the reasons for FIST are:
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to teach bike shop pros how to determine what sort of position–road, midrange, or tri–ought to be suggested and offered to a subject looking for the right bike fit.
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to demonstrate how to fit a person to an optimized tri position.
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to help create a consensus in the industry as to what an optimized tri fit means, to the point where i and tom demerly could both perform a fit on you, two thousand miles from each other, and the results would be the same.
if you are in the financial services industry and you have CLU or CHFC after your name, that means something. if you’re an electrician and you have your license # in your yellow pages ad, that means something. in each case, it means that this person will comport himself according to industry standards which have stood up to industry scrutiny. yes, that’s going to come with a price. that up-charge you pay is your “insurance policy” against pissing your entire investment down a hole when you have a living trust set up, or when you have your house rewired.
those of you who complain about paying more than $50 or $75 for a bike fit do so either because:
- you already have a perfectly good position, or
- you have no confidence that paying any more will actually yield a worthwhile result.
if you KNEW that your position would be fixed you’d not balk at a higher price, because the hours you spend riding in an uncomfortable or slower position are worth a LOT more in aggravation or misery costs than the price of a good fit. the unprofessionalism and lack of consensus is what drives the cost of a fit session down. confidence in the efficacy of a fit session drives the price up. it’s not the goal of FIST to drive the price up. it’s the goal of FIST to push the industry. that ought to serve to drive the price up for those who know what they’re doing. but that’s a natural market force.
this post will inevitably cause a reply along the lines of, “how do we know FIST techniques are really the acme of the industry?” my reply is that they are not. the techniques are already in use. all the dealers who just left the first FIST workshop already fit people the way i teach. dan rishworth (enduro sport, toronto) and tom demerly probably didn’t need to come. because of their presence this workshop was half seminar and half industry symposium. i learned as much as i taught. those who know what they’re doing are ALREADY fitting people with a common method in our industry. the problem is, the end-user doesn’t know who is part of this “club” of knowledgeable experts.
likewise, the manufacturers who know what they’re doing (geometrically) area also hip to this. it’s the mission of FIST to simply take what’s already in place and create a recognizable consensus among magazines, manufacturers, shops, and coaches. triathlon is ready for it, but we don’t yet quite have it.