Bicycle Inner Tubes
Ordinary or Self Healing?

My favorite bicycle inner tubes

Once you have bicycle wheels and the best bicycle tires for your bike, it's time to choose the right inner tubes that will best suite your specific bicycle riding style.

Inner tubes are essentially inflatable balloons that fit inside your tire. Inflating the tube helps give your tire shape. Inflating this inner tube to the pressure specified on the size of the tire also ensures you have the fastest, safest ride possible!

Presta or Schraeder Valves?

The valve on the bicycle inner tube is the means whereby one gets air into the tire. This valve pokes out of the wheel, and different wheels are drilled for different sized valves.

Presta Valve

Schrader Valve

The Schraeder (or Schrader) valve is the most typical type of valve. Because it is an automotive-style valve, you will be able to fill your tires up at the gas station without any special attachment.

The Presta valves, on the other hand, are narrower, and have built-in valve caps. Because of this, one advantage of the Presta valve is that they are slightly easier to pump up with a hand pump then Schraeder valves (because there is no valve spring to overcome).

As far a performance, you will probably not notice too much difference in these different types of valves. The most important thing to remember is to get the type of valve that matches the size of hole drilled in your wheel!

The second most important thing to remember is that unless you have a specialized bicycle tire pump , you will need a special adaptor to inflate Presta valves with regular pumps, or at the gas station. These adaptors are small, and can usually be purchased at bicycle stores for a couple of dollars. You can also buy a Presta Valve Adaptor on Amazon.

Ordinary or Self Healing

With this, my answer is very simple:

If you are into mountain biking, or even if you are riding cross country mountain bikes, save yourself the unpleasant task of fixing a bicycle inner tube while on your trail: Use a self sealed (also called "self healing") inner tubes!

If you are mainly a city biker - self sealed inner tubes are not necessary for city biking, but still - it is quite hard for me to find disadvantages to using self sealed inner tubes.

The only 2 reasons NOT to use these remarkable, self healing inner tubes are: The price (about twice in compare to the standard inner tube) and a slight increase in the bike inner tube weight.