welcome to today's episode of bike fit tristars today's episode back pain
so as my beautiful assistant uh just explained we're going to be talking about
back pain today mostly low back pain all surrounding the lumbar spine there are many
causes for it uh it really comes down to three different factors before i get into it i just
want to talk a little bit about uh very very basic spinal anatomy so most people and you need to kind
of understand this before you kind of get onto the bike element of it so most people possess
what's called the lordosis of the lumbar spine so there's a curvature a natural curvature in the
lower back here the problem with this is when we move onto a bicycle you tend to adopt a slightly
different pelvic orientation which results in uh spinal extension now what that means and this is
you know what which this is what brings us on to our first cause for lower back pain is excessive
reach because what happens is you've got a spine that wants to be in a flexed state but when you're
uh overextended it becomes into an extended state what that means is you end up overextending the
lower back uh and that's one of the one very much more common causes of lower back pain
once you have a go at reducing reach uh you could have a go at changing the handlebar
for different handlebar reach you can change the stem length uh you could go down bike size
you could move the saddle further forward you need to be careful about just doing that in isolation
because it can upset other elements but there are lots of ways of reducing reach so if you're
getting a lower back pain particularly back pain that's across the general part of the lower back
so it's not one-sided uh the the reach is quite possibly the the reason why you're experiencing
that so have a go reducing the reach of the bike see if improves things quite often i
find when we reduce reach we actually increase the handlebar drop so when you when you reduce
the reach you're able to take the front end lower that actually quite often ends up taking
pressure off the hands as well it also allows you center of gravity makes the bike handle better
that kind of leads us on to what if it's on one side now one of the most common drivers
one of those common blinds that we see in here is excessive saddle height by both bike fitters bike
shops and consumers alike and when a rider runs their saddle too high it's extremely uncommon for
that person to sit centrally and overextend both of their legs so most people tend to preference
one side over teller actually most people right-handed which means they tend to preference
the right side over the left not always but generally and what that results in is a shift
over to the right hand side now what that means is that you end up with a hyper-extended left leg
and under extended right leg it's a means of sacrificing the left for the right and what
that means is that you end up overextending the sacroiliac joints on this left-hand side so again
if you're if you're getting pain on one side it might be that you're over-reaching on that one
side solutions to that would be lower the saddle again it's important to understand that quite
often when we reduce saddle height we actually make other changes at the same time like changing
the stance changing the cleat location changing the reach but you know if it's single-sided
it might be a way of just remedying do it a little bit at a time maybe five mil ten mil
at a time and see how you get on and that should solve it for you and it's free it's also free yes
just to dispel a little bit of a myth that i was certainly privy to a number of years ago i don't
know whether it's still around but there is a myth surrounding lower back pain when you are
climbing so when you're climbing and the bicycle's elevated the front of the bicycle is elevated
you pedal differently so what you tend to do is you dorsiflex you drop the heel which means
that if your sound's too high you're extending your leg even more than you are so the myth was
just to go back a step was that uh you you get a lower back pain when you're climbing but you
need to strengthen your lower back muscles and then the pain goes away well basically
again it's about saddle height reduction quite often as i said when you when the front of the
bike's elevated you start to dorsiflex will drive through the heel a lot more which results in more
extension of the leg thus you're extending the leg even more than you would do if the bike was level
the way of remedying it would be to reduce the saddle or move to texas where they're in a hills
so the final potential cause of low back pain could be your saddle itself
now there are a couple of reasons why the saddle could be causing you issues so for example if
you don't have any pressure relief in the cell and it results in posterior rotation of the pelvis
so in english rather than adopting a neutral spine like so we tend to roll the pelvis away to
get uh get pressure away from the soft tissue that again creates even more spinal flexion
so that that's putting quite a lot of stress through this um this section this lumbar region
secondly again it kind of goes back to the the excessive saddle height thing quite often when a
rider has been riding access excessive saddlehead for a long time and they sit off to one side for a
long time quite often saddles collapse which means that it no off no longer offers you or provides
you any support so even though lowering the south height might improve things actually you've then
got a silence collapsed and it's just it's kind of still promoting that asymmetry so it's worth
looking at your equipment checking whether it's uh level in this in this plane from left to right
quite often you might see if someone who sits off the right hand side you might see that the
right side of the saddle has just completely collapsed it's particularly common in certain
generations of specialized saddle it tends to happen on um on saddles with cheaper cells with
pressure relief channels having said that though i've seen a number of cells even like this area
where the padding becomes compacted on one side or one of the wings starts to crack so it's actually
worth almost replacing your saddles every few years just to kind of keep them fresh because
they do they do fatigue a lot of the hulls are made of plastic for example so that they tend to
give up to summarize how to how to remedy it might be replaced saddle uh it might be get a bike fit
get a bike there you go get a bike fit just for a change what's that noise you're scamming your
did you did you just sell yourself a bottle of water by accident yes so that marks the end of
today's episode of bike fit tuesdays if you have any questions for us please put them in
comment section down below and i'm sure james will do his best to answer them if you have any
topics that you'd like us to cover any places where you're getting pain that you would like
to be covered in the videos let us know link down below to james's website if you'd like to
book a fit with him or one of his colleagues at the shop thank you and see you next time