Proper Bicycle Fit and Evaluation to Prevent Pain and Injury
Your bicycle should fit your body and your body should be fit to ride your bicycle. Same thing? Not exactly. Let’s think about the bicycle as the machine and your body as the engine that powers that machine. If either one is faulty (the machine or the engine), it will be hard to have a 5-star experience while riding. Therefore, at Home Team Wellness & Recovery, we work with our neighbors, Bike World, to ensure that both your machine and your engine are functioning optimally together.
Your Bicycle Should Fit Your Body
Whether you are a beginning cyclist or an experienced rider, a proper bike fit and use of proper equipment will maximize riding comfort, performance and efficiency while minimizing risk of injury. Bike World recommends getting a mechanical tune-up at least once per year and undergoing a bike fit after any major equipment changes or body changes to keep you riding safe and comfortable.
Your Body Should Be Fit to Ride Your Bicycle
Now let’s look beyond the machine (your bike) to the engine that powers it (your body). Whether you ride recreationally or competitively, your goal is to keep your engine running healthy and happy. If your bike breaks while riding, that’s an obvious problem. If your engine quits due to aches and pains, such as back or neck pain or numbness and tingling, that’s also a problem. You can’t ride without a well-functioning machine and you can’t ride without an engine (a healthy body) to power it.
Components of a Bicycle Evaluation
A bicycle evaluation at Home Team Wellness & Recovery is a comprehensive 60-minute evaluation with Dr. Megan Burt, physical therapist and BikePT certified. The evaluation includes:
Bike Fit: A proper bike fit is essential to maximize riding comfort and performance. If you’ve never had a bike fit or mechanical tune-up, Home Team recommends giving Bike World a visit prior to your Home Team bicycle evaluation. This will allow Megan to spend more time on other components of the evaluation during your 60-minute visit.
Posture Assessment: Even with a perfect bike fit, a cyclist needs the strength/endurance to maintain their riding posture over many miles on the bike. During the evaluation, your postural endurance will be tested by assessing your ability to maintain certain cycling-specific positions for a period of time. Your scapulothoracic and lumbar strength will also be assessed as it relates to being able to hold your riding posture.
Pedaling Mechanics: Faulty pedaling mechanics can be a result of an improper fit or wrong equipment but it can also be a proprioception, flexibility or mobility issue. Megan will assess your pedaling mechanics at various rpms and work to optimize your mechanics through subtle fit changes and proprioceptive cueing as needed.
Strength: In cycling, a lot of focus is on glute and quadriceps muscle strength but let’s not forget about core strength including scapulothoracic, low back and oblique abdominal strength. Just like a proper bike fit, a cyclist’s strength can also affect their ability to control the bicycle. Weaknesses commonly present themselves in bouncing and shifting in the saddle which ultimately lead to loss of energy efficiency. Strengthening can also fix and prevent a variety of bicycling-related aches and pains.
Mobility and Flexibility: Cyclists need certain degrees of flexibility and mobility to be able to ride comfortably and minimize injury risk. Let’s use an example to explain: Let’s say a rider has tight hamstrings and lacks hamstring flexibility to be able to comfortably extend their knee through the bottom of the pedal stroke. They may think an easy fix is to lower the seat. But lowering the seat increases compression between the kneecap and the femur (thigh bone). So two weeks after lowering their seat they have anterior knee pain (the most common cycling overuse injury). At Home Team, we recognize that in this particular case, the best fix may have actually been to fine-tune the body by working on hamstring flexibility rather than fine-tune the bike by lowering the seat. We would also want to know WHY the hamstrings are so tight and will delve into finding the problem’s root cause so we can work to prevent excessive tightening in the future.
Personalized Exercise Program: In other sports (such as running, football, volleyball, soccer, etc.), athletes spend a lot of time doing “sport-specific” drills and exercises to improve their performance. At Home Team Wellness & Recovery, we don’t think cycling should be any different. At the end of your bicycle evaluation, we will discuss our evaluation findings and provide you with a personalized exercise program that includes cycling-specific exercises both on and off the bicycle.
Get that 5-star riding experience and get your machine and engine working together! Interested? Contact us for a free 10-minute phone consultation to see if a bicycle evaluation is right for you!