Tuesday, October 27, 2009

If the shoe fits...

Make sure the cleat is in the right position.



(pic pinched from joe friel's blog - which you should read)

There is a growing body of bike-fit lore suggesting having the cleat further back than would be traditionally proposed is desirable.

Steve Hogg in cycling news makes a good point, and then there is the biomac mxc 2 shoe design. Joe Friel, who is arguably the most important cycling fitness guru on earth at present likes them.

Might be worth a try pushing the cleats a few mm back and seeing how things go...

8 comments:

Shaggy said...

did I send you the review from Cycling news a few months ago? That much toe overlap scares me...

Nick said...

Helps with tech riding too. After all your foot naturally moves that far back on flatties.

I sometimes wonder how much of the tradition of the weight being on the toes comes from horseriding?

dRjON said...

shaggy: yeah, hadnt tht of that....im guessing youd need to drop the saddle a bit as well. the whole thing would start to alter...hmmm!...i might try a few mm at first...see if thats noticeable.
i fink it was 'ankling' that was touted as the reason, so you had a longer lever once you started to push back on the pedal (hence toe down, which relatively means the pedal axle falls behind the first mtp joint)...but this is all brouhaha if you are out saddle/not an ankler/pedal heal down etc etc...

martysavalas said...

where do the pros with big budgets (road) to buy in bio-mechanicists put them?

dRjON said...

:-)~

you know (from personal experience) how conservative pros are....they dont change anything fast a major change like that may take an entire season to get used to...in saying that, the biomacs have a pretty impressive list of users/winners....

martysavalas said...

you know (from personal experience) how conservative pros are....
very funny.

they dont change anything fast a major change like that may take an entire season to get used to...
if it were to provide proven extra watts or 5s off a 50k tt i'm guessing they'd get used to it pretty quickly...

Nick said...

you know (from personal experience) how conservative pros are....

It's not as if you can make a gradual change from the cleat position on 'standard' shoes to this, there just ins't any overlap in the positioning ranges, so you have to take a leap of faith.

Over the last four years I'd already started moving my cleats to the very back of the allowable adjustment, and I found that still wasn't far enough back for jumpy riding.

badger dave said...

after being mocked only recently for how back my cleats were, I feel completely vindicated :D

Sadly I'm not fit nor fast even with them back