brakes, drop the gear in the laundry basket. But if it comes to hygiene and cleaning there are four things that we often overlook and forget completely.

While we wash our jerseys and shorts often, we usually wear the same dirty helmet ride after ride. To combat helmet stink, wash it – pads in – with dish detergent, or give it a good shampoo in the shower. Rinse with cold water and let it air dry.

We toss used gel and bar wrappers after a ride, but leave our water bottle in the cage. A bottle will breed bacteria if not washed properly. Dump leftover water into a houseplant, the wash the bottle with hot, soapy water.

You've been thrashing around the woods on you mountain bike for the last few months, but now feel that you are getting left behind. What to do? What to do indeed...

To get the most out of your biking you need to be a bit fitter, but before you can look at designing a training program you need to understand the demands that mountain biking makes on your body. One way to do this is to wear a heart-rate monitor (HRM) to tell you how hard your heart is working. This instrument is used by most road-riders, although the intensity of exercise can vary quite considerably off-road, and generally your heart rate is quite slow to respond to such rapid changes and stays fairly high throughout. While this may tell us that you're working fairly hard most of the time, it doesn't tell the whole story.

Recent, researchers have been able to accurately measure the power being produced by a rider out on the trail, and this has shown more clearly the demands of mountain biking, included in these demands were some short bursts of very high power outpost – up to 500 Watts – but there was also plenty of low power outputs, registering less than 50 Watts (during downhill sections).

Cycling is not that difficult a sport – something you learn when you are a kid and don't forget. Okay, that's a bit simplistic, but if you want to get some wicked air or really burn the corners, that's getting a little more tricky, and not all of us want to do that kind of stuff anyway.

If it is not that difficult, then why do so many of us not get the best out of our rides? You know what I mean – you set up a big biking weekend with your mates and so you don't get left behind after the first training. But somehow when you go out you just seem to muck about and don't get any fitter. So we created a few tips to get yourself motivated for that extra bit of training.

Get yourself a training partner

This makes sure that you go out, because if you don't you are letting both yourself and your partner down. It's good if they are a little better than you as this will force you to work a little harder to keep up. These is also the social aspect where you can have a couple of pints after – or healthy equivalent if you're that way inclined.

The sport of mountain biking requires an individual to posses a reasonable level of fitness in most, if not all, of the aspects of performance: aerobic endurance; muscular endurance; strength; power; speed; and last but not least, flexibility.

Obviously, the degree of importance of each component and the respective abilities required vary according to the rider's main events, and also his or her level of performance.

If you're a rider who returns from a hard ride or a competition with aches and pains in places that don't normally get them perhaps you need to do some training.

In light of the principle of specificity – which essentially means that you get what you train for – most riders feel the best way to achieve fitness for mountain bike riding is to train on their bikes. Well, what could be more specific than that? Indeed, most authorities would agree that the main mode of training should replicate as closely as possible the demands of the event being trained for.

The role that feet play with mountain biking is often under appreciated. While you don't have the intense pounding of the lower extremities as seen in running, biomechanical control is still necessary. Most fee tend to be categorized as pronated or supinated, with bimechanical deformities commonly treated with orthotics.

Pronated

A pronated foot is typically associated with a flat foot, even though there are several other anatomical factors that must be present for a medical diagnosis. The actual term of pronation (or supination) is not pathological: All feet pronate and supinate during the normal walking cycle. It is the relative amount and timing of pronation and supination that makes the reference pathological. A pronated foot is sometimes referred to as a “loose bag of bones.” This expression refers to the “feel” you get when working with the flat foot: it is typically hyper-mobile.

Whether it's because you're waylaid by illness, island vacation or a bout of mid-season ennui, sometimes your bike ends up sitting in the rack rather than racking up roads. Still, no matter how fast your fitness slips away, it's never too late to get it back.

Sometimes it's actually the best thing that can happen, because nobody takes the rest periods that they're supposed to. To do a a fast comeback...

Check the time

Take three of four days off, and you may actually come back faster and stronger. After a week or more, however, you lose about 2 to 4 percent of your fitness per week. If you know in advance you're in for a layoff, do short but intense efforts to forestall losses – a half hour of exercise is all it takes to maintain fitness and muscle memory on the bike.

Cyclists, like all athletes, need plenty of liquids. But beyond that basic tenet, things get unclear quickly – and for years, riders have heard conflicting reports about what, when and how much to drink. We had the pleasure to ask a nutrition expert to separate the facts from the fiction.

The biggest Riders Myth is Replace Every Lost Gram.

For years cyclists have been told to drink enough on the bike so they weigh the same after the ride as they did beforehand. The truth is, the human body can't absorb fluids as fast as it loses them, and not every gram of weight is lost through sweat anyway.

The Truth is Keep Up with Sweat Loss

Replace about 75 percent of lost sweat during a long ride. To do that, you need to know your sweat rate. To determine your sweat rate, weigh yourself before and after a short ride. An hour ride is good indicator of what you're losing through sweat along.