Originally Posted by
Doc V
While looking for a fitter you can do some modification that may help with the knees. Peter White has an excellent site for doing a fit and can be found at
How to Fit a Bicycle. Focus on setting up your fore-aft and seat height correctly as these have a big impact on knee pressure/pain. My knees are sensitive to 2mm in height adjustment when cycling over 25 miles.
Also when I first got started and increased the miles and hills my IT band would cause my knees to ache badly finally to the point of having trouble walking and no amount of stretching would fix it. If you have a foam roller, I highly recommend you try that to free up any adhesions in the IT band and really the muscles attached to the band (
DON'T Foam-Roll Your IT Band! | ASM Wellness).
Great article, thank you for sharing.
Raising the saddle has helped quite a bit. I adjusted based on the average of the different methods found online. (Lemond's chart seems to have gotten me near where I want to be). Based on that, it was actually about 1.5cm too low. I may be a tad (1mm or so) high now. I feel some tightening/stretching in the back of my legs at points.
I have some residual pain from when the seat was low in the petellar and quad tendon, but nothing like what I experienced before where it was a global ache in both knees.
I also did the fore/aft alignment (KOPs) as well. I think I'm in a good neutral spot, maybe slighting forward as some recommendations said being a little more forward is less detrimental than backwards. Seat tilt is currently level.
I have a few questions on fine tuning... What is the best bet for climbing. Should I adjust a little more forward or backward? I have a lot of medium sized climbs and any 15 mile route could include 900ft of elevation change over multiple hills from 2-12% grades. I spend most of my time climbing seated, if that makes a difference.
Also, Speedplays seem great. May be my first upgrade as I move along with this.