hello welcome back to bike fit tuesdays today we are covering five bike fit blunders things
that people do to self-medicate which might not be the best way of going about it you're ready
it's been a while been like a month hasn't it but every month do the viewers want like bike
fit content every month i think they want it every day it's a bit boring isn't it
so very common blood that we see in here is uh riders applying quite a lot of pitch
to their saddles means of removing sample issues or genital issues now there's quite
a lot of problems associated with this firstly destabilizes the pelvis the most important thing
to understand is that when you apply a lot of pitch to a saddle you create a slope now
what happens when we put something on a slope that's how stable your pelvis is the idea was
to drop the nose of the saddle to take pressure away from the genitals and soft tissue areas
in the middle of the pelvis however i personally prefer using a saddle that has a pressure relief
channel the other issues that this tends to result in is riders tend to gravitate
towards the nose of it now the nose is a very unsupported very narrow part of the saddle
isn't really going to offer you a huge amount of support and stability it's also going to result
in a lot of weight on the front of the bike so you quite often see people kind of bracing with
their arms hands and neck and shoulders because they're falling off the front of the saddle so
if you're having soft tissue problems it's not genital numbness that kind of stuff uh the best
way to remedy it typically speaking is is to fit a saddle that has a pressure relief channel
they come in a million and one different shapes and sizes but uh that that would be the best way
of solving issues like that in my opinion on the grounds that you're still able to provide
support to the pelvis but it's relieving any any sort of pressure from erogenous areas for the most
part we want to try and get a saddle relatively level but and there isn't a general rule for how
much pitch should be applied to each cell because it varies from saddle to saddle an area like
this i would potentially well most people would never leave my studio one of these but i would
potentially fit this with a maximum of one one to one half degrees of nose down when we're measuring
saddle pitch in here to keep it consistent we tend to measure across the two widest points so
if you take sound like an snp uh we would measure between the two highest points so i mean we have
a saddle pitch tool which is basically a magnetic clipboard with a digital spirit level on it
um which allows us to measure uh saddle pitch so it varies but ultimately what we what we don't
want is to be generating a huge slope in order for you to fall off the front of the saddle
the second common blunder for consumers and bike shops alike is to size up the shoes in order to
accommodate a wide foot so in a normal dress shoe or trainer you can get away with going up
a size to accommodate a wider foot because there isn't a mechanical element to it whereas with a
cycling shoe complete location where the cleaters are fixed is fixed you can't really move it to
for the most part so the problem with going up a size in the shoe is that as you go up in in the
shoe in the shoe size the [ __ ] location becomes increasingly further forward what that does is it
puts quite a lot of pressure with the forefoot uh there's a very delicate structure of the toe bones
and tends to cut off circulation to the feet more importantly it actually has ramifications in the
knees the hips and the pelvis there's a very very strong correlation between a cleat placement being
too far forward and anterior knee pain that also tends to impact saddle comfort as well
way of remedying this you've got to understand uh have you got wide feet there's a very simple way
of doing that look at them if you've got wide feet buy a wide fitting shoe i think generally the best
way of remedying this would be to go somewhere that specializes in shoe fitting we offer a shoe
fitting service where every rider is subjected to the feet being measured we measure arch collapse
and arch drop we measure the width and then we recommend a shoe based on that rather than
just kind of going on a size 10 but you're not 10 or 8 with wide feet here's the shoe i
see an increasing number of people who watch these videos say oh i'm gonna go and buy a pair of lakes
because i say they're great and they are but then they're gonna buy them online or they're gonna buy
them from a bike shop and they're the wrong size or the wrong shape well it's the wrong lake not
all legs are the same this is a narrower fitting shoe than this which is an hour a physical shoe
than this there are a few places uh throughout the uk that have that understanding but i think the
basic takeaway from this is go somewhere where they measure your feet and they have they have
a little bit of an understanding of shooters of shoes and how they differ use speedplay
pebbles to treat knee pain this is one of the more common blunders that we see in here where
again kind of bike shops and and consumers alike tend to recommend this pedal system as a means of
solving knee issues uh i don't really know how this myths come about because actually i see
potentially more knee issues occurring because of this system than anything else certainly
they've always been preferred because of uh quite a lot of adjustment float and there's also
historically has been a plethora of different options so for example you used to be able to
before wahoo took over um you used to have different axle lengths you used to have
extender plates that you could adjust the cleat in in a much more uh extreme rearward fashion
all of those benefits are no longer available unfortunately but i i find that the speedplay
has added complexity it's very expensive and doesn't solve knee pack what it might do is help
alleviate the symptoms but my suspicion is usually the symptoms occur as a result of something else
it's almost always usually multifaceted as well so uh we've got a video that we're going to put
there that we've done on ebay it's an expensive way of trying to solve a problem that
frankly probably doesn't need uh or nor warrant the purchase of any product you can usually get
away with uh removing knee pain without having to spend loads and loads of loads of money uh so i
would probably avoid so something we quite often see with bikes that come straight up a bike shop
in the kind of pre-delivery fit or setup is that the handlebars are rolled up like so as a means
of reducing the reach the main negative to this is that it renders the drops unusable because
you can't you can't stay on them uh but it also means that you can't reach the brake levers when
you're on the drops uh and ultimately it just looks rubbish so the way that we would recommend
you go about doing it is well you can reduce the reach in a number of ways we can change
the stem length we can change the handlebar the handlebar itself it's worth noting the the reach
of the handlebar so this distance where from the center of the ball to where the control is located
differs from handlebar to handlebar some of them i mean they could be as much as 30 to 40 millimeters
difference and then how the control is located on handlebar will also influence up to 20 mil within
that as well this shouldn't really be carried out it's generally indicative of a light or a position
that's just too long it's not particularly stable and as i've said it renders the controls not
particularly effective the way we would go about doing it a great way of reducing reach on the bike
without having to necessarily roll handlebars up is to change the control location on the handlebar
now first and foremost what you've got to do is to start this is you've got to unwrap the top
of the bar all the way down to just below the shifter take a five millimeter allen key it's
easier with a p handle like this uh peel the hood back and this is only on shimano by the way well
she knows shimano and sram both have a five millimeter allen key behind the hood
campagnolo uses a torx t i think it's t25 and you'll basically want to loosen the lever and
you can then adjust kind of where the shifter is on the handlebar so a good rule and this is
you know i don't like generalizations and rules of thumb but this is this could be a good one for you
get the ball oh sorry let's get the end of the handlebar level right so make sure you're doing
this when the bike is level it's on it's on earth so you don't have one part of the bike elevated
it's got to be completely level get the bottom of the bar level and then you have your control
location set up with a smiled amount of of rise at the front in this case in this way uh what
that will do is it will potentially offset the reach as much as possible when i say reach i'm
talking about the reach from of of the handlebar itself uh so what we're going to do is once we've
locked our our bar our handlebar rotation in place i'm just going to do that quickly where you have
the angle of the control to a certain extent is down to personal preference there are some people
that say that it should be perpendicular with the ground i disagree because it tends to result
in a rolling of the wrist which creates neck and shoulder and arm tension uh i like a little bit of
rice the shift to the to the lever um so that as i said earlier that your it kind of has a nice soft
interaction with with the hand when you present it to the lever lock that in place and away you
go to demonstrate how much of a difference this this can influence if i put this back down again
this bar's got the shifter set in you know quite a common place uh i see you know i see a lot of
bikes coming in with the with with leaves set up like this and to demonstrate
uh how much of a difference the reach can be
look at the reach to this lever is 69.5 centimeters
versus 67 centimeters so it's 25 millimeter change in reach without you haven't even having to even
change anything on the bike so it's uh it's a really cost effective way of reducing the region
making the bike a lot more comfortable for you it will also mean that you can reach the brake levers
when you're on the drops without necessarily having to uh rely on the reach adjustment
of the brake lever most most must probably have reached adjustment on them uh and that's it really
so this kind of leads us on to putting for a short stand but very short stems on bikes and
what that tends to do is negatively impact the handling so the bike tends to feel very unstable
at high speed if you're having to put a very short stem on a bike have a go at doing this first but
there are other ways of improving or optimizing the reach of a bicycle quite often it can be
that it isn't to do with the front end of the bike at all so for example if you have
a saddle that results in posterior rotation of the pelvis in english rather than sitting with a
relatively neutral spine like so what happens a lot of the time we have soft
tissue pressure applied is we rotate the pelvis away what that tends to result in is excessive
spinal flexion so it makes it much more it basically essentially shortens your spine
which makes them reach the handlebars much more difficult so it could be that we either need to
fit a sample that offers sufficient pressure relief or in some cases it can just be bad habit
you know everyone it's no different to sitting at a desk like this or walking down the street
like this some people just get into the bad habit of sitting on a bike like they sit on my toilet
so it might be that you need to kind of prompt yourself to anteriorly rotate your pelvis what
that results in is well a number of things firstly as we've discussed it lengthens your
spine lengthens your torso and improves your reach to the handlebars it also uh it tends to
be better and there's a video coming up on this soon it tends to be better for your lower back
it's also going to be conducive to good glute enlistment glutes are your biggest muscle group
they're the primary extensors one of your primary senses so actually you might find you get a little
bit more power as well so there you go that marks the end of today's episode of bike fit tuesdays if
you would like to find out more about bike fitting stuff then head to james's website if you'd like
to get a fit from him as well put any questions that you have into the comment section down below
and we'll do our best to answer them equally if you have any topics that you'd like us to cover in
future episodes of bite fit tuesdays put that in the comment section down below thank you goodbye