 So welcome back or welcome to the 12th edition of the RCA training tip show. We're gonna get straight into things today because I'm joined again by Neil Stambry, who is an expert bike fitter based in Queensland, Australia and has been fitting road cyclists for around 10 years in conjunction with being a sports physiotherapist. So the discussion you're gonna see today is a small part of a one hour discussion I have with Neil. So we're actually gonna split Neil across three main parts over the channel over the next month or so. And in today's discussion, I challenge you to get to the end. Neil shares a fair bit of context upfront and then shows you how to place the cleats properly for optimal power gains on the bike. So let's get into it. I guess cleat position is one of those things that most people just don't know what to do with it. You know, they go, oh, I'm just gonna put it there. You know, that's as far as it goes. Where do you normally see it put? Oh, anyway, I just kind of put it on the shoe. A huge number of people, when I take their shoes off during the fit, they go, oh, I don't know where those cleats are. I just kind of put them on, you know, and that's fine because, you know, you don't, no one knows any better, right? Cleat position, sort of, what we'll talk about is two different kind of aspects to it. There's the four and a half position and then the lateral position. And we won't worry about rotation at the moment. Let's talk about lateral positioning first. So this basically is a speed plate cleat. It's got about six millimeters of lateral play. And this alters your cue factor or your stance width or your foot separation distance. So what's cue factor, sorry? Is the distance apart that your feet are on the bike, right? So lateral positioning alters how far apart they are. And this, all road bikes pretty much, you've got the same cue factor, the same crank face separation, if you measure them all the way, pretty much all the same. And yet people have a huge variety of pelvis widths out there. You know, you and I are fairly different. I got a 28 inch waist. You got like a 34 or something like that. 32. Come on, mate. Sometimes 30. Maybe 34 at the moment. It's like guessing your age. You've always got to go on to, oh, you're 28, aren't you, Cam? So let's call you a 32 inch waist. So four inch waist difference. But then like I had an ex-Olympian rower in my clinic the other day was six foot seven and 110 kilos. And he probably had like a 42 inch waist or something. Look, the cue factor is it should be more easily variable than it is at the moment, right? So if you've got a big wide-hipped guy and his hip function is not amazing, that guy's knees on a road bike will often track in an oblique plane. You see, oh, right behind people. Oh, beach road is beautiful for a $20,000 Colmargo with a 120 kilo bloke on it. And his knees going like this. So one of the causes of that chopping out of the knees, I guess you'd call it apart from dodgy hips and having a gut in front of you which is striking your thigh. One of the causes is a wide pelvis, right? Your knees are basically trying to track out wide because your pelvis is wide and the angles of your femurs are such that your knee wants to be out here but your crank is here. So they're trying to exist in different planes. And what happens is your knee doesn't just keep moving vertically, it goes like this. Pulled in on every down stroke. And that is not great. It's really bad for power transfer and stuff. It's very inefficient and more than that, it'll hurt your knee. Typically it causes patella type pain. The patella is trying to track up and down in the notch on the front of the knee and it keeps getting pulled sideways. So it's really interesting because I've never really thought about that in terms of bike. In terms of the bike, you think about the size. I'm a 56 or a 54. But everyone Q factor is the same according to bikes. Yeah, I saw a young bloke last night, Continental Pro, who's 53 kilos and he's tiny. He's riding the smallest frame he can get and he needs his feet as close together as possible because he's extraordinarily narrow, hip, and flexible. So his bike has got the same Q factor as the XXL Canyon that the Olympic rower was riding. The foot separation distance is the same from the factory. And patently, the small guy is probably gonna have a narrower pelvis than the huge guy, right? So yeah, it's kind of a, it is a design oversight that there isn't more adjustability of Q factor. Not that there's not more options available. And no one talks about it. No one talks about it. That's what I was thinking, because you've got solutions, yeah? Even though they're probably band-aid-type solutions, are they? Oh, no, we got good solutions. Oh, good solutions, okay. Like you'll see on my bike later when we have a look at it, I've got very narrow pelvis, very flexible hips with good internal rotation and everything. And I run speed, the reason I run speed plays is two reasons, so I can get the cleat a long way back, which suits my particular riding style. The second one is so that I can run shorter than standard axles. I run some custom titanium axles, which are about five millimeters shorter than the standard ones, just to get my feet closer together. Because I function better like that. Can you do that with the Shimano and more pedals? No. With the axles, okay. There are some aftermarket ones available, but Shimano makes a plus four millimeter axle, so you can go wider by four millimeters, which is not much when some people need to want them. But two sizes only. Yeah, two sizes. Look, there's nothing. Some of the pedal systems, you can buy an aftermarket spindle and remove it all and put it in yourself. Most of them you need like a bearing press to do it and some specialized machinery and stuff with the looks. So it's almost, it just can't be done for a home hobbyist, home rider. And what did you do with mine? Yours, we used two two millimeter washes underneath the axle. Yeah, yeah. Because you only needed a tiny bit of extra width. If you needed more than that, Speedplay also offers a longer set of spindles. They go up in sort of only their four millimeter increments. It's all in inches because it's American. But they have a bunch of different lengths out to 12 and a half millimeters wider on each side, which is great. And so you can get them and replace them in about five minutes, which is one of the reasons why Speedplay is so adaptable. But if you're using Shimano's, you either use the standard, the plus four millimeter Ultegra or Durace pedal, or a set of pedal extenders, which will give you 20 millimeters on each side, which for some people, that's a big jump, right? There's a 16 millimeter jump. If you need 10 millimeters each side, you're stuck in no man's land, all right? And you kind of use the extenders and your feet are too far apart, use the standard axles or the plus fours and they're too close together. So situations like that gets a bit tricky. You will often end up using Speedplays because they're just the most adjustable system. They've got the most ability to be tweaked like that. And they've also got these, the base plate extenders available, which you've got two sort of bolt hole locations for the cleat and a big long set of slots. So you can push the cleat way back on the shoe if there's some sort of necessity behind that. So which leads to the next thing we were talking about was the four and a half position of the cleat. So the four and a half position of the cleat in times gone by, the first kind of standard, I guess, was the old boffa par, ball of foot over pedal axle, where the metatarsal joint of your toe, the base of your big toe, should sit directly over the center of the cleat, right? That was the kind of first thing that came out in the cycling world and it got ingrained into people's minds through repetition, not through logic. Like the 172.5 mil cranks. Yeah, exactly like that. And look, in the last 10, 15, 20 years, people, shoe manufacturers are getting better. They're slowly starting to realize that if they place the three bolt holes to suit the boffa par idea, that a huge number of people will have a problem from that. If you place a person's cleat too far forward on the shoe, let's again use that example of putting the cleat under the tip of the nose of the shoe, which we can't do, but if we could, on the down stroke, your foot would be tremendously unstable when you're trying to provide force through the pedal. There'll be a massive effect of anchoring or instability. So the further forward the cleat goes, the less stable the foot is over the pedal. And every rider pretty much reaches a tipping point when the cleat gets too far forward that they will start to compensate around it and develop problems, asymmetrical compensation strategies. So everyone's got their tipping point. My tipping point is 30, I have to have the center of my cleat 35 millimeters behind my big toe joint, which is freakishly far back. Why is that? I'm, because I'm a freak. You're gonna show us later, aren't you? I'll show you later, yeah. I'm a massive heel dropper by nature. I've got incredibly flexible ankles and very small calves, which I don't utilize them much when I walk, run or ride. And so if I don't have the cleat- They're sort of massive in tone. What's going on? We'll see in a minute, yeah. And so if I don't have the cleat that far back, I drop my heels excessively and my brain starts to compensate by dropping my right hip so I get left knee pain from the cleat position being too far forward. Right. Whereas you tolerate a relatively normal cleat position. I think yours is 20 or 15 millimeters behind the metatarsal joint from memory. And that's fairly normal, you know? Because you're more normal than I am in that sense. So the four and a half position, basically you'll never have a problem if it's too far back, but you might start to develop a problem if it's too far forward. And everyone's got their individual tipping point. So my next point, I guess, is that why would you go further back? Well, to stabilize the foot is a good thing. There is a downside to it. Further back it goes. The less you can utilize your calf muscle up here to provide jump in a sprint, right? Or if you're in a crit race and some guys go on pass and you want to jump on his wheel. If the cleat is too far back, you can't really utilize the lever arm of your foot effectively through your calf musculature. So you lose a little bit of jump. You lose a little bit of sprint, perhaps. A little bit of kick, if you like. The flip side of the coin is that when the cleat goes further back, your leg is effectively shorter. So your seat height comes down, which makes you less of a windsock. And your calf musculature activates less, which means your foot is inherently much more stable over the pedal, right? Because the cleat's much further back and there's less levers involved. So you use your calf musculature less. Your seat height goes down, which means the bars can go down at the same time, assuming all else stays equal. To maintain the same drop to the bars, the front end goes lower. So you're more aerodynamic. So if you're a time trialist doing a steady state effort, like a triathlon or a 30 minute TT or something, running a very rearward cleat position has got some serious benefits. The lack of calf engagement doesn't seem to make anyone go slower at threshold efforts. Makes no difference to their speed at cardiovascular power outputs. When it becomes a neuromuscular power output, it's a different matter, right? But because you can use your calf to provide the jump when the cleats forward. But running a very rearward cleat position has got a lot of benefits for those specific types of people. And so for me, I don't have a big sprint anyway. So moving it further back stabilizes me, stops me hurting, lowers my seat so I'm faster when I'm seated, blah, blah, blah. It comes with very few downsides because I don't have a sprint anyway. It doesn't matter. And you don't lose a huge amount off your outright sprint. It just affects the ability of you to reach your maximal power output quickly. So if you've got a 1200 watts sprint, it might only drop down to 11 and 50 or something watts. But your ability to get to that peak of power might be slightly diminished to get there rapidly. It might take you five pedal strokes instead of three or something like that. And in a crit race, that's pretty important. But out on the road, if you're just cruising around doing social rides with your mates, there's almost no downsides to going further back. Right, interesting. Yeah, so if you're a points racer on the track or you're doing big 10 second efforts and that sort of stuff or you're just hanging on to the end of the crit race and then smashing everyone with your sprint, stay forward until you reach your tipping point on the cleat position and it starts to become unstable. And then the negatives outweigh the positives of running the cleat forward. Yeah, okay, interesting. It's all about levers and stability and the interplay between the two of them. Yeah. So where would common Joe put his cleats if he had to put them somewhere? Yeah, so the first thing you got to do is measure where your metatarsal joint sits. So find the base of the big- You put a screw in my foot, didn't you? For that? Yeah, a cable end. A cable end, that's right. Yep, so there's a, I think you've got some footage which you can maybe cut to there. Find that joint with your thumbnail, take the cable end to it, put your foot inside the shoe and then you'll feel it poking out and you can just put a little mark there. You might be able to make out a little white-out mark of one left one there. Mark it, take your foot back out, take the cleat off and what I do is just put the shoe flat on a surface and then use a set square to translate that mark vertically down onto the sole of the shoe and then you can measure how far behind that mark the centerline of the cleat is. And speed plays have got these nice little notches on the side of the base plate so you can see the centerline of the pedal axle. Shimano's got a really very difficult to see little notch on the side of the cleats which you can just make out and you just measure how far behind it is and look for a, let's say you've got a size 40 foot. A good place to start for a completely average rider doing normal social riding would be somewhere between 10 and 15 millimeters behind that mark for the centerline of the cleat. If you've got a size 42 foot you might sort of be thinking our 13 to 18 millimeters as a range. If you've got a size 47 foot you might be looking at over 20 millimeters behind that mark, right? As the foot gets bigger the stagger goes up in a commensurate sort of fashion. But those are just, just guess, like just good places to start. There's a huge degree of individual variation and don't take that as gospel but I basically, when I don't know the person from a bar of safe I will often set them up if they've got a size 42 shoe which is what mine is here. I will start, unless I've seen evidence to the contrary that they're a massive heel dropper or a really rigid toe pointer I will start them off somewhere about 15 millimeters behind their metatarsal joint. Yeah, okay. Like I said there's usually very few downsides to going further back but there are significant downsides when you go too far forward and you reach that person's tipping point where their foot becomes unstable enough that their brain doesn't like it. And so if you reach that point they will start to compensate around the cleat position being too unstable for them. Yeah, okay. So if you've got a really unstable rider that's rocking a lot and you can't figure them out go further back and see what happens with the cleat position because often this plays a big role in pelvic stability and hamstring engagement and that type of stuff. The hamstring and the calf both cross the back of the knee. So they both act to control the knee flexion and extension moment at the bottom of the stroke. And so if your calf is just letting go at the bottom of the stroke because it cleats too far forward your hamstring tends to also switch off. They kind of work synergistically. And if they switch off you won't control the stroke well you'll become really quad-dominant and your hamstrings are not doing anything. So you'll bear more weight on your hands. It gives you numb hands to go back to the start. So it's all about balance. So having the cleat too far forward often negatively affects people's hamstring engagement and glute engagement, all that sort of stuff which can have big ramifications further up the kinetic chain for some people. And power output because they're two pretty significant muscle groups, aren't they? Cycling is an efficiency sport, mate. You know, it's all about, unless you're a track spreader it's about and grunt power over a 10 second effort is your thing. It's an efficiency sport. So we're trying to make you as efficient as possible given your body that's in front of you. So if you can spread the load of cycling over a larger cross sectional area of muscle bulk quad hamstring and glute all at the same time you're gonna go faster than if your quads are doing 90% of the work, right? So it's all about efficiency, yeah. And what we're trying to do is I guess with cleat position and seat height and seat setback is to create a really smooth controlled pedal stroke. So there's a good transition between the quadricep push part of the phase of the pedal stroke and the hamstring pulling across the bottom a little bit. There should be a nice smooth transition of that knee extension. And control is everything. If you've got control of the stroke we won't compensate and you'll be much more efficient. And cleat position plays a role in that control of the bottom of the stroke. Yeah, okay, nice one.