Physio bike fit - Sutherland Shire

Bike fitting really is where science meets art. Every fitter has a slightly different approach. The art side comes from understanding the human form on a bike and the delicate interplay between you and the frame. With a bike fit you simply can not take a one size fits all approach, you cant use the same angles and apply it to everyone simply based on their height, leg length etc.

Consideration needs to be given to previous injury history and current injury. Also the desire of the fit, are we fitting for comfort or are we more concerned about producing maximum power to the pedals to kick arse on Swift or out on the road. There is a tradeoff between comfort and aerodynamics (about 90% of the retarding force on a cyclist is aerodynamic drag when pedaling at 30km/hr on flat terrain). Therefore we need you to be comfortable based on your bodies specific presentations but how can we alter this to reduce drag?

At Aevum in the Sutherland Shire we first assess you. We look at you body shape, your strength, your muscle tightness and even your neural tension to see if some of your nerve structures can be a little tight which is often the case in desk workers, and lets be honest in the Sutherland Shire there are a lot of 9-5 desk workers getting out on 20k Pinarello’s on the weekends. This is all done before we get you anywhere near the bike.

When then move into our lab where we measure you a little more closely before starting your dynamic fit. Whats a dynamic fit? It’s when we do an analysis while your cycling/moving. A static fit is measuring your body and then applying the angles while sitting on a bike. Often the problem with this approach is the story can change dramatically when you start to move and this is where we need to assess and make changes… while you are cycling, not sitting on the bike.

Coming back to my original point the art is the Physio and the understanding of the human body and also the understanding of loads the go through the body. The science is the research and the technology that we use.

The research guides our decisions i.e. what dynamic knee joint angle has been shown in bike fitting to produce the maximum force from the quadriceps? The technology is our state of the art system at Aevum in the Sutherland Shire. We use 6 ceiling mounted infrared cameras which pickup the movement in biomechanical markers that we place over you and the bike. The cameras pickup the movement (less than a millimeter) and feed it into our software giving us a 3D real time image of you cycling that we can pan around, zoom in on, slow down… literally do what ever we need to, in order to analyse.

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Once we have done this we will make changes to your bike. A good fit will usually not change too much too soon unless truly required. We may also make recommendations on new equipment, usually handlebars, stem lengths and seats. In the Sutherland Shire we have many bike shops that have excellent equipment to offer.

We will also print out a huge report with all of the data we look at, comparing right and left and all your movements within a millimetre.