Hey Team!

This week we talk about bike fit! This one can get very deep very quickly. I’m going to touch upon the basic things you should know about your bike fit and riding position and I’ll finish with the type of "bike fit." The days of making the rider fit the bike are gone. We fit the bike to the rider. With that bike fit is very nuanced and as you’d expect, very individual. Everyone can benefit from a bike fit. It is without question the best bang for your buck as far as a performance upgrade is concerned. With this in mind, there are without a doubt improvements, whether slight or large, you can find by getting a bike fit. I recommend everyone get one. I’ll cover the basic things to look for and pay attention to here. Everything in bike fit is guided by one single rule: nothing should hurt. Ever. There’s a difference between muscle soreness from working the muscles and pain. You shouldnt have any pain. The only thing that may be not bike fit related is a saddle sore, but only if it’s a one off and can be easily explained( a wet ride, staying in your sweaty kit too long after a ride, forgetting chamois cream etc). However, a recurring saddle sore is a bike fit issue, especially if it’s in the same spot/side every time. Any recurring pain on the bike is at least a sign that you should look at your fit.

Saddle height: this is without question the most important measurement. An incorrect saddle height is robbing you of power and efficiency. I’ve seen it be so off that it causes premature fatigue in the muscles and restricts your breathing. Clinically, the proper saddle height puts the knee extension between 32-44*. Why the range? because everybody is different. The beauty of a detailed bike fit is it will take into consideration your actual range of motion and make the adjustments to the bike to fit these ranges. This is the starting point, nailing your saddle height down will be the biggest part of the bike fit.

Saddle Fore/Aft: this is number two. saddle height and saddle fore aft work in conjunction with each other in a 1:1 ratio. Go up 1mm, go forward 1mm. Opposite for down. The knee should track at or just behind the pedal spindle. As a starting point, dropping a plumb bob from the knee should put the line of the plumb bod between the tip of the crank arm and the pedal spindle. Again, these are simple starting points.

Bar reach and drop: once saddle height is set this is the next thing to look at. i’m going to give rough feelings about how this should be. For reach, you shouldnt be shrugging your shoulders and you should be able to reach the hoods while having a comfortable bend in your elbow. If the elbow is locked out or your shoulders are coming up toward your ears, the bars are too far away. Drop is a little harder to determine. bars too low could make it so you can’t breathe or feel like you’re doing a push up. Drop is solely based on your hamstring flexibility.

The final stage is what we call the z plane. I’ll talk more detail on this in the types of fits. I’ll leave z plane issues out of this email as way too many things can affect it. What I will say is that your feet should be square under your hips and knees.

The Bike Fits themselves! Most stores that do bike fits should have 2 levels of fit. They can be called several different things so I’ll go off of what we call ours and let you decipher what other shops call theirs based on what you receive. We do a Premium fit and a sizing. In my experience, a good shop should offer a sizing with every bike sold. A sizing is generally a cleat adjustment, a measured saddle height adjustment (when I say measured, i mean the shop is measuring the angle of the knee) and adjustments to the handlebars within the adjustability of the stock components.A premium fit looks at the rider in 3 planes. Some call this a 3D fit(a sizing would be a 2D fit). Think of a 3D fit as looking at the rider from the X Y plane and the Z plane(head on). A 2D fit looks at the rider from just the side. Premium fits will look at the rider from both sides and the front(3D) and make adjustments based per side so as to get the rider as symmetric as possible. Some Fit systems will use 3D tracking, some use AI or Lidar to track movements dynamically. All of this is just more information for the fitter to use to get you into the best position. Fitting is truly an artform. The fitter and his experience is truly what matters. They are the one making the decisions based on the data at hand. A premium fit from anywhere should take 2-4 hours depending on circumstance. Sizing is usually an hour or less. The biggest take away is that a premium fit looks at the rider as a whole, head to toe.

Bonus Section- Signs and symptoms of poor bike fit: There’s a bunch as i’m sure most if not all of you have felt at some point. I’ll cover the major ones here. Biggest issue I have customers come to me about is saddle discomfort. While this may or may not be a position issue, the saddle discomfort will without a doubt change how you’re sitting and interacting with the bike thus making it a fit issue. Sometimes we can solve saddle issues by just getting onto the proper sized saddle(yes, saddles come in sizes!). A saddle too high can cause chafing and pointed pressure issues. A saddle too low also causes pressure issues, but usually over the whole saddle and not a specific spot. Whether its chronic saddle sores, chafing or numbness this is without question the biggest issue customers want to address during a fit and as i said, finding the correct height is the only way to start solving saddle issues. Second issue is hand and toe numbness. Hand numbness is the harder of these two to solve, it could be either bars being too close or too far. Foot numbness usually boils down to bad footbeds, wrong cleat position or just a bad shoe. Third is usually knee pain. Knee pain is a fun one because it’s rarely ever the knee being the issue. I like to say the knee is the scapegoat. It’s usually either a hip issue(saddle too high or low, wrong size, muscle instability etc), or a foot issue(bad shoes, bad arch support, lower limb structure etc). Neck pain is another common issue, but this generally resolves itself as it’s usually a reach or drop issue.If you’re going to start tinkering with your own fit. My biggest piece of advice is to make one adjustment at a time. changing too many things too fast won’t let you understand what is wrong and what you’re feeling. Also, when you’re moving things, tiny adjustments make huge differences. We consider moving something more than 5mm as a huge adjustment. One of the reasons bike fit is so important is how repetitive the cycling movements are. being off even a few millimeters can wear away at joints quickly. Think of it this way, if you average 90rpms for 60 minutes, that’s 5,400 pedal revolutions. Imagine one of the wheels on your car being off slightly for that many revolutions. Something will break eventually.

I think this covers the basics. With it being base season and your local shop slowing down after christmas, now is the time to get a fit done if you’ve been thinking about it. I promise you it’s worth every penny.