Cycling
Lately, I’ve been thinking more about combining two of my passions…physio and cycling. I had a particularly long time to think about it all yesterday when taking part in 100 mile bike ride!!
Even though I’m pretty obsessed by physio and cycling I’ve never really combined the two. I’ve not really worked much with cycling other than the occasional friend or patient that happened to also be a cyclist. All my professional sport jobs have been in rugby. However, I hopefully will get chance to change this soon.
I’ve booked myself onto a bike fitting course in July and I really can’t wait to get started. I completed the online pre-course learning in double quick time…so I’m guessing I’m keen to learn!!
As always I tend to question what I’m being told…in a healthy way (hopefully!). There was a big part of the course about creating alignment in the knee during the pedal stroke. The emphasis/aim being that the knee goes up and down in a more or less straight line above the foot.
Though this may seem like a relatively logical thought, it strikes me as odd that we would do that…why? What if you are fitting someone that’s not in pain, why change something that has been working up until now? I can see if someone is in pain that changing something is likely to be a good start. Changing the bike/cleat position would be a quick way of changing things, but what about ‘why’ their body chooses to move like that? What are we doing to help their body be successful.
It’s fair to say I have a lot of questions. I’ve worked so much with running/walking function that cycling is a bit alien to me. It’s extremely repetitive, 80-100 revolutions per minute for several hours. It makes for much less likelihood of traumatic injury (unless you fall off of course!!) and much more likely you’ll be exposed to overuse injury.
This fact makes it really, really important you understand pain, which means that the whole line the knee up with the foot doesn’t make much sense! I have a long way to go on this, but thankfully it’s quite an intriguing journey and I can’t wait to do the course and start fitting people on their bikes. I’ll write about my experience on the course when I get there. In the mean time I’m reading a book on fitting…so may find some answers there too 🙂
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