Custom bike fitting in Victoria
At Physica Health, you offer bike fitting services. How is Bike fitting at Physica different than bike fitting at a store? I already got a free one when I bought my bike. Do I need another one?
A Bike Fit is important as it can help with postural alignment on your bike, help to cycle more efficiently, help in the prevention of injury and also aims to keep you safe on the road. Carl, our physiotherapist is certified through Bike Fitting, which is the leader in bike fitting products and education here in Canada. This course enables the clinician to adjust your bike according to numerous objective measures.
The advantage of seeing a Physiotherapist is that Carl will also assess your musculoskeletal system and be able to implement a treatment plan to help with any dysfunctions that you might have. Let’s say for example, you are complaining of lower back pain in a recent ride. The physiotherapist will be able to assess your lower back mobility and strength together with your hip mobility and strength. This will allow us to provide you with an exercise programme to help you function better on the bike. Although a bike fitting is really helpful, we believe that by doing a bike fitting and a musculoskeletal assessment, we will be able to perform a complete examination to help you prevent injury both in the short and long term.
Following the musculoskeletal assessment, a bike fitting is performed.
The bike fitting assessment will look at a few different areas:
Saddle position including tilt, fore-aft
Knee angles
Hand and arm positions
Elbow angles
Foot position on cleat and in relation to spindle
Cleat position if one uses cleats
Pelvic position whilst cycling
The goal is to develop a mobility programme, together with a strengthening programme to improve your performance. An example of a program would be:
Deadbug exercise to improve core control
Pigeon stretching to improve hip mobility
Single leg bridge to improve gluteus activation
Nordics to improve hamstring power
Foam rolling of quads and ITBand to allow improvement in knee and hip moblilty.
Each program is customised and personalised according to your needs!
Figure 1: Assessing pelvic position during cycling.
Figure 2: Carl assessing knee joint angle using a goniometer.
We use video analysis during all fits, together with lasers to check knee alignment, hip position and foot position. We will record you via applications that can give us information on the position of your joints to enable us to tweak the ride to make you as efficient as possible.
The goal at Physica is not just to get you pain- free. The ultimate goal is to help you in your recovery by giving you a programme that can help you prevent injury, become more resilient and enable you to improve your strength so the injury does not come back. With a proper assessment and customised bike fit, we aim to help you in your ride, improve your safety, increase your enjoyment and help in your postural alignment for the most efficient ride.