Wednesday 26 January 2011

The importance of riding position

I spent some time firtling with my riding position last night.
I felt on the long ride the other day that I'd probably worked my quads relatively harder than I should have, suggesting that my seat height was a little low - so I set the bike up on the turbo trainer and grabbed my camera so that I could video myself in the 4 hand positions that I use.
The camera is great, it has a normal frame rate of 30 fps, but if you want loads of detail, it can record at up to 1000fps!!
I did want more detail, but 210fps was plenty!!

I reviewed the clips in Kinovea - a fantastic bit of software that you can do all sorts of whizzy stuff with - including drawing lines and measure angles.

To start with I had a knee angle of 38° at bottom dead centre.
Too much!!
That'll explain why I have been slightly over-working my quads!
So some fiddling with seat height and fore/aft position and I'd got it to 26-27°, and I was happy with how it generally felt.  I also raised the bars slightly

So today's ride was all about trying it out.
It was not going to be a speedy ride - because I was hit by a head-splitting sinusitis last night.

But the really easy effort churned out a very decent ride.
17mph average over the 24 miles. And considering that I had half a head full of cotton wool, I was pretty pleased with that!!!!

And my legs hardly felt like they'd been used.
I'll see how it goes with it set up this way for a few rides.

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