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Tyre pressure is the cheapest performance variable on a bicycle and the one most riders get wrong in the same direction: too high. The instinct is understandable — a hard tyre feels fast, and the sidewall has a big number printed on it. Neither of those is evidence.
What follows is what the published work actually supports, where the sensible numbers come from, and why the correct answer depends on your weight, your tyres and the surface rather than on anything moulded into the rubber.
Two losses, pulling in opposite directions
Every tyre loses energy in two distinct ways, and pressure affects them in opposite directions. That is the whole story, and almost everything else is detail.
The tyre flattens where it meets the road and springs back behind the contact patch. Rubber is not a perfect spring, so some energy is lost as heat every revolution — hysteresis. More pressure means less deformation, so this loss falls as pressure rises.
On anything other than a billiard table, a hard tyre cannot absorb the surface, so the bike and the rider get lifted and shaken instead. That energy is damped in your body and the frame. This loss grows as pressure rises, and grows faster on rougher surfaces.
Add the two and you get a U-shaped curve with a minimum somewhere in the middle. That minimum is what riders call the breakpoint. Below it you are wasting energy squashing rubber; above it you are wasting energy bouncing yourself down the road.
Stylised. The shape is well supported by the mechanics; the exact position of the minimum for your tyre on your road is not something anyone can hand you as a number. Note how flat the bottom is — which is why being a little under is far cheaper than being a lot over.
What the measurements actually show
On a smooth indoor surface, where impedance losses are close to nothing, rolling resistance does fall steadily with pressure — but with brutally diminishing returns. In one coast-down study, raising pressure from 150 to 300 kPa (roughly 1.5 to 3 bar) was worth about 1.6 km over an hour of riding. Going all the way from 900 to 1200 kPa — a further 3 bar, well past where most tyres are comfortable — bought roughly another 100 metres. The same study found that adding 15 kg of load raised the rolling resistance coefficient, which is the other half of why your weight belongs in the calculation.
Off smooth surfaces the picture changes quickly. In field testing on road, grass and sand, both the tyre tread and the inflation pressure changed rolling resistance materially — a smooth tyre rolled about 21% easier than a knobby one, and the surface mattered as much as the tyre did. And the energy that a hard tyre does not absorb genuinely goes into you: measurements of road cycling found whole-body vibration at the saddle high enough that an eight-hour equivalent exposure exceeded occupational limits. That is not comfort talk. Damping vibration with your own body costs power, and being rattled for four hours costs more than power.
A starting-point table
These are rear-tyre pressures in bar for a tubeless setup on dry, reasonably smooth tarmac, using total system weight — you, the bike, bottles, kit, everything. They are a place to begin experimenting, not a result from a laboratory. Anyone who hands you a table and calls it optimal is overselling what is knowable.
| System weight | 25 mm | 28 mm | 32 mm | 38 mm |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 65 kg | 5.6 | 4.7 | 3.8 | 2.8 |
| 75 kg | 6.4 | 5.3 | 4.3 | 3.2 |
| 85 kg | 7.2 | 6.0 | 4.8 | 3.6 |
| 95 kg | 8.0 | 6.6 | 5.3 | 4.0 |
Width, casing and load split
- Wider tyres want less pressure, not more. A wider casing at lower pressure produces a shorter, broader contact patch that deforms less per revolution. This is why a 32 mm tyre at 4.3 bar can roll as well as a 25 mm at 6.4 bar and ride far better.
- Casing quality matters more than width. A supple, high-thread-count casing loses less energy at any pressure. It is also more fragile. That trade-off is real and worth making consciously.
- Rim width changes the tyre. The same tyre on a wider rim sits differently and has different stiffness at the same pressure. In mountain bike testing, a wider rim at matched tyre stiffness cut rolling resistance by about 1.4%, while the same rim at matched pressure raised it by about 0.9% — small effects, in opposite directions, depending entirely on what you held constant.
- Your weight is not evenly split. Roughly 40% sits on the front wheel and 60% on the rear when riding on the hoods. Running the same pressure at both ends means one of them is wrong; the front should be the lower of the two.
- Temperature moves the number. Ambient temperature changes both the pressure in the tyre and the behaviour of the rubber, and simulation work on bicycle tyres shows rolling resistance varying meaningfully with ambient conditions. A tyre set in a cold garage will be running higher once it has been worked for an hour.
Why the sidewall number is not the answer
The range printed on a tyre is a safety and compatibility statement: below the minimum the tyre may unseat or pinch, above the maximum it may fail or damage the rim. It says nothing about which pressure within that range is fastest for a 62 kg rider on a rough Slovenian back road. Those are different questions, and only one of them has a legal department attached to it.
You cannot measure this reliably with a power meter on a public road — the differences are smaller than the noise. What you can do is the craft version, which works:
- Start from the table, ride your normal roads, and drop 0.2 bar at a time.
- Keep going until the bike starts to feel vague in corners or you hear the rim on impacts. That is the floor.
- Come back up 0.2–0.3 bar and stop. You are near enough, and the curve is flat there anyway.
The honest summary
Most riders on 28 mm tyres are running about a bar more than they need, gaining nothing and losing comfort, grip and a little speed on anything but perfect tarmac. A decent pressure gauge is a better investment than most upgrades, and checking before every ride matters more than the exact number you choose, because tyres lose pressure steadily whether you ride them or not.
If you are picking routes with surface in mind — and after changing your pressures you probably should — Moveee's Route Engine knows the difference between a smooth valley road and a broken gravel climb, which is also the difference between the two ends of this article. See gravel vs road: choosing the right surface for the training side of that choice.
Sources 6
Where this article summarises a study, the study itself is linked — not a write-up of it.
- 1 Grappe F, Candau R, Barbier B, Hoffman MD, Belli A, Rouillon JD. Influence of tyre pressure and vertical load on coefficient of rolling resistance and simulated cycling performance · Ergonomics · 1999
- 2 Bertucci WM, Rogier S, Reiser RF. Evaluation of aerodynamic and rolling resistances in mountain-bike field conditions · Journal of Sports Sciences · 2013
- 3 Dell'Orto G, Ballo F, Mastinu G, Gobbi M. Racing bicycle tyres – Influence on mechanical characteristics of internal pressure, vertical force, speed and temperature · European Journal of Mechanics - A/Solids · 2023
- 4 Maier T, Müller B, Allemann R, Steiner T, Wehrlin JP. Influence of wheel rim width on rolling resistance and off-road speed in cross-country mountain biking · Journal of Sports Sciences · 2019
- 5 Edwards PI, Holsgrove TP. Thunder road — whole-body vibration during road cycling, and the effect of different seatpost designs to minimise it · Journal of Sports Sciences · 2021
- 6 Hyttinen J, Rothhämel M, Jerrelind J, Drugge L. Simulation of transient rolling resistance of bicycle tyres at various ambient temperatures · PLOS ONE · 2024
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