Is Female Bike Fit Different? Some Surprises & Unpacking Myths!

Bike Fit for Females is not really covered on YouTube, so I took my wife Dani to visit Sian at UK Bike Fit for a full bike fit. We also got chatting about whether there’s a difference between male and female bike fit and you might be surprised at the outcome.

There’s good content here for men and women as we walk through bike fit tips that apply to everyone, we hope you enjoy it!

Book a Bike Fit with Sian or Dan: https://geni.us/ukbikefit

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Instagram — https://www.instagram.com/grantritchie/
Strava — https://www.strava.com/athletes/6460943

My day job is running a brand design and development studio, if you’re interested in graphic/web design or brand strategy then hit us up — https://www.studioyoke.co.uk/

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Road Bike: Canyon Endurace CF SL 8.0
Gravel Bike: Canondale Topstone
Wheels: Hunt
GPS Cycling Computer: Wahoo Element Bolt
Road Shoes: Lake CX332
Gravel Shoes: Quoc Gran Tourer
Helmet: POC Omne Air Spin
Clothes: Universal Colours / Maap / Rapha
Turbo Trainer: Wahoo Kickr Core
Nutrition: Styrkr (Use code ‘GRANTRITCHIE’ for 25% off)

The small camera I use: https://geni.us/small_camera
The big camera I use: https://geni.us/big_camer
The mount I use for cycling: https://geni.us/my-mount

#cycling #bikefit #female

if you were going to Pedal yeah and I said let go of the bars would you headb the stem welcome back to the videos we’re back with something a little bit different today everybody has seen there’s a lot of bike fit content out there on the internet about how to get comfortable on the bike but they all make one big mistake they’re all for men so we’re back at UK bike fit today and I’ve brought my wife Danny and we’re here to get a bike fit specifically for females and we’ve got rid of Dan and we’ve brought in Shan and she’s going to give Danny a bike fit today if you’re a man don’t tune out it would be good for us to all get a little bit more education around this kind of stuff and so yeah we’re going to get inside and you’re going to get a bike fit can we so if you want to get into your cycling stuff for me we’re just going to do like a preassessment first so just look at like flexibility joint range of motion movement pattern like spine flexion like Arch movement and stuff like that so if you just want to lay on your back with your head that way for is that pulling there just a b yeah a little bit yeah anything in the glut to the lower back or is it just hamstrings um just hamstrings really yeah Co we tend to find that women tend to have a few more like a bit more mobile hips anyway yeah not always but it’s like a general General Trend but hamstring flexibility you’ve got plenty of I mean my partner can only get to B here so yes you can um jump on the bike got some stickers and stuff on [Music] you in a position I’m normally sitting but it’s going to spit you in how you finding it so far good yeah I definitely feel discomfort in a few areas so I’m excited to see the changes that we can make to just make it overall more comfortable for me um so these blue lines here through the center of your feet at the bottom of the pedal stroke and ideally what we’d want to see would be for your knee to track directly up and down that blue line okay we can see that maybe your right knee does fall slightly inside of that line yeah and same on the other side you can see the other side pretty much tracks inside that blue line the whole way yeah um the good thing is what we’re not getting is the knee come up and then like collapse in sometimes that collapse can be like an arch thing sometimes a roll can be like the HP Flex has being tight so saddle height were definitely low okay you can see here how much of a Bend there is in your knee mhm yeah um you’ve got so much more it’s wasted um P that yeah yeah so these are pushed to bring your feet in already that that in position um so what I’ll do is I’ll set them neutral see how it presents when the cleats are set like neutral in the middle and then see whether we need to then push to the left or to the right or anything like that so this black line here is the pedal axle and then obviously this is the base of your little toe so your fifth met ideally what we want is for that um that pedal ax or to be just in front of the base of your little toe right essentially what that does is it puts the center of the pedal over the ball of your foot which is the most powerful part of your foot if you come too far forward we’re kind of in toe region and it’s like imag running on your toes like it’ be it’s not efficient it’d be uncomfortable like when it’s too far forward the ankle’s not supported properly so you get loads of calf engagement just to try and like stabilize the ankle and it just ends up calf can’t contribute properly to like power production and that sort [Music] of I don’t think we’re actually far off [Music] okay yeah so I think where the cleat position is with regards to the out the the right foot mhm um you can see there that it moves nicely up and down that blue line yeah so there was no need for any point for that knee to be like the CLE to be pushed inwards or outwards or anything like that um but we can see a lot more obviously now on this side how much the knee drives into the bike M um as you can see it comes up and then it collapses in you can see the yes the roll of the knee so you can see it’s outwards there comes up rolls in in yes you can see that just goes over the hole there and you can see the fatter bits there and the thinner bits that way and it’ll just raise it slightly okay I know it doesn’t seem like much but bike fitting really does just come down to millimeters it has helped it looks better okay um feels better a bit more through bit more Balan through the the pedal the PED do you feel like you’re pressed against any side of the shoe does the or do you feel like now that left one’s been rotated it feels a little bit more I think I’m definitely feel like I’m pressed a bit more here like my foot’s still mhm pushing that way yeah you are still kind of pushed into the inside of the shoe so if I pull the yeah all the floats there and when you natur want to be you you pushed against the I’ll do like another small tweak on that just to rotate a little bit more obviously we’re limited to a point where we don’t want to be brushing the crank yeah so there’s only really so far we can rotate it but let’s see whether we can get like a couple of degrees of like Freedom the other [Music] side so these are the inshoe wedges I was on a Bo they do the exact same thing as the wedges under the cleat they’re just in the shoe okay um obviously we’ve kind of put it to the the point where we can with the mounting bike so the SPD cleat so let’s see whether we can get one of these in basically raises that foot a little bit more y um on the side to hopefully create that contact that you’re missing y um so you’ve then got the cleat slightly raised on that side and from the underneath and then that slightly rais from [Music] great the knee feels really good feels much better yeah now the feet are all sorted we’ll move on to the like the back end of the bike so like saddle height SLE fora that sort of stuff um so I find the point that you undere extend mark it off with a bit of electrical tape and then raise it to the point you’re over extending yeah and it basically shows you as well as me like what underextension feels like see that like your heels driving down a little bit as you come down to the bottom of the pedal stroke and it’s almost your subconscious attempt to get more extend so if you’re doing if you’re doing this basically on the the pedal stroke you’re probably your sadd’s too low probably it’s definitely an indicator of it how does that feel through the feet still feel like I’ve got pressure in the in the lower part of the stroke let’s go up again then cool so now we can see that this is your point of underextension this is your point of overextension and we’ve got this nice window here of where we can play Within that you’ll be not a risk of like injuring or overextending anything so what I’ll do is I’ll put it smap bang in the middle now you know how the two extremes feel you can then kind of say to me like oh I don’t know whether I want it a little bit higher or we can play Within that how’s that feel feels good feels comfortable yeah I might just maybe go down a mill or two you almost want to think of the saddle as like a seesaw so if this is like your center of mass and this is the saddle mhm too far back and you end up kind of like falling forwards okay no Saddles too far forward sorry you end up falling forward so your like power Productions kind of coming at this angle so sad so far forward you’re like donkey kicking the power yeah and it means that there’s so much force going through through the like the knee it’s going to have so many issues You’ get a lot like knee pain and stuff like that when the saddle’s too far back it’s not so much it’s going to cause you injury it’s just like inefficiency like the Saddles like this and you’re try and almost like Chase the power yeah and when we find the perfect point of where the saddle needs to be over of your center of gravity it just balances you she should find that when we’re on that like Prime point it’s like through the hands like so when it’s too far back it’ be like a bit heavy too far forward it’s really heavy and then when it’s in the perfect point it’s just light it’s kind of what we’re after I think we’re actually probably on the game with the the saddle for you can see that that like force transfer is kind of like coming down here instead of it coming down at this angle or at that angle we getting it just coming directly down yeah we made a lot of change like a lot of changes around the feet we made a huge difference with the saddle height but saddle for raft we’ve not really changed much yeah but because we’ve come up so much kind of in this direction dire the s’s gone back okay so me moving it Forward probably put it where it was before you came in yeah front end but I’m going to do is take your stem off take the um pop our sizing stem on with your bars and then we can have a proper Explorer of a range of stem lengths and stuff like that so we go too long too short find happy medium it does look very short at the moment and quite high so even if the stem length stays the same I think we have the scope just to relax maybe in a little bit more to something lower but let’s have a look and see what happens when we change stuff [Music] great do not ride it’s the fact they had to write it on there how many people roded the size they actually got it on there yeah so this will feel 2 cm longer than what you’re currently used to yeah this is the part I think that I’ve struggled with the most the reach of knowing what’s correct and correct because I don’t know whether it’s just me personally being used to coming from riding a town bike that was up here yeah to then down here it just always feels long so often when I’m riding a bit further I’ll sit like here or it’s more comfortable but you want it to be comfortable in the shifters and you want to be able to ride in the shifters like pain free no issues how does that feel that it feels okay actually I actually feel like if you told this was the same as my other ones then I probably would have believed you I’ll wind it out to show you what’s like overextension I think 60 is not bad to be honest I think we can maybe go a little bit lower just to relax a little bit more I think we’re a little bit high but I think 60 is quite a nice length but let’s see what 70 feels like what 80 feels like I can see at what point you’re like yeah this is where are the bars so we’re wanting to find that like looseness through the hands again if it feels like pressure’s increasing then we’ve gone to too far and you want to be able to like free at the elbows you don’t be so far that you’re like I literally can’t move my elbows so I’d say that looks quite long visually yeah that feels better through the hands as well that’s that like key feeling that we’re looking for is what point are we lighter through the hands so now we’ve kind of reached like an appropriate stem length and we’ll have a look at like stack so like how many spaces we have underneath how high or low that you go sometimes if we go higher we can sometimes go a bit longer mhm and say that if we go shorter we can sometimes go a bit lower it like this movement or just comes hand in hand but it is easier to find an appropriate stem length first and then we can play with the height yes so I’ve taken about 5 mil out so let’s see what that does again bike fit in millimeters so you might think what’s 5 mil going to do but you’d be surprised how much 5 mil does how does that Hy feel definitely feels feels different so if you kind of like hone into the feel of that lightness through the hands if it’s got a little bit more more then I’d probably Edge to stick to the height we were at if you were going to Pedal yeah and I said let go of the bars would you head put the stem right no that’s not quite you can hear that you had to like increase your pedal stroke a little bit more to hold you up yeah that’s um but you couldn’t so that test is like some people genuinely have such good like control and balance that they can just let go but it’s not everyone um so that’s why we tend to hone in on that like hand as opposed to like do some tricks and let go of the bars for me so this is where you were before so you can see that the shoulders really high it’s like kind of forced back yeah and then as we come through to here you can see we’ve got a natural Bend through the elbow now the shoulders a lot more neutral if I come through again you can see it’s the like the back’s pan flat there’s no flexion through the back whatsoever the shoulders are forced back the Pelt you can see that feeling of like a bit like t b like grounded through the back of the the sit bones and then we come through we’ve gone up a little bit we’ve got some flexion through the back and through the pelvis now and a nice Bend through the elbow feels a lot better as well it feels it feels a lot different and a lot better I think I’m excited to now just go out and cycle in this new position and feel how it actually feels on the bike like you said out on the road and um over a yeah longer time and settle into all those little changes that we’ve made so we’ve made quite a lot of changes to be honest a wedge to the cleat we’ve added a 4T wedge inside the pedal so we’ve raised the saddle by about a centimeter um which in turn has set the saddle back a little bit as well so we’ve had to bring the saddle forward a little bit essentially doing that we’ve then gone lower and longer cuz we brought you up and back but we’ve actually now gone 2 cm we’ve actually gone didn’t need that anyway 2 cm longer at the front yeah and essentially lower because we’ve obviously raised the saddle it’s that kind of thing of as you like relax into as you get longer the arms can just naturally be where they want to be we’ve essentially changed everything’ve good job of going over all of it yeah but hopefully it feels solid and strong and good to you and efficient and nothing’s like red flag like I don’t like the feel of that give it a ride and let me know it goes looking forward to that but yeah it’s been great and it feels feels like a different bike like defin it really does feels completely different and I think all that stuff you know stuff that you just put up with where you’re like oh that’s a little bit uncomfortable but I don’t think I’ll ever get rid of that cuz just maybe part of how I’m built and how I ride get to a point now where I feel really comfortable in like all areas of the bike so yeah I’m just excited to get out and see how I get on I think coming into cycling as a woman especially if you come like into it as like like if you’ve already got like a group of friends who ride you almost get sucked into it a little bit quicker whereas if you’re coming into it it’s like not really knowing anyone like can you be like it can be a scary place for a woman to ride a bike like group rides are like lovely most men are really nice but to go in thinking oh my God I’m the only woman is is quite terrifying I think the thing to think is that cycling is equally as much for women as it is for men and like just because you think you’re a novice or you’ve just started like a bike fit’s always beneficial just find a bike fitter that you trust that you feel comfortable with whether you can find another female bike fitter and just come in and just get it all SED and just enjoy cycling like no saddle is a men’s saddle no Saddles a women’s saddle no specific bars are for women like bike fits are very much the individual and we work just with the individual so yeah don’t be put off for getting stuff done because you feel like you don’t have a place in the cycling Community cuz you definitely do what she said and cut a small little feature at the end for me um but yeah hope that you’ve enjoyed this video thank you so much Shan for taking us through this be really fun and um yeah if you’re a female cyclist um leave a comment down below let us know that you’re here and let us know if you’ve got any frustrations in the industry or if there’s any other videos that you’d like us to make um but I hope that you’ve enjoyed this one we hope that you’ve enjoyed this one and we’ll catch you in the next one [Music] cheers