I’ve been experience a bit of medial knee pain when riding and I suspect it may have to do with my cleat position. Background: road bike, shimano 105 pedals with the ‘yellow’ cleat (i.e. I’ve got float). When I stand, not on the bike, my right foot is somewhat splayed out while my left points straight (I’ve always been like this) I have always set my right cleat up in such a way that my foot can be splayed out when pedaling i.e. matching my anatomy. My searching has shown that having your feet splayed on the pedals can cause medial knee pain, and many online folks have suggested (generally, not specifically to me) that straightening the foot via cleat rotation can help.
Now to me, this seems like it would put me in an ‘un-anatomic’ position. Thoughts? Suggestions?
Thanks in advance
I recently had some similar discomfort in my knee. In another thread, someone posted this very helpful article. Since you seemingly have good reason to be comfortable with your cleat rotation I’d suggest starting with moving the cleat slightly outward (thereby slightly decreasing stance width). If that doesn’t work, then you can play around with the cleat rotation.
Pain in the inside or front of the knee can also suggest your seat is either too far forward or too low, but since you didn’t seem to mention anything like that I’m assuming that’s not the problem. If you think it might be, you can play around with that too. I’d suggest only making one change at a time though, so you can actually figure out what helps and what doesn’t.
Thanks for the advice. For unrelated reasons, I just measured my saddle height and turns out, unknown to me my road bike was about 1cm lower than my cx bike. So perhaps that has something to do with it as well, as I ride my roadie way more that my cx. I think I may try raising the seat first, I measured the height because I though I was feeling a bit ‘low’ in the saddle and sure enough I was. I’ll keep the cleat moving out tip in mind though.