r to keep your balance while walking, and finally
on the bicycle to guide the wheel and keep yourself balanced on it. If
you will examine the two cuts accompanying this article, entitled,
respectively, "correct road position" and "incorrect road position," you
will at once see the difference. The incorrect position shows a rider
"leaning" on his hands and arms. The seat is a very common one,
unfortunately, and if you examine the next twenty riders you meet,
especially those who have ridden fifteen or twenty miles, you are likely
to find most of them in this condition. The arms are rigid, the body is
leaning on them. This thrusts the shoulders back until the
shoulder-blades touch each other behind the shoulders. The lungs and
neck are pushed forward, and every single muscle and nerve in the upper
part of the trunk and neck is out of place. The result is that neither
heart nor lungs get good opportunity for action, and the shape of your
upper body is slowly but surely being deformed. In the other position,
the correct one, the rider could at any moment take his hands from the
handle-bar and not alter his position in any way. The two contrasted
speak for themselves.

It may, of course, be said that when a rider becomes tired with riding,
the incorrect position is a great rest. In the first place, this is not
true if he has faithfully learned to ride in the upright seat. Then the
other becomes uncomfortable. In the correct position the wheelman has
his arms a trifle bent, at the elbow, so that when he goes over any
unevenness in the road his arms give, and he avoids the shaking of his
whole body by the jounce, to say nothing of the certainty of giving his
wheel an unpleasant shaking up.

In the most modern wheels the position of the rider is almost that of a
pedestrian--that is, the pedals are almost under the saddle, so that he
treads directly up and down. This helps him in keeping his seat without
the aid of hands and arms, and it makes all the muscles of the legs and
thighs work in their proper places, and the whole action of his body
thus becomes natural. All this can be seen in the "correct position,"
and there can hardly be a question that this is the natural position for
a man to take when he mounts his wheel for a run of a few miles. It
naturally brings part of the weight of the body on the pedals, relieves
the very uncomfortable weight on the saddle, and helps a rider to
balance himself without the use of handle-b