I’m having a lot of arm pain after long rides on the road bike. To the point where I can’t even reach into my jersey pockets. I think I’ve narrowed it down to the fact that my arms push against the handlebars, kind of keeping me in place on the saddle.
What do I do to the saddle to fix this condition? I’ve heard that in a normal position, one should be able to lift hands off of the bar and stay balanced in position. I can’t do this. Should I move the saddle back, forward, tilt the top up more (it’s flat now)?
It might not be a fit issue (or just a fit issue), though you could try the saddle a little back and also a little forward to see. It might also have to do with strength and/or flexibility. Your core/lower back needs to be strong enough to allow you to relax in an athletic cycling position.
The weight on the bars should at most times, be relatively light. There should not be significant strain, from riding with the hands on the road bars. Yes, you should be able to take one or both hands off the bars and the bike should be balanced and rolling forward in a straight line( at a decent speed).
fit coordinates, please.
You’re seat is too far forward and/or have the nose pointed down, is the first guess. You don’t have the core strength and wattage to hold your current position. You’ll probably need to raise your hbars too. But this depends on how your bike is already setup.
The hands-off-bars-balance is useful for roughing things in, and depends on how hard you’re pedaling. But yes, being totally unable to do this is probably an indication you’re off. -J
Agreed, it sounds like you’re riding too steep in terms of effective seat angle for a road bike position and need to slide the saddle back.
But as others have said we don’t know anything about your saddle tilt or how much bar drop (elevation in Dan’s terminology) you’re currently running or for that matter if you’re running something like an Adamo saddle on your road bike and are perched way off the front making it hard to support your upper body without your arms. So there could be other contributing factors.
Steve Hogg has a functional approach to finding appropriate saddle setback which is focused on balance and not over weighting the bars. It’s described here: http://www.stevehoggbikefitting.com/blog/2011/05/seat-set-back-for-road-bikes/ I haven’t found it works in all cases but it does describe the concepts and helps explain why effective seat angles and saddle setback should be a lot greater on a road bike from a balance perspective. And though it’s been debunked countless times as a valid fitting theory you could always start with a KOPS (Knee Over Pedal Spindle) as a starting point as most road riders will be somewhere near that point if they’re also well balanced fore and aft.
I’m having a lot of arm pain after long rides on the road bike. To the point where I can’t even reach into my jersey pockets. I think I’ve narrowed it down to the fact that my arms push against the handlebars, kind of keeping me in place on the saddle.
What do I do to the saddle to fix this condition? I’ve heard that in a normal position, one should be able to lift hands off of the bar and stay balanced in position. I can’t do this. Should I move the saddle back, forward, tilt the top up more (it’s flat now)?
Thanks!
Your fit is wrong. Fore/Aft Seat position shouldn’t matter. Your saddle is either pointed down, your reach is off or your bars are likely too low. It also has nothing to do with core strength.
… Fore/Aft Seat position shouldn’t matter. …
Fore/Aft seat position definitely matters. We counterbalance our upper bodies on a road bike by moving our center of mass backwards. Read the Steve Hogg link above. Upper body balance is the biggest reason we don’t ride 80+ degree seat angles on a road bike.
But yeah, seat tilt or something else could be a big factor as well.
Agreed, it sounds like you’re riding too steep in terms of effective seat angle for a road bike position and need to slide the saddle back.
But as others have said we don’t know anything about your saddle tilt or how much bar drop (elevation in Dan’s terminology) you’re currently running or for that matter if you’re running something like an Adamo saddle on your road bike and are perched way off the front making it hard to support your upper body without your arms. So there could be other contributing factors.
Steve Hogg has a functional approach to finding appropriate saddle setback which is focused on balance and not over weighting the bars. It’s described here: http://www.stevehoggbikefitting.com/...back-for-road-bikes/ I haven’t found it works in all cases but it does describe the concepts and helps explain why effective seat angles and saddle setback should be a lot greater on a road bike from a balance perspective. And though it’s been debunked countless times as a valid fitting theory you could always start with a KOPS (Knee Over Pedal Spindle) as a starting point as most road riders will be somewhere near that point if they’re also well balanced fore and aft.
-Dave
Agree on the balance, however, OP may need to consider the correct sitting balance before determine if the saddle needs to move back…What if he was already overreaching and saddle position is higher than what supposed to be…Does he feel like topple forward when his hand are not set on bar? There are many scenarios to look at but he would need to start with saddle position before anything else…
… Fore/Aft Seat position shouldn’t matter. …
Fore/Aft seat position definitely matters. We counterbalance our upper bodies on a road bike by moving our center of mass backwards. Read the Steve Hogg link above. Upper body balance is the biggest reason we don’t ride 80+ degree seat angles on a road bike.
But yeah, seat tilt or something else could be a big factor as well.
-Dave
Unless Hogg has changed his opinion in the last few years, I stopped paying attention to him when he suggested riding steep was the wrong way to Time Trial.
By the rationale you put forward I should not be able to ride for extended periods on the nose of the saddle of my road bike, I’ve done hour crits nearly the entire time there. I was riding at close 78-80 degrees. I guarantee you that I could set up someone to be comfortable on a road bike with the nose over the center of the BB and them be completely comfortable. For that matter look at 90% of an IM field they all seem to ride fine at 80 degrees not on the aerobars.
…By the rationale you put forward I should not be able to ride for extended periods on the nose of the saddle of my road bike, I’ve done hour crits nearly the entire time there. I was riding at close 78-80 degrees. I guarantee you that I could set up someone to be comfortable on a road bike with the nose over the center of the BB and them be completely comfortable. For that matter look at 90% of an IM field they all seem to ride fine at 80 degrees not on the aerobars.
No, but try riding the rivet on your road bike WITHOUT weighting your arms. Good luck with that. Sure you can do it in a crit down in the drops with a lot of weight on your hands but we don’t set up road bikes such that they depend on weight support from our arms the way we do TT and Tri bikes.
This is really basic fitting stuff and not revolutionary at all. It underpins the whole reason TT and Tri fitting is described as rotating a road position forward around the bottom bracket. If we rode super steep on road bikes there would be no rotation necessary and the positions would basically be the same. But we don’t, we ride a slack position on the road bike largely so that we don’t have to rely on arm support while we ride. Then we rotate that position around and forward, steepening up the seat angle on TT/Tri bikes to get low but then rely on arm support from the elbow pads to ride in that position.
Try the basic experiment of standing straight upright with both of your heels and your butt touching a wall and bend forward. At some point you’ll fall over forward as your center of mass gets in front of your support. Now move your heels a few inches in front of the wall but keep your butt back against the wall and you can lean way over without tipping forward. This is the basics of moving your center of mass backwards to balance your upper body as you lean forward and it’s the same on a bike. Ride too steep and it will not be possible to lean very far forward without support from your arms, that’s fine on a TT/Tri bike where we expect support from the arms but not so much on a road bike where we’d like a light touch at least when riding up on the bar tops.
I’m not inventing any new ideas here this is really fundamental stuff for road bike fitting. Google road bike fitting and you’ll find references to this in many places, you’ll also likely find a lot of references to KOPS fitting which as I mentioned above has been debunked as more of a correlation to how many folks end up rather than an actual fitting necessity but it largely does the same thing. It assures that your center of mass is sufficiently far enough back to allow a balanced forward lean towards the bars so you don’t have to support yourself with much weight on your arms as you ride.
I’ve fit many people on road bikes, and raced on them for more than 25 years. Within the confines of normal road bike angles (72-75 degrees) it is HIGHLY unlikely that the saddle is too far forward. When I’m on the “rivet” I still have very little weight on my hands and arms. Setback is largely determined by proper hip angle. The lower you are in the front the more rotated to you have to be to maintain that angle. Would I set someone up on a road bike with an 80 degree seat angle, no. Could I and they be comfortable? Yes.
Case in point, Alexi Grewal rode a 80 degree seat tube bike from Clark-Kent and then Serotta towards the end of his career to help alleviate back issues. Conversely Steve Bauer rode a 60 degree seat angle bike towards the end of his career. You can make about anything work, and everyone is unique in their fit needs.
