- [Announcer] Oh, hello there trainiacs.
Nice little recovery ride today.
What I have cooked up for you now is a multi part series
addressing just basic bike fitting setup.
We're gonna go through saddle height.
We're gonna go through fore and aft.
We're gonna go through setting up your front end
and all how to make yourself comfortable
so that you can get as aerodynamics as possible
for as long as possible and that
is what's gonna make you as fast as possible on the bike.
(upbeat music)
So alright, trainiacs, I'm going to preface
this bike fitting series by saying
that I am not a certified bike fitter.
If you problems that are very painful,
very specific to you, something that is more intense
than just maybe a little bit of a nagging injury,
or just wanting to get your bike fit in say
the right realm of the fit that you should have,
you should definitely go see
a certified bike fitter from a bike shop.
What we're gonna talk about here is
just general bike fitting with three touch points.
You touch the bike on your pedals, on your seat,
and on the elbow pads and the bars.
So we're going to address those three points,
but when it comes to getting right dialed in
specifically for you, go see a bike fitter.
Also this series is going to be accompanied
by a free download that you can get
by going to triatholontaran.com/bikefit.
So if there are images and things that you want
to make sure that we save so that
you can kind of put them on your phone
and match it up to what you are seeing,
all of that is going to be in that free download,
which is at triatholontaran.com/bikefit.
Today in this first video we are going to start off
with the placement of the saddle, up and down, fore and aft.
If you have lower back pain, knee pain,
or severe saddle sores odds are that your saddle height,
or forward and backward position
are not dialed in properly.
The saddle height is probably the easiest
of the up and down, forward and backward
saddle positions to figure out.
In general get the crank arm to the very bottom
of the pedal stroke so that the crank arm
is completely vertical and as a starting point
you want the saddle height set so that at your legs
full extension, about as stretched out
as you can possible make it your heel
is just barely grazing the top of the pedal.
From that point, you've got about one inch of room down
and that one inch is about the ballpark
that you want to be in.
So that top is your top limit,
but if you find that you start having lower back pain,
you start having knee pain, gradually bring it down
to a point that feels comfortable.
John Cobb, the founder of Cobb saddles
who himself is an amazing bike fitter,
is probably one of the guys
that pioneered it in the industry, said that
as much as that inch lower is still a really good spot
for people that have aches and pains to be in.
So if you're able to get somebody looking at you from behind
what you want to see is a saddle height
that allows your hips to not rock up and down, side to side.
If the saddle height is too high your gonna have to push
and stretch your hips to get
to the bottom of the pedal stroke.
So you want everything nice and level in the hips
and the shoulders, and even this I would say
there's probably just a touch too much rocking
side to side for me and I work on
just being a little bit more steady.
And next when it comes to saddle selection,
there is no best saddle.
A lot of people swear by split nose saddles.
A lot of people swear by flat saddles.
It's very, very personal.
A lot of triathletes will doe better
with a split nose saddle and that's because
saddles are built for you to be upright on a road bike.
When you end up titling forward,
all that pressure that was on your sit bones
ends up rotating onto your pelvis
and if you don't spread that load across your sit bones
and your structure properly,
there's gonna be a lot of pressure right into your pelvis,
and basically your undercarriage.
So a split nose saddle might help.
A flat saddle might also help.
A rounded saddle might help.
Some guidelines that you can work with
are rounded saddles tend to be for people
that have a very rounded lower back.
Flat saddles tend to be for people
that have a very flat lower back.
When you go into a bike shop to select a saddle,
what you want is basically just like a memory foam pad
that you can sit on and they'll be able to see
where your sit bones line up
and the width of those sit bones will be a guideline
for how wide or narrow your saddle should be,
and then beyond that, the only thing that you can do
is just try a whole bunch of saddles and see what works.
And then one big caveat to all of this
is that females will have different requirements for saddles
because they are built different anatomically.
There are quite a few saddle manufacturers
that are starting to make female specific saddles,
Cobb being one of them and I've herd that
the structure of their saddles compliments
a women's area much better than a lot of other saddles,
so if you tend to have very tender parts,
and you are a female, take a look at Cobb saddles
and the female specific saddles that are out there.
Then finally when it comes to putting your saddle
fore and aft, forward and backward in the right position,
that's where you start looking from the side,
and you can put a mirror off to the side
and you want to be looking at your leg at full extension.
You want it basically as vertical as you possibly can.
What you really don't want, is a line that's going forward,
because that line that's going forward means
that your hip angle is closing,
and as triathletes, that's gonna put a lot of pressure
on our glutes, it's gonna imbalance
the muscle fatigue that so that when we get off the bike
our glutes are gonna be so toast
that they're not gonna be able to fire properly.
They're gonna cause our quads to work a lot more,
and they're probably gonna cramp up,
so what you're looking for is
basically as vertical a line as possible
to get your hips forward and open up that hip angle.
So there you go trainiacs, that is saddle positioning.
In the next video we're gonna talk about
the contact point of the pedal and how to set up
your cycling or triathlon shoe with the cleat
and potentially an insole on the inside.
You can check out that next video right up here.
You can check out the full play list
for all the bike fitting down here,
and as I mentioned, go to triatholontaran.com/bikefit
for the free download that will give you some images
and more resources that will help you make this
a little bit more easier for you.
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