What is a bike fit?

In simple terms it is ensuring that you are sat on you bike in the most comfortable and efficient way. By ensuring you’re sat on the bike effectively, you reduce your risk of injuries, discomfort and it enables you to work at your best.

The benefits.

By fitting your bike to you every Watt you produce counts. This is not always the first reason we see people but it is a nice bonus if you’re coming for other reasons. Performance might be exactly why you are coming and you will leave in the most efficient position possible for you.

To remedy pain or discomfort. By far the most common reason we see people. The vast majority of pain or discomfort you feel whilst you’re on your bike will be down to bad fit or incorrect components. This doesn’t include muscle soreness from workouts or a bit of a bruised bottom from a long ride but pretty much everything else.

Common pain and discomfort whilst riding include numbness, pain or discomfort in areas such as the groin and bottom, ankles, knees, hips, lower or upper back, shoulders, elbows, wrists or hands.

Any pain or discomfort in any of these is too much and should be addressed. By ignoring it and riding on you could run the risk of discomfort turning into an injury.

What to expect on fit day.

When you arrive we will start with questions. Why have you come, what are your goals, do you have any pain or discomfort etc? Please try to think about some of this before you arrive. The more we know the better fit we can produce. Also, if we don’t know there is an issue, we can’t help fix it.

Then we asses you. We take various measurements including height, leg length, inseam, shoulders etc and assess your flexibility (as much as we’d all love to slam the stem and ride fully aero, that just isn’t always possible or beneficial).

Now to the bike. We take a full set before fit measurements so you can see the changes by the end. Some are very subtle but can have a large impact.

At this point we get you to warm up on the bike. Once you have warmed up and settled in, we’ll start to assess you on the bike. This is a dynamic fitting that we provide. We want to see you on your bike. For the vast majority of people, they will be on the correct size of bike and it just needs setting up to you. If it is the wrong size, we will tell you and we will do our best, but you will never sit on it correctly. This is very uncommon and we tend to find people go away and come back later with the correct size bike once they find one. We’d rather fit you to the right bike correctly than badly to the wrong one, but this will be completely up to you.

Now we can start to make adjustments. Up to this point we have been assessing and analysing to get as much information as we can. A picture paints a thousand words and by assessing you and you on your bike we now have a big picture. Starting with your feet then saddle position and finally the front of the bike we slowly tweak our way to the best position.

Fine tuning is the last step. We all have a range in which we can ride but to truly get the most out of your position we will spend time making very small adjustments to find what works best for you.

That’s it. Time and attention to detail plus feedback and communication from you, will leave your bike feeling like it wants to be ridden.