There seems to be a lot of discussion at the moment around bike fit.
It could be that the cookies in my feed are just serving me bike fit content because I’ve been looking into it recently. Or it could be that more people are waking up to the fact that cycling does not have to be all about discomfort and pain. It should be about enjoyment and fun too.
With that in mind, I thought I’d share a few thoughts of my own.
There tends to be a thought that if you want to go fast, you slam your handlebars as low as possible to get as “aero” as possible. There is an equation that says you multiply your inside leg by 0.883, known as the LeMond method, and that will give you your saddle height. There is also the old “knee over pedal spindle” rule, where a line dropped from the front of your knee is supposed to line up neatly with the pedal axle.
All of these things sound useful, and they can be useful as starting points, but they are not bike fit. They are rules of thumb. Bike fit is what happens when those rules meet an actual human body, with actual flexibility, actual history, actual injuries, and actual goals.
A friend of mine had been championing bike fitting to me for years. I just thought I didn’t really need to spend €250 for someone to tell me how high my saddle needed to be. In typical fashion, I ignored the advice and went on my merry way thinking I knew best.
I am lucky enough to have two bikes in my shed: a full carbon framed Giant and an aluminium framed Triban. Both great bikes, but both were making me sore across the lower back and shoulders, and I was getting pins and needles in my hands.
All three are symptoms of a badly fitted bike.
But in my head I still had the thought that pain and discomfort were just part of cycling, especially on 50km-plus rides. I thought I just needed to suck it up and get on with it.
So I did some research. I found the inside leg equation and the knee-over-pedal-spindle advice and started changing things on both bikes to see how it went. I also bought some cushy handlebar tape and silicone inserts to try to stop the numb hands.
The saddle height worked okay. The knee-over-spindle bit was harder to achieve by myself. That involved putting the bike on the trainer, making a plumb bob out of string and some washers I found in the shed, putting masking tape on my shoes, and drawing on the tape where I thought the pedal spindle was in relation to everything else.
It wasn’t exactly scientific, but I managed to make some changes.
Then I tried to make my handlebars as high as possible. I bought a headset extension and a comedy high-rise stem, specifically for the Triban. My thinking was simple: my lower back is sore because I’m leaning forward, so if I sit more upright it should ease the pressure on my back.
It did.
But it made my shoulders worse. And it made my back worse when I went any real distance.
I even downloaded an app, stuck little white dots on my elbows, shoulders, hips and knees, set my phone up on my bike workshop stand and followed the instructions to see if I could get it any better.
I didn’t.
More frustration.
More thinking: “Yeah, but this is cycling and cycling is uncomfortable.”
Eventually, I booked an appointment with a bike fitter.
Bike Fit Barry.
I found him online and he would do both bikes in one session, so I loaded up the car and went to see what it was all about.
The session started with a discussion about what symptoms I was experiencing, any medical history, and what I wanted to achieve. Was it comfort? Was it power? Was it speed?
The answer was pretty much a combination of all three, but erring on the side of comfort. Yes, I like going fast, but I’m not racing from lamp post to lamp post any more. I want to be able to ride all day and enjoy it.
After the discussion, Barry asked me to walk up and down without my shoes on so he could see my gait. Then he started asking about my medical history again. There was something he couldn’t quite put his finger on. Something he couldn’t suss out.
Then I remembered.
I had broken my left leg just above the ankle once, a long time ago.
And that was it. That was why he couldn’t quite place why I was walking strangely. It didn’t feel strange to me, but it was enough to make a difference.
Next step, literally, was to look at my cycling shoes. He quickly discovered they were too narrow for me. When he pointed it out, I said that was what cycling shoes were all about. Or so I thought. You cram your foot into a shoe, tighten it as much as possible, and that gives you proper power transfer to the pedals.
No.
He measured my feet, including width, and pulled out a pair of new wide-fitting cycling shoes. I put them on.
So comfortable.
The next phase was proper cleat alignment. The cleats are the physical connection between the shoes and the pedals. They can be positioned to move the foot forward or back in relation to the pedal spindle, slightly side to side, and also change the angle of the foot in relation to the direction of travel. All of that affects the position of the entire mechanical framework of the skeleton.
I’ve only mentioned it briefly here, but the cleat placement and foot alignment took most of the time in the session and its quite possibly the most important part of the session and the overall fit.
Next, the bike was mounted onto the training setup in his studio and I started pedalling. Cameras at the front, rear and side recorded me riding. Snapshots of angles such as hip angle, knee angle at the top and bottom of the pedal stroke, elbow angle and shoulder angle were displayed on a screen. That gave Barry an idea of where I was in relation to the usual guidelines.
Then, using his experience, his know-how and the conversation with me, he went about changing all the things that could be changed: seat height, saddle position fore and aft, saddle angle and handlebar height.
This was by far the strangest thing and went against everything I had previously thought.
He lowered the handlebars.
It turns out I am quite supple and can bend at the waist fairly well. Because I had the handlebars up so high, I was holding myself up and pushing my shoulders up to fit my arms in, while my body was trying to bend lower.
Sounds odd, but I was actually cycling hunched over. That was causing the sore shoulders, and I was putting so much pressure on my hands that the pins and needles were there all the time.
By lowering the bars, the pressure was released.
And the changes only need to be small. We are talking millimetres. Millimetres can make a big difference.
We also talked about saddles. It was decided that my saddle was probably the wrong shape and I should investigate something else. Barry has a pressure pad he can place on the saddle to see where the weight quite literally sits. It showed more pressure on one side, which we put down to my twisted pelvis, but a new saddle looked like it might improve the comfort.
After a while, we had one bike set up and it was time for the second one.
This was the Triban with the comedy stem and riser. I hadn’t been able to find the original stem that came with the bike, so Barry tried to get the bars as low as possible. This bike didn’t need to be set up quite the same way as the Giant because it had different duties. I quite often put flat pedals on it and cycle with my son, so it didn’t need to be set up purely for distance.
I took the bikes home and started riding the Giant far more than I had previously. It was easier to ride, more comfortable, and I started researching new saddles.
After a while, I moved the stem down another couple of millimetres and that eased my shoulders even more. It was great. I found another saddle and booked a follow-up session with Barry to get it fitted properly.
The bike had come alive.
I rode it often, basically ignoring the Triban.
A few months later, I thought I would try the Triban on a spin again, and it was uncomfortable. I had become used to riding the Giant with the lower handlebars, and I decided I should book in with Bike Fit Barry again.
When I was there getting the new saddle fitted, I noticed that he had stems of different lengths on the wall in his studio. I asked if I could bring the Triban in and try different length stems. He said yes.
That fitting took place, and now that bike is also comfortable to ride.
So what is the outcome?
I am absolutely now a proponent of having a proper bike fit with an experienced person, because it is way more nuanced than a few rules of thumb. Everyone is different, so everyone will have a different fit.
People may think it is too expensive, but cyclists will happily spend hundreds of euro on new components to save a few grams here and a few grams there.
The reality is that comfort is speed.
If you can push power through your pedals without having to permanently brace yourself because of discomfort, you are going to get bigger gains than a few grams of weight will ever give you.
And that leads into the next part of the story, because there is another kind of bike fit that I wish I had understood sooner.
This is The Sub-7 Experiment.
The Sub-7 Experiment 