Originally Posted by
Wilfred Laurier
The potential damage caused by clipless pedals was much greater ~20 years ago. Since then all* clipless pedals are designed to allow the foot to float and find its own alignment. This still doesn't work for some people, but for most it does.
Float makes clipless better, but the ball of your foot still can not move left or right, it's locked into spot. Float helps let you rotate the back left and right, but the front is still always in the same spot.
Originally Posted by
Wilfred Laurier
A colleague recently went for a professional fitting to alleviate knee problems, and the fitter recommended he get clipless as flats, which he was accustomed to, have no way of ensuring your knees don't go into a damaging position. Of course, an improperly positioned cleat can ensure your knees never leave the damaging position until you can no longer ride. *maybe not all, but I cannot be sure. Clipless pedals with float are somewhere between 'the vast majority' to 'all'.
These seem like they're part of a process where something sounds unusual and is unusual, so it gets repeated a lot, to the point where sometimes people start to think it's the norm, rather than the rare exception.
There's also the question of what motivates the fitter to recommend something - do they work at a bike shop so the shop makes more money if you buy clipless shoes? Is the training they go through funded by the bike industry which tries to steer them towards buying their special bike shoes? Maybe it's simply that for a pro fitter it's easier to make sure the foot stays in the same position with clipless. Maybe for certain people with certain issues clipless happens to help for that specific issue.
If you took average people, did not involve a specialized fitter, and randomly had half the group use clipless and half use flats, I'm sure that the clipless group would have a
lot more foot and knee issues to try to get rid of than the flats group.