After spending much of the first day at Fit Class learning about the physiology behind what goes into a good fit, we started actually learning 'how to fit'. And not just a numbers and put people in there system, a real system that takes measurements but also brings in the human approach.
It's pretty simple to fit someone on a bike if you just play it by the numbers and go. But the fit itself won't be anywhere near what the customer may want, or even need based on their given parameters of what they are looking for in a fit. So, one thing I really like about the Trek Precision Fit process is the actual use of an in-depth interview process before a fit actually begins. You can learn so much about a person's fit needs based on the interview alone. Some might argue you may not even need to take any standard measures as a baseline to test them up against their current setup, but just jump right in and make some changes, that is, if you're good enough at it and have some experience under your belt.
But, for someone like me who is relatively new and green at this gig, taking some measurements is a good idea.
To go over a few things here, I'll discuss the most important measurements in my opinion that we went over in class, so as not to leave you reading for days.
One of the most important measurements in my opinion is basic flexibility in your hamstrings. This is one of the easiest to measure, and Trek Precision Fit places you in one of three categories: red, yellow or green. Easy enough. Red is not very flexible. Green is very flexible. Yellow is in between.
To measure your base flexibility, stand with your feet shoulder width apart, keeping your knees straight and try to touch the floor. If you can put your hands flat on the floor, you're in the green zone. If you're between your ankles and fingers touching the ground, you're a yellow. Finally, if you're hands don't reach your ankles, you're a red.
Now what this means is that when you're placing someone up on the saddle, you have to pay attention to their knee bend at the bottom of the pedal stroke. Follow their ankling and see how much knee bend they have. To keep this simple, you need to more knee bend the less flexible you are. Essentially this means if you're more flexible, you can activate your hamstrings at a steeper angle than those of us who are less flexible.
The next measurement I like to take a look at is hip restriction. This is somewhat new. What we're talking about here is how high you can bring your knee in correlation to your pelvis and how steep or shallow of an angle you can have between the two.
To measure this, we simply raise your knee (bent) while laying flat on the ground towards your chest and note how far we can push your knee upwards until there is some resistance. The less you can bring your knees up, the shallower of a hip angle you can utilize on the bike. Which can mean a couple things you need to fix. One is raising up your handle bars so you don't have as much of a forward pelvic rotation. The other is trying out shorter crank arms so that when you reach the top of the pedal stroke, you are essentially lower. Raising the handle bars is free, getting new crank arms can get expensive.
That's it for this one. I'll discuss more restriction measurements in the next post.
-Dave
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