He Flew from France to Australia for a Bike Fit (did Neill solve the problem?)

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French Cyclist Karl has been all around the world trying to get comfortable on his bike. He has spent a fortune on fitting services and equipment previously and as a last effort Karl found himself booking a flight all the way from France to the Sunshine Coast, Australia! Watch on to see Neill Stanbury work his magic and implement some very unique solutions to Karl’s problems!

#cycling #roadcycling #training #bikefit

welcome to the RCA channel again guys we have another fit video for you today next to me I’ve got Carl Carl’s come all the way from France which part of France go uh South provance in provance yeah south of France far out that sounds fancy man that sounds very fancy he strikes me as a fancy guy this bike is the brand spanker that’s just come out of The BMC Factory only available in Europe and I think there might be some in the United States may but none in Australia so yeah amazing piece of Kit now Carl’s got some chronic long-standing problems which he’s going to tell me about in a minute and I’m hoping that he hasn’t flown all this way for no result uh he’s very jet lag so he might be a bit slow during this video uh and I’m a bit slow myself anyway Carl it’s just standard operating procedure here at the RCA so we’re going to take a look at you your position on the bike but first i’m going to ask you a bunch of questions about your medical history and try and get some background on what’s been going on let’s get started 15 hours a week you’re a serious uh serious racer but what what Cony sort of or uh mostly race ground okay yeah so mostly longer endurance races more than four hours yeah okay cool tell me what have you done to yourself fractures joint injuries muscle tears tell me um a track hit me U on the front when I was 18 on my left side okay and since then uh I can’t find a good position on the bike what was the damage was there anything like fractures joint injuries anything specific specific that you uh we cut here here y uh s Twisted so cut me here but nothing broken okay big cuts and and and deep deep tissue injuries okay this thing in your leg does sound like it might be a bit of a problem so um let’s hope it’s not the major issue on the bike cuz it’s something that might be hard to fix on the bike do you get a lot of the burning pain as well when you’re riding hard or is it I always feel Twisted on the bike you feel twisted and does it create pain do you get saddle saws or knee pain or anything from it uh knee pain whereabouts uh external side knee cool and neck pain okay on the one side no no all the all the way okay some neck pain both sides as well cool all right mate let’s have a bit of a look at you off the bike and see how wonky you are Carl there’s a couple of things that stand out which could be like you know misaligning you a little bit one of them is this large bottle of French champagne which you’re carrying in your back Jersey pocket always yeah is that a common thing that you would it seems like a strange thing but anyway let’s get rid of that yeah there’s uh what is this a block of butter Carl it is a block of butter what are you got a block of always butter butter salted butter jeez man God stuff coming out of his so there we go oh there’s another is this cam bear cheese are you I think it is how French are you Carl it’s very wellow it’s good quality it’s Tasmania in this one yeah so we got to get those out of your jersey pocket so we can have a closer look at your posture car good so the hamstrings obviously still attached okay which is great that’s a that’s a good start there’s plenty of bulk in there there’s a little bit of thickening in the muscle there we’ll have a closer look at this when we lie you down in a minute your calves are roughly the same size very broad foot that’s a lake foot for sure you got the right shoes no significant tilt in your pelvis no significant gluteal asymmetry reasonably straight spinal posture nothing too weird which is great totally different left foot that’s interesting yeah so the arch has got a different profile on the right compared to the left and your left metat tassel head is a lot bulkier than the right this left foot is almost what we call supered it’s kind of rolled out a little bit like that definitely a little bit different to the other one tighten your quads up Carl and lock your knees back into extension your VMO is much bigger on the right so a little bit of muscle imbalance cool nothing too bad the probability here is that you’ve learned to adapt your gate around your your dodgy hamstring and probably what’s going on is that you’ve inclined your pelvis a little bit round to the left that’s what I feel on the bike yeah yeah which is what we know that you’re doing on the bike which is pushing your knee away from the bike and all of that sort of stuff but you’re probably doing it a little bit with your with your walking gate as well and as you go forward on the right the line of force goes across your foot and on the left you tend to land then on the outside of the foot so that would make a lot of sense I I think what’s probably going on is because your hamstring is so weak on the left it’s not rotating your sacroiliac joint as evenly as it should compared to the right it’s going to be an interesting problem M I’ve got ins with me always on ins on your walking shoes yeah okay yeah like a lift or or more Arch okay and does it help I can’t say it’s been I don’t think you’ve got a leg length difference yeah I think what you’ve got here is a functional like a planarity problem with the movement of the left the whole left quadrant of your body because of the hamstring damage so let’s have a look at how you pedal now and see if this is going to be fixable come and throw these on and we’ll have a look at you in your natural state first with the shim and everything see how Carl’s left knee sits off the top tube further than his right his right knee Dives in a little bit on the on the downstroke and his left knee just sits off the top tube a bit now that’s a consequence of Carl sitting Twisted on the bike a little bit so he’s dropping his right hip forward which is then pushing his left knee away so you’ll see me if I magnify this if I make it worse have a look at what his left knee does if I twist him more you can see it exaggerates the effect effect his left knee is way off the top tube the right knee is almost brushing the top tube now so he’s slightly out of plane forward on the right hand side and it’s not terrible it’s not as bad as I was expecting which is great there’s other elements to his asymmetry as well he drops his left heel more than he drops his right heel which is very characteristic of this type of a problem so he’s Towing the right pedal and dropping the left heel which is then pulling him out of plane so there’s a bunch of different possible reasons for why this could be and one of them is going to be a big problem if that’s the correct one which is the hamstring so we’re going to hope it’s not his left hamstring doing it um we’re going to try a whole bunch of different things to see if we can fix this before we sort of kind of not not give up but before we go ah damn it Carl it is your left hamstring we need to do something about it like in a medical sense um I think we might have some luck here though I’ve got a couple of theories already what this might be just from looking at it um so yeah this might be solvable mate it might be solvable the first thing we’re going to do is remove that shim because I’m pretty certain you don’t have a short left leg what’s happening though is because you’re dropping your left heel when they sh that then opens up the knee extension angle at the bottom of the stroke so the leg overextends and if someone was measuring you with motion capture software or whatever they would go ah your left leg is shorter so the shim closes the knee extension angle back down so that when we actually look at your knees they’re kind of doing the same thing from the side they’re they’re opening up at the bottom of the stroke to roughly the same depth yeah but the the only reason that that shim is needed is because of the left heel drop so if we can stop your left heel from dropping differently to your right heel you probably won’t need the shim so that’s going to be the key I have a feeling that a lot of this is related to your um your feet but let’s have a look at shoe set up now with the g8s that you’ve got and the shims and wedges and bits and stuff that you’ve got in there and we’ll um see if we can come up with a better solution that’s going to help this is a good situation where we want to measure the cleat position specifically on each foot and each shoe complex so Carl’s got a situation where here where he’s got two different size feet and therefore two different size shoes so what we’re going to do is individually measure the two cleat positions relative to his first metat tassel first on the two shoes um and then try and even up the cleat position in terms of in terms of how far behind the metat tassal heads each one of the centers of the cleat is and this is where it gets a bit interesting because they’re two different shoes and I’m assuming that the arch supports which you’ve got in there are a bit different on the left and the right as well let’s have a look there’s a full 10 mm of difference here how do you do you know and this is a tough question cuz you’re you’re quite old now you’re 31 um so so your memory your memory is probably going like mine was at 31 from all the heavy drinking in my youth um were they like this always or did they become like this in the last 10 or 12 years I think during the last 10 or 12 years you think they’ve become like this yeah if I had to guess I’d say that you’re probably right remember we were talking about the structure of your two feet before with the left one having a higher Arch and the right one having a lower Arch this left foot is almost what we’d call a supern foot it’s kind of tilted up like this and the arch is shortened which makes the foot shorter right which is what we’re seeing here another way of imagining it is that this one is longer because the arch has flattened so it’s gotten longer his left foot is nearly 10 mm shorter than his right so he’s done the right thing and he’s bought two different Siz shoes which is pretty logical now this is where it gets tricky what you want to do is measure your if you’re if you’re setting your cleat position to suit two different Siz feet in two different size shoes you must individually measure each one so what I’ve done is I’ve marked where Carl’s metat tassle joint sits on each one with a really fine tolerance and we’ve translated that down onto the bottom of the shoe like you’ve probably seen me do in some other video and uh what we what we’re wanting to do is get them roughly the same distance behind the ball of your foot in most situations here the person’s body their central nervous system will have a problem if you’ve got two different Siz feet and you don’t stagger the cleats exactly the same distance behind the ball of your foot on each side the central nervous system will perceive the two cleat positions as being different that’s car’s metat tassel heads the white out marks and you can see they’re staggered by roughly 10 mm with the right one being further forward hence his his much larger foot this left shoe is obviously a little bit smaller than the right one but you can see the back edges of the cleats are roughly lined up which means that the cleats are way off each other relative to his foot bit of an interesting scenario so we’re going to ditch this in its entirety and we’re going to ditch the wedge for the moment we might put it back in later although I doubt it there so this is staggered a massive amount it’s a full 10 mm which is the difference between your two feet it’s 10 mil you guys are still on the imperial system aren’t you what’s that a quarter of an inch uh no right so so this is uh the new cleat position that we’re going to t here with Carl you can see those little white out marks down here on the medial border of the shoe those are the positions of his metat tassal heads and you can see that they’re staggered by around 10 mm inside the shoe that’s that’s the actual vertical sort of translated location of his Med heads inside each shoe so that’s kind of like a real measurement of where they are and you can see this now we’ve got the cleat staggered to match that so the left cleat is roughly 10 mm behind the right one to match his foot size difference in addition I’ve completely removed the 4 mm shim that was under his foot and we’ve removed the wedge as well so we’re going to test this and see what happens let’s have a look at you car the trick here is to do nothing for a bit and just see what happens we’ll just let you adapt to this before we even look at it so spin your legs up just to a moderate Pace Caryl don’t kill yourself put a little bit of pressure on the nose of the seat is more visible he’s not sitting lateral anymore you see the little red mark underneath his gentleman’s region is more centered which is always a good start what does it feel like Carl I feel more from the left side yeah yeah you’re sitting much straighter on the seat yeah so step one is to at least at least get your pelvis roughly Square to the bike yeah that’s that’s always step one and it looks way better from behind it almost looks perfect the Symmetry almost perfect your left hamstring doesn’t know what happening right now and neither does your left calf I’m sure you can feel your calf fighting the pedal it doesn’t know what what to do now you’ve spent 10 15 years riding you know 5 to 10 hours a week or more with all of with this weird foot problem and the cleat in the wrong spot and all this sort of stuff so your your ingrained motor patenting is so heavily embedded with those memories of how your leg has to function that this is going to take some time to to come back out but even now I’ve I’ve been watching you for about 60 seconds or slightly slightly more and it’s getting better as I watch it your left hamstring and your calf in the first 30 seconds were struggling to control the knee extension at the bottom of the stroke and now as I watch you it’s getting better and better but you can feel that left foot it just doesn’t know what to do cuz your Cal yeah so there’s a couple of things you can do about this to sort of um help it work a little bit better the first one is to consciously don’t let the heel drop like that like that exactly like that don’t let the heel drop so to you this will feel like with your left foot like you’re actually Towing the pedal yeah so you can consciously you can help to consciously embed the motor patterning a little bit but most of it happens subconsciously yeah but this is one of the drills I’m going to get you to do for the next couple of weeks is to try and like tow the pedal on your left like almost almost Point your toe down but not quite that much about about that much that’s perfect because that’s exactly what your right foot does okay so this has been 10 or more years of not doing this so it’s really foreign it’s really yeah it it your brain’s like what and your patent generating motor system doesn’t know what to what’s happening but as soon as you consciously do it your left knee closes down the extension angle and it perfectly matches the right side side so your symmetry actually looks really good so that’s step one Carl okay there’s more steps to this so what I’m going to experiment with now Carl is trying to figure out how much your weak hamstring is screwing things up and we try and try and figure out if it’s quite a lot or not or not that much I deliberately didn’t do this before cuz you know how your feet got quite different Arch mod like shapes to them I deliberately didn’t do this before cuz I didn’t want do too many things at once I straight away yeah we’re just going to investigate what a more symmetrical arch support does to you nothing bad there that makes a difference that actually helps a little bit sorry Carl let me borrow your right shoe again I’m going to dagger the cleat again cuz that helps so we’re trying to figure out here which pieces of the puzzle make a big difference and which ones you know which ones don’t there’s lots of pieces in your puzzle unfortunately it could be worse I’ve seen worse it’s a nice complex one he’s not dropping his heel quite as much as he was before with the addition of a an asymmetrical Arch module oh it looks much better from the front that’s the best I’ve seen it let me borrow that foot again mate sorry wow that I didn’t think they were that different this is the beauty of the G8 inso is you can uh quickly change the arch support really rapidly to test the effect so we just drop that down another notch on the right getting somewhere what I’m going to do now is wedge your right heel not the 4 foot this is actually underneath the calcum the theory if this helps the theory would be that for 10 plus years your foot’s been diving across the line so that the rear part of your foot will have probably developed some laxity into what we call a pronator movement so if we can stabilize that by tilting it back the other way by a few degrees the theory being that may help with the functional Symmetry and the engagement of your calf and your hamstring let’s find out when you ride these two joints here where the the two sides of the pelvis articulate with the sacrum in here they roll forward and back they kind of go like this with every stroke same thing when you’re walking and running right um if you’ve been sitting Twisted to the to the left for a really long time the two illiams tend to go like this relative to each other now yours don’t really display a lot of this off the bike so this was a a guess it was a test what we did there was basically push the left one into forward rotation really aggressively and it actually like let go and freed up a little bit then we throw you back on the bike straight away and see if there’s a change in the rotation of the alums and if there is what will happen is as the ilium rotates more freely than it was before your leg will get longer so that sounds crazy but what happens is if if there’s a pivot point here on the Sacro iliac joint if if this isn’t pivoting each time your hip joint moves then it basically makes your leg shorter cuz your leg really is the distance from the center of rotation of the sacroiliac joint to your foot not so much the hip joint on a bike this movement of the free the free movement of the ilium is really important so you basically end up with a technically a functionally shorter leg on the left yeah so this was playing a small role like you can feel it feels like I’ve lowered the seat for your left leg a little bit now yeah this won’t last it’ll stiffen back up a little bit after this but it shows us that there as a small piece of the puzzle is to do with this functional asymmetry in your pelvis this is one of the things which is going to take time to fix but we’ve got methods to fix it we just have to hope that we can get your hamstring kicking goals again and functioning well cuz that really is the key if your left hamstring comes back online this will all kind of go away I suspect you’ve probably got 20 130 mm of drop or something and because of your proportions and how well you been forward and everything the drop should be more like 180 mm yeah so what happens essentially is because the bar is so high you just prop your weight up on it a little bit and you brace with your elbows you’ll find that it’s not such a problem under race conditions because you’re you’re putting out big Power and you’re sitting down low and your neck doesn’t get zore but when you’re cruising along doing like a zone two ride like cuz it’s just you’re bracing more on your on your arms so the general position is totally fine but I suspect this will need to go up as you fix your leg Yeah so don’t be afraid to creep it up I would probably I’d probably think 2 mm every two or 3 weeks right for the next couple of months yeah and I suspect you’ll end up probably about 5 mm higher than this I’m going to have a look at it now 5 mil higher and just see if you tolerate it now but I don’t think you will what’ll happen is you left your left hamstring won’t tolerate it your your right one will be totally fine it’ll just be your left one what’s now this stuff never shows up on footage like we’ll we’ll look back at this on the editing table and it’ll look exactly the same but that left leg is definitely losing control and you can feel it yeah so what we have to do for for the moment is set your seat height based upon the weakest part of you which is your left leg Yeah and that’s okay because we know it’s we know it’s going to get better we know it’s only going to improve it doesn’t worsen your symmetry a lot like you don’t sort of drop out a plane or twist or anything you just lose control with the left leg Yeah so we’ll leave your seat height quite low the other way of doing it is we could leave it high up and then shim your left foot temporarily but I would I would I would move away from the shim if it was me and we’ll just try and strengthen it so that all of this goes away you can see they’re just a little bit different with the way that the arms Bend and that’s just because because Kyle’s pelvis is slightly out of whack with the bike still and he’s just not he’s not Del loading his left side with his left hamstring so it’s actually the fault of your hamstring Carl is why your left arm looks different to your right arm which sounds crazy when you say it but here we are from above and behind man absolutely beautiful super square no twist to the bike you can feel your left bum sitting on the seat can’t you it’s always nice right so Carl we’re talking about the geometry of this bike compared to you now you’re three 3 cm taller than me I ride a 56 some some Brands I ride a large other other other ones I can write a 54 if it’s got a fairly tall stack height you’re slightly taller than me this is a 51 very hyper aggressive race geometry bike and I’m here telling you to get a 47 which is a strange turn of event so car um the only other problem with his position we’ found apart from all of this complicated asymmetry is that the bars are still too high for him he’s got an unusual situation short legs good forward flexibility and short arms so he needs a bike that’s quite short but extremely low in the front end so the 47 on the next size down in the te machine R is is 25 mm lower in the front end and that’s exactly what you need this is a a 15° cockpit which bmc’s got it’s as low as they can go so we can’t go any lower but that extra 25 M of drop would unload a lot of your neck issues it take away a lot of the load from your neck essentially um and the reach is only 10 mm shorter so we just go straight out to a 120 mm stem slam it and you should be good so it seems crazy to be talking to 178 cm tall guy about a 47 CM frame but here we are yeah and and you’ve got a seat height of a shade over 700 mm mine for example I’m shorter than you mine’s up around 755 just gives you an idea of how different two people can be and why the manufacturers recommendations don’t always work out in extreme circumstances and this is an extreme circumstance right here okay Carl we’re all finished up here in The Sports Hub mate uh you’ve come a long way you come from France all the way to the Sunshine Coast in Australia and uh I was hoping when we started that this would have been worth your effort and hopefully it has been um we identified a lot of stuff going on with car he’s got an old a really bad old injury to his left hamstring which was complicating matters a massive foot sizee discrepancy two different size shoes um you’ve been around the world before seeing me to have bike fits elsewhere and you haven’t uh you haven’t given me too many details on this but you said you you’ve been to London and a couple of other places and this has been a big struggle no one’s really been able to figure this asymmetry out that you’ve been struggling with for a long time um and until now you haven’t really had any good answers so I’m happy that I’ve helped you out on this one but what we’ve ended up with here is a massive stagger in the cleat position you can see Carl’s got one foot that’s 10 mm shorter than the left and essentially what had happened was a comedy of errors but no one had ever thought to actually set the CLE position to be the same relative to2 ft which I find quite demoralizing given how many hours and and pounds and and Euros you spent trying to fix this problem because this wasn’t that complicated it is a tricky problem but this is basic stuff that should have been figured out in the past so with all that said and done with me having a subtle dig at some other people who you’ve seen in the past um we’ve staggered your cleats we’ve taken out a lot of the rubbish we’ve figured out that you don’t have a leg length difference you don’t need a leg length shim we’re going to give you a whole bunch of home exercise stuff to try and powertrain your left leg to get it functioning well again and we’re going to get your left hamstring imaged when you get home to try and figure out if it’s been badly damaged in that old accident that you have uh that you that you had back in uh 20 uh 2013 2013 so a solid 11 years ago so we’ve ended up with this situation on the bottom of Carl’s shoes and his symmetry actually looks quite good with a couple of exceptions his left knee still tracking a bit wider the top tube and a couple of little bits and pieces which we’re going to work on in the future and I’ll try and catch up with you when you’re next back uh in the southern hemisphere mate and we’ll see how this is going we might catch up with a video link and uh and and see if this is all working long term so there you go uh me having a bit of a ranted other bike Fitters is not unusual situation here but this one was a bit of a shocker I’m surprised that uh yeah this never got any further than that and I’m happy to report that you can remove all of the leg length shims and everything cuz we know now from your X-ray that you’ve had and from what I’ve seeing as well you definitely don’t have a structurally short leg so that’s great news yeah makes it nice and simple nice to meet you Carl thanks for coming all this way buddy that’s good let’s go they’re yours