Secrets to Getting a Great Bike Fit Ep 8

Bikes should be comfortable. You should enjoy time on your bicycle, whether that's, you know, doing, riding a triathlon bike, mountain bike, road bike, gravel bike. It should be comfortable. You know, the, these myths of time trial bikes being like, uh, a hatchet on your butt and you just need, your body needs to be in an L shape that, you know, that doesn't really work for most of us. So, um, comfort is important. Comfort, comfy rider is a, is a happy rider, is a fast rider.

Welcome to the Find Your Edge podcast. Get ready to dive into all things training, nutrition, recovery, and more. Whether you're a new or experienced endurance athlete, a weekend warrior, or someone who just wants to improve your health and fitness, this podcast is for you. I'm Chris Newport, founder, head coach, registered dietitian, exercise physiologist, and certified personal trainer with the Endurance Edge and the Fueling Edge. With more than 20 years experience in the fitness industry, 18 years in multi-sport, and over 10 years as a sports nutritionist, I'm speaking with athletes and experts about key actionable steps you can take to reach and sustain peak performance and health. Let's do it. Welcome back. We are here again with Ben Turrets of Endurance Collective. Thanks again for coming back to the show, Ben.

Oh, it's a pleasure. I had a great time last time and I'm looking forward to this one.

Yeah. So if you guys haven't listened to it, Ben was on an episode with Michael talking about, you know, working together, collaborating, which is huge because you and I are both coaches and we're both in the same area. And some people would probably look at us like, hang on, what? You guys are talking? That's a thing.

Yeah. There's plenty of pie to go around. Yeah. Yeah. And, and, and, you know, I think people don't realize it makes us stronger as coaches to work together.

I totally agree. Yeah. I think, um, there's so much that we can learn from each other and so much that we can learn from our athletes and different styles of coaching. And so speaking of coaching and COVID. We were just talking about this before we started recording. How are things? You know, because I think it's so important for people to understand how small businesses are doing. So, so tell us about that.

Uh, well, you know, there's like the COVID qualifier, you know, things are COVID, COVID good. You know, I— we're obviously, uh, you know, in, in a strange place and, and kind of trying to figure out our way forward. But I would say To my surprise, we're actually really busy. We have a lot of new clients. Some of that's a function of people didn't have a lot to do, so they started running a lot and riding a lot. And, uh, now they're sore and injured and, or they want a more structured path forward. So yeah, we are, we're doing pretty well.

That's awesome. That's so great to hear. Uh, so speaking of lots of biking that everybody's doing, we're here today to talk about bike fit. And I really wanted to talk to you about this because you take a kind of a unique approach. Back when I worked at a bike shop, I was one of the people who was working on fit and it was a very like structured way of doing things. Here's your plumb line. The, you know, the shoulders have to be exactly like this. The knee has to be this far over the toes and the seat has to be exactly at this tilt. Uh, so tell us how, well, first of all, tell us why bike fit is important and should we fit all of our bikes? Cause most people have more than one bike.

Yeah. Hopefully you do. You know, it's fun to have a little quiver of arrows that you can, that you can use. Um, yeah, bike fit's hugely important, especially if you are spending lots and lots of time on your bike. Because cycling is a very repetitive motion. And so you're, you're going through your pedal stroke thousands of times, uh, over the course of a ride. And if something is off, you open yourself up to repetitive use injury. You know, you've, you definitely, those, those of you cyclists and triathletes out there have, I'm sure, come into contact with either yourself or somebody who's complained about Now it's, it's lower back pain is, is the cycling most common, uh, complaint. It used to be knee pain. And while that's still prevalent to, you know, a lot, a lot of riders, uh, we, we deal with a lot of low back and, you know, everyone talks about my butt hurts. Bikes should not be uncomfortable. And, you know, you're, you're spending between maybe $1,000 and $10,000, you know, the price of more than my first car on a bicycle. And man, that thing better be comfortable.

Yeah.

That is not an unreasonable expectation if you're spending that much money on it. You know, all the bikes I own are comfortable and they are what some people would consider racing bikes. There's, there's no need to think a bicycle should be uncomfortable.

So tell us about your bike fit and how maybe your process is a little bit better than the one that I may have been describing.

Well, so, you know, everybody's kind of got their, their different way to look at things and I don't want to disparage how a bike shop might do it, but we, as we're trained in anatomy and physiology and movement. And so we're going to take an approach that is a little bit more centered in that realm.

You know, when somebody comes in, Ben is a body worker. So that I think most of your bike fitters, and just like you said, certainly nothing wrong with the way that they're doing things, which I find where you are unique is that being a body worker, you've got a different approach. You can see how the body needs to be positioned versus just looking at how the bike needs to be adjusted.

Exactly. We're, we're fitting the body to the bike. You know, that said, if somebody comes in with a bike that is just, we can't make this work, we're going to tell them. And we have a bike shop that we work with. We have a couple of bike shops that we work with where, you know, we don't have a big tool case here and we're making big adjustments on the bike. We'll, we'll make some tweaks here and there, but if there's some major changes that need to be made on the actual bike itself, we're going to, we're going to refer that out. But what we're going to do is we're going to start out with a good bit of assessment. We're going to look at an overhead squat assessment and we're going to check to see if your glutes are firing the way we want to see them firing. And to look if you have stability control over your body, you know, what, what are you doing in your pedal stroke? And what can we do as therapists and corrective exercise specialists to minimize the physical part change on the bicycle and maximize where you might need to work on strength and stability off the bike and on the bike, bringing up awareness of your pedal stroke and, hey, I see your knee doing this. Why is it doing that? So we play, we play kind of a fun detective game. When somebody is here, it is, uh, it's very important, I think, to take that perspective of fitting the body to the bike and not just necessarily putting the longer stem on or a shorter stem or bringing the saddle up or down.

So when you've done a couple of fits on my athletes, it's been quite refreshing to get some videos from you. So I generally get like a before video. Of this is how they looked and an after video, what happens in between?

The magic.

Yes. Tell us about that magic.

Uh, yeah. So, so like Chris said, we've got, uh, we like to kind of take a before video. There've been a couple of athletes we've seen where their knees are flaring out for one reason or another. Maybe they're, uh, they have their scapulas are winging. So we're going to look at all of that stuff and then we're going to, we're going to see, you know, one of the first things I like to do is, is see how they're able to stabilize their body on the bike. And a lot of people, you know, this all comes down to a lot of times glutes. We always talk about glutes and glute strength and, um, not to say that some of these athletes aren't strong, but there's a challenge. Neuromuscular connection between brain and butt. And so we're going to, we're going to actually bring the rider off the bike. We might make some minor saddle adjustments at first, but we're going to do some testing on massage table. We're going to see and challenge them to see if they can stabilize themselves. And we might, that might include muscle testing, might include actually some, some palpation and bodywork. And then probably a little bit of corrective exercise, and then we're going to go back and we're going to hop back on the bike and take a look at it again and see what happened, you know? And I think one of the cases you're probably thinking about, we just did some very minor bodywork. We released some hip flexors and then gave the rider some stability exercises. And within probably 45 minutes, His knee flare had gone away. It was great. And that's a pretty typical case. The, the human body, I, you know, somebody much smarter than I who, who has helped us along this path, a therapist, uh, or physical therapist named Brian Beatty in Chapel Hill, who's, who's really pushed us to look beyond where something might be manifesting itself. We want to, you know, where it is, it ain't, is kind of the mantra here. So we want to get to the root of the problem and not just look at, okay, well, your knee hurts. Well, why does your knee hurt? What in the body is causing that?

So that's a perfect segue to some of the other common issues that you might encounter. Because as you're talking, I'm thinking of people who are saying, oh man, my neck really hurts after I ride, or my wrists are so tired. Feet are going numb. What are some of the other things that you see commonly and the appropriate fit that you, or the potential adjustments that you make both in body and in bike to work with those?

So you mentioned knee and that's kind of what we just talked about. Uh, low back pain is a big one. We see a lot of, a lot of riders come in who are very quad and anterior chain dominant. Um, so that they spend so much time on the bike, but also they might have a desk job, um, where they're, they're seated for 8 hours a day. So yeah, we do a lot of awareness of, of deep hip flexors and then releasing deep hip flexors and teaching exercises to stabilize the whole lumbar pelvic hip complex. Um, so fancy, fancy term for. You know, butt and hips. And, you know, that, that really is your center of movement. So, so much of what we see is kind of a breakdown in that area of the body. We see a lot of winging of the scapula because people want to slam their stems, or they have a stem that's so long that they're really reaching and their elbows are straight, arms are locked out, you know, and that's, that's a big one because You're putting a lot of, a lot of pressure on that median nerve in your hands. So tingling fingers, you know, it's, it's, it's also just very fatiguing to have your arms locked out all the time. And not to mention kind of dangerous. If you, if you hit a pothole or something on the ground while your arms are locked out, you're probably going to go down as opposed to if you have nice soft bent elbows, they act as a spring. To soak that up.

Yeah. And mountain biking, we call them those spaghetti arms. You gotta have, you gotta be able to control the front of the bike, you know?

Absolutely. Yeah. That, that front of the bike, especially now with the longer top tubes and wider handlebars, you've got this big lever that's really powerful. You need to be able to get those, those elbows out and, and throw the bike into a corner and countersteer. And you definitely can't do that if you can't get your body over the front of the bike and keep your elbows bent.

Awesome. So how can people schedule a fit with you if they're interested, if they're in the area?

The best way for people to schedule a fit is to go on the endurancecollective.com website. And there's a book now section. You can, uh, you can look up times that we have available or just Email us, you know, I'm just ben@thendurancecollective.com. And, uh, we're, we're pretty good about getting back to people quickly right now, more so than ever, you know, because we're not out running around, um, you know, driving team cars at bike races and doing stuff like that. We're in the office a lot, just hanging out when we don't have patients. And there's a lot of continuing ed happening right now and experimentation. Those are probably the best ways. And if you, if you do go on the website, uh, you can kind of see a little snapshot of what, what we do in addition to fit and, uh, bodywork and all of that.

So if people have races in, let's say September, October, should they be thinking, when should they be thinking about it? Should they be thinking about fit now? I mean, you've got the time, so absolutely. Okay.

Fit, fit now. And. You know, one of the things I like to tell people is fit is not a, you know, there's, there's not an end to it. You don't come in for a fit and it's over. Fit is a dynamic process that can change several times over the course of a season because of fitness. So if you're a rider who's just getting into it and all of a sudden your mileage kicks up over the course of 3, 4 months, your fit's going to change. So. You know, that's, that's one thing we encourage people to see this as a process. And, you know, also these changes take time to adjust to. So the bigger the change, the more you want to ease into it. You never want to like drop your saddle, move it forward, put a new stem on, and then go race. Your body will be angry with you if, if that happens. Um, and a lot of times, you know, I've seen. Injury because of really drastic and quick fit changes, you know, which they may be the right fit changes, but they happen too quickly for your body to adapt to them. So it's important to make these changes now in the winter off-season so that your body can adjust to them.

I think that's a great tip. So if somebody is not local, what would be your suggestions to them as it relates to finding somebody who could do the right fit for them?

There's some really good bike shop fitters out there. We collaborate with a group of people in Bellingham, Washington called Apex Chiropractic. And they've, they've actually seen a couple of my clients on the West Coast for fit. And, you know, so I like to encourage people to find fitters who have a depth of knowledge of anatomy and physiology. And, um, you know, they, they don't need to be bike racers. They don't need to be super accomplished bike athletes, but they need to know what to look for. They need to know how the body responds to certain stresses. You know, like your body does a completely different thing on the trainer inside than it might do outside under, under load. So it's also really important if somebody's coming. In here from out of town, we ask for some video of them pedaling. Or if I have an athlete that I'm sending somewhere out of town, video is a really important tool, making sure that the fitter can see how your body moves on the bike, because there's some really helpful and important cues that usually pop up pretty, pretty immediately.

Awesome. All right. So that's great that you've got some other people to collaborate with, and it sounds like just poking around and finding a good fit, maybe talking to people and their background rather than just, just saying, hey, you fit bikes. Let me schedule an appointment. What are some of the things you think that somebody should ask a fitter?

I would, I mean, I would ask how much experience they have doing it. I would ask what types of fits they do, you know, are they, are they doing just a bunch of basic bike shop fits, you know, on commuter bikes and stuff like that. Well, that's not going to help you all that much if you are an Ironman triathlete looking to really dial in your time trial bike fit, or if you're an enduro racer and, you know, you're talking to somebody who mostly does road fit. Um, so make sure they have some experience in your discipline of cycling. Because it's, you know, a mountain bike, a real mountain bike fit, especially somebody who's riding a more aggressive mountain bike is very, very, very different from somebody who might be really experienced with triathlon fit. Not to say they're not good at what they do, but it's, you know, it's apples to oranges. There are also people that are good kind of across the spectrum. You know, I think context is really important. And, and also asking them about what are the supporting things that I need to do to maintain this fit, and do I need to come back and see you to update this? Those are all very important. You know, it is very helpful if a fitter has a mechanic that they recommend, or on site. You know, I— there's, there's some shops around here who do some pretty, pretty decent fitting, and they have mechanics on site. We don't have that. So we refer out to somebody if this is, you know, if it's beyond our capabilities, um, we work with a bike shop in Durham. Uh, they do fits out of the shop. If it's something that they feel needs to be more in-depth anatomy focused, they'll send a client to us. And if we feel that client might not need our level of fit, You know, it's, it's a little more involved than they're looking for. We'll send them to that shop, making sure that you've got the context and asking, is this what I really need? Because I will say a really good fit takes time. It can take as much as half a day because there's warmup. There's a lot of question and answer. It's a detective session. And, you know, fitters get paid, good fitters get paid a lot of money to do what they do because it's. It's a very in-depth skill and, you know, $100 bike fit and a $500 bike fit are very different things.

I'm glad you mentioned price points. So people have an idea of what they're going to be spending after spending their good chunk of change on their bike. But what are some of the, what are some of the trends that you've noticed? Because I, I always feel like. Amateur athletes want to be like the pros. And so they're going to drop their aero bars as low as they can, or their handlebars, or they're going to crank their saddle up. Or what, what are some of the trends that you've seen now, but maybe in equipment or in things that people think they're going to be— they should be doing with their fit and perhaps is totally wrong for them?

Well, definitely what you just mentioned of slamming that stem is, you know, something I see so much. People, people getting themselves a bike that is way more aggressive than their body is ready for, especially with the new aero road bike trend. You know, when Specialized made the Venge, I saw a lot of people that were dealing with Venges that they, they were just inappropriate for their body. They could not maintain that level of forward flexion without back pain. Thankfully, a lot of bike manufacturers now are putting taller head tubes on their bicycles. So it is easier to fit some of their bicycles to the general public. You know, it turns out that when you make a bike that's comfortable, more people ride it. So yeah, taller head tube endurance style bicycles are definitely a trend that we see. And, and we like to see because it is easier to fit and then they're more appropriate for Somebody who's not training 20 to 30 hours a week, you know, and mountain bikes, wider handlebars, uh, longer top tubes, shorter stems. You know, that's something that has been an adjustment. You know, I come from my racing days. I was racing on these little narrow handlebars and, and short top tubes of a mountain bike. How you move your body around the bicycle now is completely different. So, you know, that. That's a big one. And, you know, I think you've probably seen this one is aero bars not being so slammed so low, uh, you know, in the pro tour, you see a lot of rise on aero bars. It goes back into comfort on a time trial bike is possible. And you're kind of trying to meet in the middle between aerodynamics and comfort, uh, and maximum power output. And, uh, a lot of times that's not as low as you think it is. Looking like the pros is not always going to make you fast like the pros.

Oh man.

I know it's crazy. Right. Um, you know, getting, being uncomfortable on a bicycle often leads to you not wanting to ride it as much.

Um, isn't that weird? It's so weird.

It's bizarre. Yeah. Yeah. Having a bicycle that fits you and it's comfortable. And you enjoy riding is going to encourage you to ride it more. And we want to help you find that happy place between being fast, which really takes training and hard work more than anything, and comfortable.

So it sounds like if we're going to fine-tune the engine that's riding the bike, it has to be comfortable. It has to be fit well. It doesn't necessarily have to Look like somebody else's bike or be too aggressive?

Like, uh, Sep Vanmarcke rides in the classics, you know, a huge rider, slammed stem, you know, negative rise. Most, most normal human beings who work at an office cannot ride that bike and will have real back problems if they try to ride that bike. You know, cause they're not, they're not, you know, their job is not to wake up, eat, lift, ride, recover, sleep. That builds a completely different athlete than, you know, 40 hours a week sitting in a car on Zoom calls, chasing your kids around. You can't ride that bike without that training.

And that's okay.

And it's totally okay. It's, it's, it's wonderful if you're, if you're riding your bike and you don't have to go through the rigors of being a professional cyclist. It's a really hard profession that requires a lot of, a lot of work. And, uh, most of us aren't cut out for that.

So on the point of trends, what about, um, crank arm length? What's been your experience there?

Shorter crank arms now. And I remember the days where, you know, I would try and ride a 175 on my road bike and now all my road bikes have 170s. Yeah, all my mountain bikes have 170s and, uh, yeah, absolutely shorter crank lengths. It's definitely resolved some, some knee issues that we've seen with a couple of riders. Unfortunately, it's a tough one to remedy without some expense because when you buy a bicycle, you know, there's, there's a size spread and each size comes with a standardized crank length. It's very hard to say, hey, bicycle manufacturer, I see you make this with a 172.5. Could I get it with a 170? Sometimes a shop will trade out for you, but, uh, you know, it's something that when you're buying a bicycle, you should consider looking at and erring on the shorter crank length side is kind of the, the most modern trend right now. Uh, keeping your cadence high, not pushing a low cadence. And those are all things that kind of come from that shorter crank length.

So I'm glad you mentioned cadence. What's a good place for riders to shoot for as it relates to cadence?

We kind of preach 90 is like that point. 90 RPM seems to be in, in all of our training that the most efficient place. And that is a very— everybody's different. And I have riders that push a lower cadence and a higher cadence and still maintain power where it needs to be. If you get much lower than I'd say 85 or 80, you're starting to do neuromuscular strength intervals. And if you get too high and you're not able to stabilize your hips, you become very inefficient. Really, you become, you can become very inefficient on both sides of that. So we see lower cadence pedaling much more often when somebody comes in here and training them to increase their cadence, take the pressure off those deep hip flexors, stabilize their hips. That is really, you know, one of the first things we'll look at with, with a lot of riders. And sometimes that is because of crank length. They're, they're pedaling a really low cadence because the cranks are too long. Um, and they're just standing on top of them every time they come around or pedal stroke.

Yeah. Physics is a, is a wild thing, isn't it?

You can't avoid it. It's one of those set points in cycling that, you know, you're, you're riding a lever and on some gyroscopes and you can't, uh, you can't avoid physics at all. So you have to work with it. And take advantage of it where you can.

So speaking of cranks, what about if somebody has a leg length discrepancy? What are some of the ways that you're dealing with that leg length discrepancy?

So we, we will approach, you know, a lot of times people come in and say, well, my left leg is longer than my right leg. And the first question we ask is, you know, is really the only way to accurately measure that is with a bone scan. And some physical measurement. So unless they've been diagnosed with that, for the, the, the assumed leg length discrepancy, bodywork, strength training. And we try to avoid any kind of stackers, uh, in the cleats or, uh, insole in the shoe or anything like that, because what that ends up doing is sending the problem up the kinetic chain. You know, you're just pushing it up into the knee or the hip. When we— I honestly think I've only dealt with a legitimate leg length discrepancy once, and it required a cleat shim. And you can kind of correct for it with moving a cleat a little bit forward or a little bit backwards, but, you know, Typically, we are trying to minimize any asymmetry on the bike. It's rare that it's actually like my femur is longer on my right side than my left side. It may be within millimeters, and that's something that the body can correct for.

So you've given us a ton of tips on how to cure low back pain. Well, perhaps not how to cure it, but how to address it on the bike. We've talked about trends. We've talked about crank arms. If you could summarize and give people 2 to 3 things to walk away with, what would they be?

2 to 3 things to walk away with. Uh, get a bike fit. Uh, you know, it doesn't have to be super involved. Get, get a bike fit that's appropriate for how you're going to be riding your bike. I think that's Number 1, realize that a bike fit is dynamic and changes over time. So what works for you at the beginning of your cycling career is going to change as you become more or less fit. And the less part is a really hard one to stomach sometimes. So when you go from a very aggressive fit to a less aggressive fit, sometimes, uh, ego gets in the way there. Don't let it happen. Just ride what's comfortable. I think that would be the third thing is bikes should be comfortable. You should enjoy time on your bicycle, whether that's, you know, doing, riding a triathlon bike, mountain bike, road bike, gravel bike. It should be comfortable. You know, the, these myths of time trial bikes being like, uh, a hatchet on your butt. And you just need— your body needs to be in an L shape that, you know, that doesn't really work for most of us. So, um, comfort is important. Comfort, comfy rider is a, is a happy rider, is a fast rider.

Very well said. I love that. Ben Turrett of The Endurance Collective, thank you so much for being on here again. And one more time, how do they schedule an appointment with you or get ahold of you?

Uh, check us out on theendurancecollective.com. You can, you can book appointments or send us inquiries on the website. You can, uh, send a message on Instagram or send me an email at ben@theendurancecollective.com.

Awesome. And we'll put all of those links in the show notes as well. And if you want to get ahold of me, find us at theenduranceedge.com. Thank you so much for listening to the Find Your Edge podcast. Ben, thanks again. And hopefully we'll. Chat again soon.