Food & Fitness: I wanna be like Lance
Has the sight of Lance Armstrong cycling up the Alps inspired you to hit the road yourself? Before you head out on your new bike or dust off the old one, steal a move from the six-time Tour de France champion (and the rest of the peloton) and spend some time making sure you're positioned correctly on your bike. Since you spin the pedals thousands of time per hour, a seemingly insignificant inch here or there can mean the difference between comfort and pain in your knees, back, and posterior.
A paper in the current issue of the Clinical Journal of Sport Medicine recommends getting an individualized bike fit. (Your local bike shop should be able to help you out or refer you to someone who can.) This can range from the basic (sit on your bike and have someone take a few measurements) to the most high-tech (the pros use wind tunnels to help them get set up correctly).
If you're a recreational rider making a few changes yourself, "the quick and dirty way is to look at the three contact points between you and the bike," says Marc Silberman, one of the paper's authors and a sports medicine and family physician at the New Jersey Sports Medicine and Performance Center in Gillette, N.J., and a serious cyclist himself.
- The shoes meet the pedals: The ball of your foot should be over the pedal spindle.
- The pelvis meets the bike saddle: One way to figure out how high the saddle should be is to sit on the bike and drop one pedal all the way down (to 6 o'clock).
- The hands meet the handlebars: If you sit on the bike and put your hands on the brakes, your body should be at about a 45-degree angle in relation to the top tube, the authors say. You can adjust this angle by extending the stem, which connects the handlebars to the frame.
The knee on that leg should be flexed at a 25- to 30-degree angle. To figure out how far or back to move the saddle, sit on the bike and rotate the pedals to 3 and 9 o'clock. If you drop a plumb line from your kneecap, it should hit the axle of the pedal. The saddle shouldn't tilt too far up or down but should be parallel to the ground. If you get saddle sores or numbness in your, ahem, nether regions, you may need a wider saddle. The goal is to rest your weight on your sit bones.
If you're still uncomfortable, a local bike shop can provide a checkup or maybe you need a professional videotape analysis of your pedaling from various angles. It's a lot more fun to pretend you're Lance heading for the Champs-Elysées when nothing hurts.