 So, welcome to an off-tempo Thursday video on this channel. As discussed yesterday during the RCA training tip show, I would be sharing the full 27-minute discussion with expert bike fitter Neil Stambry, who provides an overview of his philosophy of bike fitting, what areas for fitting improvements he commonly finds with athletes, and then we dissect what Neil found wrong with me and what changes we're making. In addition, I will also share the follow-on discussion we have surrounding speed play and Shimano pedals. Now I'll put some timestamps below for anyone out there that might want to go to some specific sections, and let's get into it. Alright Neil, so we're here at Cam's Collective in Brisbane, we've just finished a three-hour bike fit. Yep. Before we get into my fit and you're sharing what you found with me, can you just tell me a little bit about your background, how long you've been bike fitting for? So I think around 10 years, it's somewhere between 8 and 10 I reckon, I started out life as a regular sports physio, and one day came across a pretty serious problem in my own body, which was stopping me from riding, and I got interested in the process of fitting people then because I had three professional bike fits in Melbourne and got nowhere, my knee was still just as sore as it was before, and so that's what got me into it in the first place many, many, many years ago, and I've just developed my skills ever since and specialised in it more and more, and now it's probably most of what I do, it's certainly in Brisbane now, it's all that I do, I've just moved back up here from Melbourne, so yeah I just got interested in it the way a lot of people do with my own problems and trying to overcome them. Yes right, and you've been fitting for 10 years, you've seen a lot of people, before we talk about the things that you identified with me, what are the most common challenges or opportunities people have when it comes to fitting that you've seen in your experiences? Biggest challenge is they face, finding a good bike fitter, yes no massive, that's a big one, and the overload of information, you know the internet is great for finding information, but sometimes there's a massive overload of information, you might find 10 different ways to set your seat height and picking which one is the right one, well that can be very tricky, so the overload of information is a big problem, finding a good person who knows what they're doing seems to be harder than it should be, and then finding a solution that works for you, if you're a bit unusual, if you're a person who's got a big leg length difference or something like that, it can be really really tricky to find someone with good knowledge of how to resolve those types of issues, setting your seat height and your seat setback and your reaching and drop can be tricky, just doing it by feel as well, so you really, ideally you need a good pair of eyes on you if you can find them. Yeah, it's a good segue because something I noted today is you're not really using the softwares, the retool machines, that kind of thing, obviously we use some like a laser thing and a few other bits and pieces, but you know you put a screw in my leg or my foot sorry and did a few old-school things which I kind of really liked, what's your reasoning behind not using you know those big machines and big softwares etc? Yeah, so look the bike fitting industry has become very tech heavy, partly, well mostly so that it can be mass produced, so you need to now in the business of bike fitting, you need to be able to run a course where you can teach average punters or guys with an interest in this, how to run a software program to create a position and sell it for $300, so you need to be able to standardize it and software and you know motion tracking software and that type of thing is an attempt by business people to standardize the industry which is a great idea, it just doesn't work really well, I can see why they've done it but it just doesn't work, you just unfortunately it's one of those industries where you need a person with a lot of experience and a really good eye. I used a little bit of motion tracking software many years ago and all I did was found that it confirmed what my eyes were seeing and as a secondary effect it slowed me down, I would be constantly second guessing looking back at the screen, looking at the person, looking at the screen and I found myself just losing track of what I should be looking at which is the rider and really there's nothing that motion tracking software can show you that your eyes can't see if you're looking close enough and so yeah I just found that it slowed me down, it didn't add anything to the experience and so I got rid of it all in the end and just I use my eyes and a lot of intuition and knowledge of things that I've seen before and if you've got a good idea about human posture and function and that type of thing you don't need any of that stuff, you just need a really good pair of eyes and a problem-solving mindset which is really critical as well. Absolutely, so talk me through, so there's a few interesting things that I want to talk about the shims you put in my foot you've told me to get on shorter cranks, I want to talk about the cranks, there's some interesting takeaways for me and also a new way to arrive even though they might be small differences I already feel more symmetrical on the bike which is good but we went through quite a thorough process which was step-by-step so just talk us through what your process was with me and then what we identified as we go through the process because the first thing we did was you were poking and prodding me, what was that all about? Yeah so look the first 45 minutes is usually me looking at you off the bike trying to figure you out so look yeah I go over the person with a fine tooth comb before we get him anywhere near the bike otherwise I would have never known or suspected that you had a right-sided leg length difference so we also noted that you're two feet with different sizes and that you've got some pretty decent hip impingement which stops you from internally rotating your hips so immediately we're thinking right this guy's gonna need probably need a shim underneath his right foot he's probably gonna do well with a staggered cleat position because of his foot size difference and he might do well with his feet further apart and they were the three things we basically ended up changing so we look at you off the bike a lot too and then we throw you on the bike and see if those things that we spotted match up with how you actually ride and most of the time they do sometimes you get something totally left to field which doesn't make sense but you were pretty straightforward you had a shorter right leg and you dropped your right hip and you know your quadricep muscle bulking balance that you've noticed we immediately noted that your left quad was much bigger on the inside section which tells me that you're dropping your right hip and your left knee is tracking outside the line of the pedal and your quad is trying to control that motion so it's bulked up and gotten physically larger to deal with the extra load so you go over the person I go over the person in great detail before they go anywhere near the bike and then we use a process of trial and error of educated guess and check I like to call it where we know for you there were three main things the hips the foot size difference and the leg length difference and those were the three things we focused on and we used a combination of all of those tweaks in the in the feet to get the best possible symmetry out of you and that is in your case was really the only problem was your symmetry in general position was really good already before we even started it's just a symmetry issue is that common for most people you fit though like the leg length and the hip oh yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah I always preface that when I'm explaining all this stuff to people say hey look you're not that messed up most people are like this you know you've got a pelvic tilt and a small rotoscoliosis of your spine and one of your shoulders sits below but unless anyone ever pointed it out with the degree of nitpicking that I am pointing out no one would ever know you know you would have had physios look over you in the past no one's mentioned it because those degrees of asymmetry are irrelevant in the real world they're only relevant on a bike when the bike demands the highest degree of symmetry of any any sport you'll ever do in your life and so most of the complexity of fitting a person to a bike is resolving asymmetries one-sided problems one-sided knee pain or foot pain or whatever it is and so a huge amount of the the the stuff that we do when we're looking at you off the bike is is assessing asymmetries yes and we ended up we ended up doing a few things and going to suspect you know we use this shim underneath your right foot here which is a leg length compensator there's two three millimeter shims there it's basically making your right leg a little bit longer so it matches your left one because we unfortunately can't make your left leg any shorter yes as more as much as fun as that would be and the second thing we did was move your feet a bit further apart to unload your hip impingement a little bit and the shorter cranks which we haven't changed today but I'm nudging you in the direction of trying some 165s because your pelvic posture is very posteriorly rotated on the bike so you're very much got that C-shaped curve to your spine and if we could anteriorly rotate your pelvis your head would drop down your aerodynamic gains would be significant enough that it's worth trying for the few hundred dollars that it costs and you'll you'll feel I'll guarantee you just feel better as well you'll find it hard to quantify but you'll feel better yeah okay and so some 165s I think would be a good move for you and it's only because you've got some pretty decent hip impingement type stuff going on where you've got no available internal rotation of either of your hips because of the orientation of your sockets inside your pelvis it's a genetic thing you can't really change it much yeah so the so let's talk I'm keen to talk about the cranks yeah because the crank length is quite a if I feel like it's a bit of a one size fits all everyone's 172.5 or 80% of the population is and I don't think that is the case but before that the shims I've never had a shim put in there before and you said something to me that was interesting during the fit that of all the bike fits that you have done over the years only two people have ever come in with a shim but three quarters of people have a leg length discrepancy and leave with the shim so what's the explanation behind that yeah so the explanation is that about 75 percent of the people that came into my clinic to be fitted had already been fitted elsewhere sometimes multiple times and they were unhappy with it so they're seeing me as a third fourth or fifth opinion and of all the people that leave my clinic about three quarters of them leave there with a shim underneath one foot now sometimes it's two millimeters sometimes it's 20 sometimes it's six but three quarters of people deal you know that they function better with a with a shim underneath one foot so of all those thousands of people that have come through my doors only two have ever come in with a shim underneath one foot which the conclusion that I eventually came to was that was that other bike fitters at least in in Melbourne don't use leg length shims which is very bizarre very strange and a bit depressing because leg length shims are definitely the best way to account for a leg length difference some people advocate staggering the cleat forward but that comes with other problems where it effectively changes the cleat position of one foot whilst also making the leg effectively longer it comes with other downsides the using leg length shims is a way of compensating for structural leg length differences this is the best solution that I've ever come across and I'm happy to change my mind if I ever find a better solution but yes as far as I can tell most bike fitters don't really use shims at least at least the people that were coming to see me after being fitted elsewhere seeing a shim was was rare as hen's teeth and I think the two guys that brought them in had actually put them there themselves they weren't put there by the bike fitters so they figured out themselves through trial and error that they had a leg length difference yeah so the idea here is that I will no longer be favouring the left hand side by about 10% in my pedal stroke will I become more powerful because of that it's possible that you'll gain a bit yeah you'll certainly I find people they the decreased neurological load of compensating so the fatigue that it induces to to create an asymmetrical pedal stroke once that's taken out of the equation they tend to find their endurance gets a bit better even if they're outright power output for a 20-minute effort doesn't actually go up a lot in your case I reckon you'll pick up a little bit it might be measurable you'll certainly feel better and it will hugely reduce your propensity for developing left-sided knee pains in the future yeah I have had people occasionally pick up big wattages you know big like five to ten percent gains once we've removed an asymmetry a big asymmetry like a big leg length difference or something from their position but that's that's the that's rare you know most of the time it'll it'll be it'll be the person will feel a lot better yes they may not be able to quantify a huge gain yeah if there's a lot of other things wrong with the position like the seat is way too high or the seat's way too far back or the reach is all wrong if you change a lot of other things the gains can be very large if the position was way off where it should have been yes especially if this or the lack of this was causing you pain because pain is the biggest detriment to performance you'll ever have right as soon as you're in pain or there's an inflammation somewhere your brain will curtail your energy delivery to your legs so that you can't hurt yourself any further so you literally become tired when you saw to slow you down to protect the joint or whatever it is so not being in pain tends to be the biggest performance improvement yeah okay yeah if your knees are not hurting you can train harder too absolutely yeah you can gain more and tell me about the the crank length like what what's that going to do and why is everyone supposedly a 172.5 it's one of those things that got ingrained into bike fitting or cycling law i believe through repetition a long time ago there's a story behind this i don't know the details but someone came up with a crank length based upon a mathematical principle and it just kind of stuck and that was it it was like the ball of foot over pedal spindle idea where you should always have the center of the cleat underneath the ball of your foot exactly that was just someone said it one day and it kind of made sense and so everyone started doing it and you know that everyone followed the herd and that just became a thing for a long time crank length is very much like that it started out as as 172.5 a long time ago for for whatever reason and people just stuck with it you know in your case you'll gain from it because of what it will do for your hip impingement it'll enable you to roll your pelvis further forward your head will go down the front end will go out and down and the aerodynamic gains will far outweigh any slight power loss if you lose any power i don't think you'll lose anything but you said you're learning to lose power at the top end not really like you maybe gained it over a five 10 15 20 minute effort but maybe the the sprint yeah it tends to the shorter cranks tend to make you make more of a difference in a positive sense over long efforts because they decrease joint angle speeds and the the the length by which your muscle spindles have to change you know so they they seem to have physiological benefits more over longer efforts in in my experience short efforts is where it becomes a slight problem if you've got a big chunky guy who loves low cadence riding and who rides crits and needs to jump on someone's wheel and create an instantaneous burst of torque over a very short effort you know three five seconds the longer so the shorter cranks can cause a problem because you have to sort of wind them up a bit you don't have as long a lever arm to create instantaneous torque efforts so that can be a slight downside of going to shorter cranks so if you're a big chunky strong guy with a big powerful sprint you you can't maintain good leg speed and you race crits a lot well and probably not not going to work out too well for you but if you're a lean guy who has a big 20 minute power and no sprint you're not going to lose anything anyway off your sprint because you're never going to be winning a race from a sprint anyway and so for your physiology it makes a lot of sense in in most of the ways so it's it's well worth you trying rather than just going i'll just stick with the 172 and if you're going to try don't go down two and a half mils go down five or seven and a half mils go down to 167.5 or 165 you won't perceive almost any change from a 2.5 mil change you'll start to perceive it at five mils and after seven and a half mils you'll definitely be able to tell the difference yeah okay do you want to tell me about the inner sole um because we changed the inner sole and you've got some interesting inner inner soles there so can you show the camera what you've got yeah so i've been using these for a long time david david lee at g8 um i know him fairly well now and he's produced a really good product these are the g8 arch tech 2620s a bit of a mouthful and they have five different levels of adjustable arch height so there's five different modules with different heights and you can move them around to suit the shape of your arch and so i use them because they're very adaptable a lot of people need a level four arch on the left foot and a level three on the right and you can do that instead of just having symmetrical insoles for an asymmetrical pair of feet a bit more expensive these are about as custom as you can go without being custom yes i can't give every rider custom insoles because they require time to manufacture you know i'll come in for a fitting in a we'll measure your feet up and get you some custom insoles come back in two weeks and we'll finish the fit can't really work like that so these are about as customers we can get without going to full custom yeah okay and they're very high quality what is good arch support give you while you're riding what's it going to do it spreads the load of of foot pressure over a larger surface area so you're less if you've got a decent solid level of arch support in there you're less inclined to get hot foot problems and that type of thing because the spread of load over the foot is larger you know the pressure is being spread over a larger area but more than that it gives you really good clarity of proprioception so stability of the foot over the petal that type of thing is massively improved when there's a better contact patch with a little bit of arch tension and corrective wedging and that sort of stuff which we didn't get into much with you at all because it wasn't necessary but it can make or break a rider sometimes and other people it makes no difference to them right but it's part of the fitting to give you the best possible outcome i give these to everyone it's actually built into the cost of the fit right if i come across a person who's already got a set of custom ones or something which are which are in good nick and we actually take that off the price of the fit but these are so important to a good position or a good set of arch supports is so important to a good position that i actually build it into the cost of the fit now right yeah so i don't want to give people the chance to go i can't really i don't want to pay another 90 for that and then we get a suboptimal outcome you know i'd rather than just be expecting this is how much it's going to cost i'm not trying to sell you these i pass these things on for a fraction over wholesale price to my clients and i don't therefore make any kind of margin on any parts that i sell so i'm trying to be completely independent even stems and bars and saddles and stuff you know that kind of thing so there's very very little margin for my clients because i don't want to become a shop where i'm inclined to sell you things yes more than happy to sell you my time in my expertise but i don't want to sell you things because then it become people start thinking well maybe i don't really need that new saddle yes well did he give me those bars just to make 40 bucks yeah i don't want people asking those questions yeah of course but it demonstrates the importance to your process of the inner soul yes yeah in your case um you just got a really rigid high arched foot and people with your foot type really always function much better with decent arch support and they're much less inclined to get hot foot and that type of thing as well yeah now that we've been through this fit process is is it set and forget or what happens next we'll try and see you again in two three four five six months um you got some reasonable muscle imbalances because you've been dropping your right hip for a long time your left inner quad is much bigger than your ride and so forth and your left itb was really tight so those will hopefully work themselves out now that you're pedaling with much greater stability speed and and symmetry and so we'll see you again in a couple of months and see how many of those asymmetries have worked themselves out and if we need to tweak this because right now your leg is six millimeters shorter than the other one but if you are more muscularly symmetrical if future cam is in better physical condition than current cam in terms of symmetry this might only need to be four millimeters right five some of this six millimeters could be structural and some of it could be structural leg length yeah some of it could be a functional leg length difference which is to do with muscle strength comparisons to left and right that type of thing so you may change in the future so we we always try to follow you up a few months later to see how many of those things have worked themselves out if we can yeah okay it's never set and forget because your body is never in the same state for decades you know people people constantly in a state of change and their position should be as well once we find a pretty happy medium you tend to fluctuate around that that sort of ideal symmetry point only small amounts which don't matter but when you're fluctuating around that that symmetry in a physical sense in a large way that's when you get trouble you know so for you now that any changes in the future will become progressively smaller and smaller yeah because your body won't change won't have as much capacity to change in terms of your symmetry yeah um so while we're here i'm going to do a speed play versus a Shimano can you give me a quick two three minute speed play versus Shimano speed play versus Shimano speed play double-sided entry a much more forgiving entry because you don't have to flip the pedal over so you just stand on it and goes in they take a bit of wearing in so they have a downside when they're new they're really stiff after 50 clip in and out cycles they become a lot easier so some people don't like that they're more adjustable they've got more ability to go back and sideways and adjustable is that a bad thing it can give you too many options to think about yeah yeah it's great for me my left leg was floating around a lot in the pedal and it enabled me to do that are you better off locking it in or would you rather let the natural movement happen it depends on the rider it's one of those for some people locking the foot in is is a necessity because the only way they can function yeah in your case using the speed plays with more float allowed your knee to not hurt yes but the reason your knee was hurting and your foot was squirreling on the pedal in the first place was because of a right-sided leg length difference yes so you would be fine with Shimano pedals or looks or whatever now assuming we used a six millimeter shim yeah which we can do so the speed plays require a little bit more maintenance you gotta keep them clean you gotta lubricate them and be in that kind of stuff but if you've got some mechanical aptitude and you don't mind doing that they're a really good pedal system I use them a lot for weird wonderful cases because they're more adjustable there's more you can do with them in terms of cleat placement for enough with the the base plate extenders but there is nothing inherently terribly wrong with any of the three bolt systems if there was they wouldn't exist anymore they would have been pushed out of the market so I like them but they're not for everyone yeah okay yeah and what about Shimano less maintenance they can get dirtier and it doesn't matter Shimano any of the three bolt systems they wear out by walking on them rather than clipping in and out whereas these wear out from riding and clipping in and out as opposed to walking on them interesting so you don't want to be if you don't walk on your Shimano cleats they last forever yeah they just hack away on the bottom because of walking on so um what about the fact that the Shimano they say it has a larger area that you're pushing the power through but with speed plate yes it is a smaller area but you're closer to the shoe yeah the stack height's uh half a mil different or something it's a rare person who can feel or perceive a large difference from that I don't know about the actual surface area being much different okay I don't think there's a lot when you actually multiply it out and measure it all out the sole of the shoes is so rigid anyway it's almost a moot point a lot of people who are getting hot foot in that type of thing with one pedal system is not because of the contact patch size of the of the cleat it's because the cleat's too far forward or the seat's too high or there's no arch support or something so a lot of people blame hot foot problems on on the contact of the cleat being so small but this shoe is so rigid anyway that that force is distributed through the sole of a modern rigid carbon salt cycling shoe so much that the contact patch size a small variation in the size of the contact patch between the Shimano's and the speed plate is so small as to be in my opinion almost irrelevant if you're if you're using a very flexible shoe it might make a bit of a difference but um yeah just use use what works for you and if one of them if you if you really don't like some aspect of one of them you know the other pedal system may have a better solution like the double-sided engagement you know guys on speed players are always the first ones away from a set of lights they just stand on it and it goes in you know so that's that's a big bonus for some people yeah looks like they're getting going here what actually happens here it's a camcycling collective in Brisbane cams is a it's a lot of indoor trains a lot of Wahoos there are 45 I believe Wahoos kickers in this room and 55 kilowatts of air conditioning to keep everyone cool wow he's got drop-down projector screens and basically I believe what cam does is is personalized training programs for each person they come in and do a personalized workout yeah and they have they have sort of drop-down screens which show your workout I think they use train a road or something similar yep and it's a really good really really good high quality professional training service with indoor focus on indoor training but I think that they also do they do a lot of organized outdoor rides and stuff like that so cams just got back from Three Peaks where he towed a car tire up the last 35 kilometer climb up the back of Falls Creek as a as a fundraising thing for motor and your own disease oh my gosh yeah it doesn't look pleasant there's footage of it somewhere on one of the promotional videos for the Three Peaks guys for Peaks challenge it doesn't look pleasant at all no better him than me but look he made it in sub-zero temperatures he did it in 10 hours yeah so he's a pretty serious old rider cam he is an x-pro from from a while back yeah so um yeah it's a very very good setup here and I'm I'm sort of a bit of a ring in here I've got a temporary setup at the moment um because I've only just moved here yeah just just trying to find my feet of where to be working and and I'm also trying to renovate a house at the moment so I'm not looking for too much work yeah so um no it's a really good setup and cam's got lots of available space during the middle of the day because most of people work out in the afternoons in the early mornings so we use that and everyone wins yeah cool oh thanks you time so I really appreciate it I'll see you in three months yeah yeah two or three and just let me know if you have any trouble um it if there is a problem it might present earlier than that you just got to let me know and um we'll make any changes as needed