Couldn't reach like as in standover height?

Tri bikes smaller than road bikes is an old wives tale that just won't die. The real rule of thumb is that everyone is on a size too small tri bike and after they see a proper fitter they have to buy a new bike. Your tri bike should be the size your tri bike should be. Based on your fitters numbers you need a high stack bike like the Cervelo PX or the others CycleNutNZ mentioned. You could be a 52, a 54, a 56, or a 58, it all depends on the bike and the cockpit configuration as it relates to your fit coordinates, not your height.

If you're just going to roll the dice I'm sure you could get pretty close on a 56cm P-Series.

E

---

Eric Reid AeroFit | Instagram Portfolio
Aerodynamic Retul Bike Fitting

“You are experiencing the criminal coverup of a foreign backed fascist hostile takeover of a mafia shakedown of an authoritarian religious slow motion coup. Persuade people to vote for Democracy.”

The bigger question to me is did our OP get what they should have gotten from a bike fitter?

https://www.slowtwitch.com/Bike_Fit/Road_Bike_Fit/Reasonable_bike_fit_expectations_3595.html

I was trying to get there gently.

E

Fit Session Deliverables

1. Identification of the contact point products (saddle, aerobars) on which you're most comfortable. In other words, yes, a fit session should include you leaving that session knowing that there's a comfortable saddle in the universe for you, and knowing its name, because you rode it (among a number of others, if need be) during the session.

2. Your fit coordinates (explained below) and another set of metrics used to decipher complete bike solutions (also explained below).

3. The bikes that flow from your fit coordinates, i.e., the absolute precise prescriptions of exactly what bikes, in what size, with what front-end configuration, will match your fit coordinates. And, yes, of all the bikes that will match your coordinates, including a bike you ask about (unless that manufacturer doesn't provide basic geometric data on its bikes), whether or not sold by the fitter (unless your fit was given you at no charge).

4. Precisely, in granular detail, how you retrofit your existing bike to match your new fit coordinates, including how to do so should you choose to incorporate your newly discovered (during the fit session) favorite saddle, aerobars, etc.

5. Any other data that is actionable. You own the data. It's your data.

6. A video of what you look like aboard the fit bike.

7. The fit executed aboard a conforming fit bike! Happy to discuss that on our reader forum; the point here is that no, "it's the fitter not the tools" is not an appropriate response. Rather, "it's the fitter and the tools."

8. Where you are relative to norms, and if you differ from those norms, why.

---

Eric Reid AeroFit | Instagram Portfolio
Aerodynamic Retul Bike Fitting

“You are experiencing the criminal coverup of a foreign backed fascist hostile takeover of a mafia shakedown of an authoritarian religious slow motion coup. Persuade people to vote for Democracy.”

Thank you all for your responses - please don't think I'm not listening or being rude. This is seriously Greek to me. And yes, I think I got a lot out of it but I think I had expectations that were not realistic. I just *assumed* that I would get my report and my list of bikes would all be 52's (or smaller). Because that's what I had heard before. So I was surprised when the list contained bikes that were all bigger than what I am riding now.

All of this information has been helpful. It's hard to find a bike right now so I will just keep looking.

Don't apologise, you're definitely not being rude, we're all newbs at some point. (I'm still a newb compared to eric, cyclenut, jim, trentnix, slowman, etc)

Point 8 is I think particularly pertinent to you. Put your Pad XY numbers (~461*/727) into the chart below (an example of one typical bike's range of adjustability) and ask why you're so far outside the norm.
(* based on 431 to the rear of the pads)


I'm not saying there isn't a reason you're there, but you should know why.

Thank you for gently making that point gently. I was hoping to get there eventually. I don't know who the fitter w/ the Retul bike is so I didn't want to blow people up.

What frame is this chart tethered to?

E

---

Eric Reid AeroFit | Instagram Portfolio
Aerodynamic Retul Bike Fitting

“You are experiencing the criminal coverup of a foreign backed fascist hostile takeover of a mafia shakedown of an authoritarian religious slow motion coup. Persuade people to vote for Democracy.”

Your fitter did a good job of following the evidence and pointing you in the right direction instead of repeating useless "received wisdom" saying you need a 52cm bike when you don't.

By now you might have noticed bike sizes are like t-shirt sizes... they differ from brand to brand and the size labels are arbitrary really. All that matters is your stack and reach coordinates and that you configure a new bike and cockpit, "in granular detail" as this website's founder and the inventor of bike fitting would say, *exactly* as it needs to be to make the bike work for you in your fit.

I'm trying to resist commenting on your fit specifically, but your fit is a good starting point, has good bones so to speak. If you were to see me as your fitter, say a year from now because you have new goals and want to go faster, your reach would be good, and might even get slightly longer, but I'm seeing some easy low hanging fruit to get you lower, which is to say that you'd be more "orthodox" and more in range of more bikes, possibly a 56cm in something. But not if moving down to a 56cm smaller bike takes away the reach you need that your fitter so wisely gave you, I would not do that just to get you onto a bike that sounds good or matches others' ill-formed "cultural" or "fashion-based" opinions.

Make sense? Until I hear otherwise, you're a size XL in the PX bike, and probably a 58cm P-Series, although I think if I had more of your details and some videos I could tell you for sure what configuration a 56cm P-Series would work or not.

Eric

---

Eric Reid AeroFit | Instagram Portfolio
Aerodynamic Retul Bike Fitting

“You are experiencing the criminal coverup of a foreign backed fascist hostile takeover of a mafia shakedown of an authoritarian religious slow motion coup. Persuade people to vote for Democracy.”

hehe I'm not exactly known for my tact and subtlety ;)
Chart is from the slowman article I linked above, it's an Orbea I believe, but I assume generally representative of "normal".

Anyway, please continue. I'm not going to cast aspertions on the fitter either, there may be underlying circumstances that are entirely justified that we aren't aware of based only on a set of numbers and two small photos.

it could also be a function of methodologies... "fitter led" vs. "athlete led" bike fit sessions or "doing things right" vs. "doing the right things".

I personally no longer take client input nor do I "do things right". I've found that it's easier to make the fit "perfect" and then work backwards to find the right saddle (out of dozens) all the while coaching on how to ride the totally new position than it is to incrementally move forward from some starting position and take rider input at each increment along the way. It's a harder sell, but the result is usually better. IOW I feel my method is "doing the right things".

E

---

Eric Reid AeroFit | Instagram Portfolio
Aerodynamic Retul Bike Fitting

“You are experiencing the criminal coverup of a foreign backed fascist hostile takeover of a mafia shakedown of an authoritarian religious slow motion coup. Persuade people to vote for Democracy.”

This is nice in theory, but very hard in practice. Examples
Cervelos website has a fit calculator for the P5D but it's wrong. All their calculators fail to factor tilt
Trek Speed Concept has a tabular fit guide that has massive imprecision on reach, is impractical for longer reach positions (short extensions) and doesn't factor tilt.
Giant/Liv and Scott don't provide anything for current bikes.
Canyon have fit calcs but don't share them.
BMC have a tabular tilt factored doc (because I wrote one for them) but I've never seen it shared so there is nothing for their current bar setup publicly.
Can't find Zipp Vuka fit on their site
Ventum & Dimond I couldn't find anything

OTOH
Wilier have a really good (guess who wrote that) tabular tilt document
Quintana Roo have reasonably detailed tables (no tilt though)
Specialized have an online tool, that works well. Bike is extremely limited though so that impacts the usefulness of the tool.

So for most of the bikes that people lust over it is extremely difficult to precisely define a position match.
Even if we just look at mortal bikes, the fitter is ill equipped there too:
- standard calculation for stem XY is wrong
- aerobar XY data sparse and tilt details not provided

Thus it's easy to fall into the trap of providing (what appears to be) a precise list of position matches and be wrong in many regards.

It's just as bad on the road side with all these integrated bikes that don't provide bar data.

Maybe this is more associative, like, athletes should require (and be educated about) certain things from the fitter, and fitters should require (or be educated about) certain things from the bike companies. I don't know that you or I alone has any pull to make changes but there has been some positive movement as you know.

E

---

Eric Reid AeroFit | Instagram Portfolio
Aerodynamic Retul Bike Fitting

“You are experiencing the criminal coverup of a foreign backed fascist hostile takeover of a mafia shakedown of an authoritarian religious slow motion coup. Persuade people to vote for Democracy.”