If you ride bikes a lot, you’ve probably been there—nerding out about optimizing crank length, micro-adjusting seat post height and debating the value add of osymetric chainrings. Well, friends, this is the episode for you.
This week, Dirk joined expert Bike Fitter and Physiotherapist Phil Burt to discuss the entire bike fit process from start to finish. They discuss what it takes to work with everyone, from the elite athletes at Team Sky to those just trying to get comfortable on their everyday commuter. As Phil explains, ultimately, everyone is looking for the same thing—to feel (relatively) comfortable and truly listened to.
Stand-Out Quotes
“You can spend all your time treating somebody, but if you can’t get to the root cause of it, then they’re never going to get fully better. So that’s why I became interested in ergonomics more than bike fit at first, that amazing interface between the human being and the machine.”
“The most important bit is the first 20 minutes…they tell you the nugget of information that really unlocks what they’ve been struggling with or what is going to have the most success.”
“All the research shows that people are much more emphatically, rehabbed better when they feel like they’re being engaged and listened to. And compliance with exercise prescription, for example, just drops to the cliff if they don’t understand why they’re doing it.”
“I think sometimes we dismiss comfort, but what is comfort? It’s a simulation of all the different things you feel coming through your body and ends up in your mind and you decide whether that’s comfortable or not. So it has subjective connotations, but really [it’s] based upon lots of little subjective pieces of information.”
“When aero positions are getting more and more extreme all the time, the problem with that is as you get lower, the front of the hip gets more and more closed.”
Resources
Phil Burt Innovation – Bike Fit Service
Phil Burt’s Book: Bike Fit: Optimise your bike position for high performance and injury avoidance
Phil Burt Innovation Instagram
Phil Burt Innovation Twitter
Phil Burt Innovation Facebook
