welcome to today's episode of bike fit tuesdays in today's episode
10 bike fit tips for new cyclists you gotta get up we've got filming to do
don't buy a race bike buy an endurance bike racewalk is designed for 60 kilo 20 year old
athletes to win races like the tour de france uh you then translate that to an individual in
this 50s it's a desk all day uh it's a bit like buying formula one car and driving it to tesco's
not everybody is 50 and sits at a desk all day though no that's true but the vast majority of
people of consumers are not 20 years old and at an athlete level race bikes tend to tend to
require high levels of fitness uh good levels of strength generally less upper body mass
typical of a professional cyclist in order for them to be ridden comfortably endurance bikes
inherently are a bit more comfort orientated uh they have a longer wheelbase which makes
them more stable the geometry is generally far less aggressive and tends to work much better
for consumers uh these days as well they're ten they're getting a lot lighter they're getting a
lot stiffer so you can still ride them fast it's just that they're generally better suited to
uh to uh consumers good example of an endurance bike would be something like high moves cannondale
synapse uh my personal favorite is the look 765 there are cheaper versions of this as well so
uh specialized does a bike called a sector don't make a bike called a contend uh trackmakerbike.com
called the domani uh that most major manufacturers will have an endurance orientated bike usually
at the lower end they're usually equipped with disc brakes as standard which gives you slightly
better braking performance so and they're taller head tubes shorter reach and longer wheelbase
for our next trick we're going to need our friend chris hannah width should be as wide
as your shoulders most off-the-shelf robots come with handbars that are too wide so if you consider
that most men when i measure them measure between 39 and 41 centimeters across the acromion process
the distal part of the scapula this renders a 42 centimeter handlebar to be too wide for most
people what that results in is people tend to roll the wrists like this which results in numb hands
neck and shoulder issues uh that kind of stuff but also it recreates an inability to reach the
brake levers now there's a reach-around joke here if your handlebars are wider than you are you're
reaching around the handlebar to get at the brake lever accompanying that with excessive reach which
we'll come on to later and you can't reach the brake levers when you're on drops and set which
is pretty problematic actually we're going to show you how to measure your handlebars we are like i
said measuring across the chromium process from here to here chris here is a pretty slanted guy
he's 34 35 centimeters most men will measure as i said 39 to 41. women there seems to be a wider
spectrum with women i the smallest women i think i've measured about 32 33 centimeters all the way
up to 38. generally speaking the 40 centimeter handlebar is the most common bar with i sell
on a on a massive scale i would say uh 90 percent of male clients tend to leave here with
a 40 centimeter handlebar women like say anywhere between 34 36 and 38 centimeters it's worth noting
that not all handlebars are measured in the same way so if you buy a data handlebar for example
data element is a very popular italian brand they measure outer to outer which means a 40
centimeter data bar is actually a 38 so which actually means most people end up buying the
right size by accident so it's worth noting that when you're looking on manufacturer's website
they will iterate what how they met how they're measuring these handlebars so some will measure
across the drops some will measure across the top at the control location some will
measure out to outer it's also worth noting that some handlebars will flare so the
the drop will be wider set than the tops will be a very good example of this would be um
envy's aero handlebar which is ridiculously narrow and a ridiculously wide at the drop
a tip for those of you with small little hands on a lot of shifters these days you can adjust
the reach of the brake lever this might make it easy for you to reach the lever when you're
on the drops it's worth noting that changing the handlebar width is likely to influence this a lot
more than just adjusting the reach of the brake lever but for like i say particularly some women
and gents with smaller hands you might want to wind this lever in where you do that will depend
on the lever so this is a clarisse lever uh i use these on jig because they're cheap most of
the shimano mechanical levers there's two and a half mil allen key at the back here
and as you wind it in you can see that the brake lever gets closer to the handlebar yeah
if i wind it back out again you can see how much scrub there is some of the sram levers
uh will have i think it's a two and a half might be a two two millimeter anarchy up inside here
somewhere and that's also where i think a lot of the electronic and hydraulic uh adjustment
is on the shimano levers as well you can find all this information on tech documents or simply just
google break lever adjust reach adjustment on sram force whatever it is whatever system it is
that you've got if you don't know what the system is it'll usually be written on a lever somewhere
they're still on handlebars so much can be done at the front end here so the next one this is
probably my favorite is uh handlebar setup and control location now the reason this is important
is because it you can massively influence the reach to the handlebars simply by playing around
with them with the handlebar rotation and the control location which is so pretty
which is free one of the first things that i would always do and this is a very general rule
and it will depend slightly on the handlebar but one way of getting the handlebar set up
correctly in terms of rotation like this is get a little spirit level get that
vertical yeah so we're looking for looking at this bubble here what that means is that
you will offset the reach of the handlebar worth noting that not all reaches are created equal uh
something like a zip or a 3t will be longer than a data which is why i prefer data and then from once
you've got the handlebar set up properly you can then set your control location get the control set
up with a little bit of angle on the ground that as you present hand to it it sits in your hand
if you've got it panned flat some people prefer this but if you've got it completely flat or
um or perpendicular to the ground it ends up with you end up having to roll the wrist a little bit
like this the opposite end of the spectrum if you've got the bar rolled up like this it means
that you end up falling off the uh off the drop and you can't reach the brake levers when you're
on the drops as well secondly control location on the lever the reason this is important is because
you can change the reach when i say reach i'm talking about this is from the back of the lever
to the nut to the saddle which is how the human being interacts with this you can change that
figure by up to two centimeters just by changing the control location and handlebar rotation
so for example we've got two shifters here set up in different ways so if we measure this one
is 60 centimeters to prove my point this bar this control is set slightly lower on the handlebar
61.5 centimeters so just by changing the control location of the uh on the handlebar you can really
get quite a lot of reach off of the bike without necessarily having to pay for a new stem or pay
for a different handlebar the handlebar it has to be said though is probably the best
way of changing reach or considering reach and i know a lot of people will talk about stems
but some handlebars as i said earlier will have longer reaches and if you cut that down means
you end up not having to put a really short stem don't make it too long i don't know what it is
about road cyclists but they seem to have this liking for doing a plank and riding a bicycle at
the same time you don't want the thing really long firstly it'll have ramifications in the
saddle it tends to result in a gravitation to the nose that's where most saddle discomfort
comes from is a poor interaction not necessarily just the reach per se another way of getting of
determining whether the reach is too long is if it feels too long if it feels a little bit long it's
way too long so on the grounds that as a human being you are very good at absorbing dysfunction
and with regards to reach what you'll find is you'll absorb absorb absorb to the point that
oh now it feels a bit long right so one way of uh potentially remedying this is we talked about
the handlebar but you can also reduce the stem length what i would also recommend you don't do
is use the saddle setback as a means of reducing the wrist that should be a last ditch attempt
to to reduce the reach because if you bring the saddle really far forward to reduce the reach
you end up upsetting uh the rider's weight distribution you end up putting a lot of
pressure on the hands generally speaking as well more most people can tolerate more
handlebar drop than they can excessive reach while we're on the subject of saddles next tip
sample tilt you want the saddle more or less level now it's worth noting that this can
be quite difficult uh because it depends on depends on the saddle so this saddle which is
a pro griffon is pretty flat i would normally set this with about uh one degree of negative uh tilt
this is measured across the two highest points of the saddle in this instance the sound like i say
is predominantly pretty flat this is going to be all the way around now yeah on saddles that have
uh a bit more of a screaming you're trying you're generally looking for the middle third
to be more or less level on a side like this i might expect maybe a little bit more of a tilt
about negative two degrees uh which i suspect is probably what that is
near enough the reason this is important is that if you have
too much tilt supply to the saddle thank you very cycling for this
you create a slide and what happens when we put something on a slope it rolls down the slide
what happens when you put something on the slip so you end up with low pressure on the hands you
end up with putting low pressure in the nose of the saddle and frankly it's just not going to be
much fun for you at all equally you don't want to go the other way nose up results in usually
posterior rotation of the pelvis in english run your pelvis being orientated like this which
uh is conducive to a neutral spine and good glute enlistment you end up posteriorly rotating
your pelvis like so to get your soft tissue and your genitals away from the saddle so
common is this compensation that a certain saddle brand developed a saddle selection
and marketing system called spine concert so ultimately get yourself a more or less level
andy's going to kill me because i've been working in here for a week and uh
i used to be so neat i haven't organized the saddles finisher fit i'm usually in so much
of a flat i kind of just do that buy a saddle with the pressure relief channel cut out of it pressure
relief channel is something like this pressure relief channel is intended to relieve soft tissue
all right uh and a rough enderogens tissue now the reason i think this is a good idea is because
as human beings we were not intended to sit on our genitals on hard pieces of foam so what this does
is it relieves that soft tissue and redistributes it redistributes it to the skeleton uh the lack
of lack of pressure relief typically results in riders sitting rotated they sit off to one side
they sit pissed they posteriorly rotate if we as we talked about in the previous tip so generally
speaking i almost always encourage riders to use one of these it's worth noting that if you have
tried something like this or you know specialized of course i can't find a part of the sound that i
want specialized toupee for example this is uh and you don't find it comfortable it's usually because
you're not interacting with it correctly think about it like this most people when they're on the
saddle too high for example usually sits off to one side which means that pressure relief channel
you ain't hitting it you're sitting off the and you're sitting on this very very hard ridge
so if you are getting discomfort on a saddle like this and it's sort of gentleman's that kind of
stuff it's probably because of your interaction with the saddle rather than the saddle itself
take your cleat as far back on the shoe as it'll go the reason for this
is it takes all the pressure away from the very delicate forefoot so any numbness or tingling
or pins and needles can be eliminated usually by taking the cleat further back
tends to improve stability of the heart of the overall foot and you end up generally
improving kind of knee stability pelvis so on and so forth we're keeping the segments in this
video quite short but we have a longer video dedicated to cleat position which i'll put in
the description down below if you want to check it out as you move like down the stock room it's like
and when you're filming yourself it looks like the death star trench run day i need help
don't use fixed cleats in the 1980s and 1990s uh there was an epidemic in professional racing in
knee injuries and it wasn't realised until some years later that directly coincided with the
introduction of the look black cleat which was the first clipless pedal system and it didn't allow
the foot to move inside the pedal and this is very popular in a lot of racing circles unfortunately
and it's usually used as a means of masking uh instability of the foot which and the the the
the symptom of foot instability and cycling tends to be excessive float all right you can dial that
out with good shoe fit good arch support cleat wedging heel wedging occasionally forefoot wedging
uh you don't almost i would all i would go as far as to say as you almost never need a
fixed cleat because it it stops any form tibial rotation which occurs when you flex your knee
uh so i would always use a in shimano either the yellow or blue there is an optimum float figure
i just think that you need some so yellow or blue in uh in shimano and red or grey in look
and speedplay obviously you can dye it out there as far as i'm aware there isn't a fixed cleat for
an spd system so generally look after your knees have yourself allow yourself a little bit of float
when advising my customers in a bike fit scenario or even just generally day to day in the shop
i always recommend or make recommendations to them based on things that are actually going to make a
difference to your life this is going to make more of a difference your life than this this is three
and a half thousand pounds it's really nice though for one i mean it wants to be for three and a half
grand for one week thanks yeah i'll just cry i'll look after it okay this however is going to make
a bigger difference to your life this is where all the power goes or dozens as the case usually
is i have guys coming in here they've got ten thousand pound bikes they've got 50 quid shoes
you would go faster on a 2000 pound bike with 300 worth of shoes than you would on a 10 grand bike
with 50 quid level shoes end of story and that concludes our 10 tips for beginners uh if you
have any more questions relating to bike fit or topics that you'd like us to cover in these videos
we're going to be doing some more put them in the comments down below if you want to book a fit with
james because he does bike fitting head to the website down in the description although there's
quite a long waiting list i think it's end of september for me now but booking with andy instead