 almost all of them have reported no loss at all to their 20 minute power, right? None at all. Some have actually reported a slight increase in their 20 minute power because they're much more stable on the seat and almost all of them report an improvement in speed at their 20 minute threshold low because of the aerodynamics advantages, right? So welcome back to the 28th edition of the RCA Training Tips Show where today we round out another bike fitting series with expert bike fitter Neil Stambry who's been fitting road cyclists for around 10 years in conjunction with being a sports physiotherapist. So mid-foot cleat position. This certainly wasn't a topic that I brought to Neil nor was it a topic that you, the audience, brought to Neil. It was actually Neil himself who wanted to talk about this and here's why. This is a topic which no one, almost no one, when I suggested to them when they come in for a fit for whatever reason, almost no one's ever heard of it. So it's good to do a video on this because it is quite, from a biomechanical perspective, it's actually quite a logical thing to think about when you're cycling. So Neil, he's gonna break down for us both the pros, such as comfort, aerodynamics and speed and the cons of riding with a mid-foot cleat position and how you would go about getting the cleat into the middle of your cycling shoe. Now Neil has kindly confirmed he'll be back for another round of bike fitting videos. So if there are any hot topics that you, the audience would like us to cover in the next round, please put them below and if you wanna ensure you don't miss those videos, please don't forget to subscribe and hit the bell. Now before Neil gets into it, I'd like to remind everyone that the Uplevel Road Cycling Course, I'm gonna be reopening the door to that, program very shortly, which is gonna be a beta program. If you're not aware, the Uplevel Road Cycling Course is for road cyclists that are keen to take their performance to the next level and for those interested in being part of this beta relaunch program, I have an invite going out to my email newsletter list next week. So if you wanna jump on my email list, put a link below, alternatively, you can download my free ebook which will automatically put you on my email newsletter list. So let's get into it. So look, mid-foot, technically speaking, strictly speaking, mid-foot is where you divide the length of the shoe by two, measure out from the nose or the back, put a line and you put the center of the cleat on that line, so the middle of the foot, right? Have you ever done that? Absolutely, yeah, I actually rode mid-foot as an experiment for 18 months, many, many years ago, and I quite liked it. Yeah, I had no problems. What about walking around at cafe, is it a bit weird to walk on actually? Like a seesaw, yeah. Yeah, yeah, it is a little bit odd to walk on, but that should be the least of your worries. But the idea behind mid-foot is that as the cleat goes a long way back, the foot becomes really inherently stable on the pedal, right? So you're producing downwards force on the pedal and there's almost no effective of anchoring or loading of the rear of the foot to drop the heel, that kind of stuff. So if you've got a person who's an extreme heel dropper, like myself, riding mid-foot just stabilizes their foot to an unbelievable extent and that can then reduce further issues, further up the kinetic chain, right? Knee pain, whatever it is, lower back pain, instability, numbness of the feet, that type of stuff like we spoke about in one of the other videos. Now, when the cleat goes a long way back like this, there's a point where it gets a long way back and somewhere between there and mid-foot, it's basically the same. So when the cleat is far enough behind the regular kind of cleat positions that we see with road shoes, it for all intents and purposes becomes mid-foot, when it gets close enough to being mid-foot. So the idea behind it is your foot is very stable, your calf musculature, which would otherwise be used to stabilize the foot on the down stroke, just basically switches off. It just doesn't have to do anything during the stroke, which is great, but it has its downsides. So the upsides of mid-foot, when the cleat is a long way back, your leg is effectively significantly shorter. So the effect is more pronounced if we've got a rider who's an aggressive toe pointer, like you're a fairly decent toe pointer, not off the charts. But if we gave you a mid-foot cleat position, your seat height would have to go down probably 30 to 40 millimeters, which is quite substantial. Let's say that you're doing a time trial or a triathlon. Each centimeter that your head goes down, the bars can go down the same amount to keep the drop to the bars the same. So your frontal area, which you present to the wind, is reduced to the lower your seat height, right? So the aerodynamic gains for time trialing and that kind of thing can be pretty significant. Switching the calf off has some benefits, particularly for triathletes. They can get off the bike at the end of the bike leg and their calves are fresh, because they haven't had to do anything, so they can run more effectively for the first 10, 15Ks if they're doing an Ironman or something. They can get off the bike and their calves are much fresher. So that can be pretty important, right? Now people would say, well, you're not using your calf, you're not getting all of the muscle energy delivery to the shoe that you can. For steady state threshold or below threshold efforts, it seems to make no difference. And this is extremely unscientific, but in all the experimentation I've done with it over the years, both with myself and other people I know who have ridden midfoot, almost all of them have reported no loss at all to their 20 minute power, right? None at all. Some have actually reported a slight increase in their 20 minute power because they're much more stable on the seat and almost all of them report an improvement in speed at their 20 minute threshold load because of the aerodynamics advantages, right? So if you're doing a steady state time trial, pretty good, right? Downsides now, the downsides are that when you get out of the saddle and you're using your calf to spring, it doesn't feel that nice. It feels choppy, you're kind of a bit blocky at the bottom of the stroke, that type of thing, because you can't use your calf to attenuate the bottom of the stroke and spring naturally, right? So out of the seat feels a bit odd. You also do lose a little bit of your ability to accelerate really rapidly. And we spoke about this a bit in the cleat position video, yeah. As the cleat goes a long way back, it can be a slight detriment to your speed at which you can reach your maximal power output. Strangely though, the actual outright wattage that the rider produces in a flat out 10 second or 20 second effort doesn't seem to be affected a lot, but they seem to get there more slowly. And for crit racing and road racing, that can be a bit of a problem if there's a lot of surging efforts in the race where you have to change speed rapidly. Mid-foot's not ideal, yeah. So the other benefits of it are, seat goes down, aerodynamics get better. It does help if you've got foot numbness that's really persistent. If you've got circulatory issues in your feet, it does help a lot. If you've got oddities, if you've got like one foot that's significantly bigger than the other or a big leg length difference or something, it can help to stabilize certain types of riders and reduce other issues because it takes the foot's lever out of the pedal stroke. It just kind of deletes that section of the biomechanical puzzle. In terms of attaining mid-foot cleat position, there's a couple of ways you can do it. The way that if you want a true mid-foot, most of the time what we still do is I actually modify the bottom of the shoes and you can only do this with certain shoes. We couldn't, for example, do it easily with your shoe here because of the design of this channel that's cut out in the middle. But essentially what we'll do is we'll create an epoxy, out of like epoxy resin block in the center of the arch of the foot and we'll usually then sit a speed plate, base plate on it and this is a bit further back than it would be. But you can see how there'd be a small gap between that and the shoe. You fill that space up with epoxy and it's a bit convoluted. I use a blue tack dam around it and pour the epoxy in through the top with a speed plate, base plate on it and then re-drill the holes and put some new captive nuts inside the shoe to hold that in place. You can't really do it with a three bolt like a Shimano or a look cleat because it needs to sit curved on the bottom of the shoe. So we create an epoxy base for a speed plate, base plate in the center of the arch of the foot and then screw the base plate straight on. These extender plates have the ability to move the cleat a long way back. So you can't really ever get full true mid-foot out of one of these but it'll get it so far back that most of the benefits will come anyway. Your seat will go down a fair bit, the calf will be reduced a lot but it won't really ever go to a true mid-foot if you use one of those. With three bolt pedal systems, this system that a bloke in Switzerland is making is the best one that I've ever seen. This is a three bolt version of that. Does the same thing. The three countersunk holds here are where this bolts onto the bottom of the shoe and then you can see he's got a triangle here and a triangle there for two more rearward placement positions of the cleat. One of them is 12 millimeters further back than standard and the other one is 24 millimeters. So that'll give you a fair bit of rearwards translation of the cleat. These are made by a bloke in Switzerland as I mentioned, really high quality and I have no great affiliation with them except to say that they're the best off the shelf version of moving the cleat a long way further back that I've ever seen and they're really high quality, very strong that type of stuff, very well engineered. And so these can be used if you really don't wanna go to speed place to do this. These can be used to move the cleat back and then back a long way. And again, you may not get to a true mid-foot but once you get 24 millimeters, an inch further back for those American viewers, it becomes most of the benefits of mid-footer there already once you get that far back. So it doesn't technically have to be a complete mid-foot position to give you most of the benefits of lack of carp engagement, better circulation through the feet, lower front end, lower seat height, all that stuff. Not so good for sergi bunch riding but if you're a time trialist or a triathlete, endurance rider, yeah, yeah, Ordax riding, that type of stuff, yeah, ultra endurance stuff. I'm in the process of convincing Abdullah, the winner of the Trans Am, the vegan Melbourne boy who rode across North America in 16 days or something to win the Trans Am in the process of convincing him that moving to something like mid-foot will have serious benefits for those long sub-threshold steady-state efforts. And yeah, for that type of riding, man, there's almost no downsides. Well, the aerodynamic gains alone at solid power outputs that you might do in a time trial or something like that are often well worth any slight negatives that you might perceive like the choppiness out of the saddle and that type of thing, yeah. So that's mid-foot in a nutshell. It's a bit of a weird one but it shouldn't be as weird as it is. It should be more common than it is, yeah. And people should recognise that this is a possible thing that you can do. Even if you're just using off-the-shelf stuff and you don't wanna go drilling holes in your shoes, even using a speed plate, extended plate, or something like the patrocleats here to get the cleat a long way further back can do some pretty cool things, yeah, yeah. If you had another bike that was your endurance bike and you had another set of shoes, you could quite easily have two positions, yeah? Absolutely, yeah. And they'd be, depending upon how much of it, like I dropped my heels a lot so when I went to mid-foot, my seat height stayed mostly the same but if you're a decent tow pointer or something, you'll need to have the seat significantly lower and thus the bars lower at the same rate, yeah. So you need another bike, essentially. But a lot of people do, they have their endurance bike for going out for long days and they have their bike for bunt riding and if they do crits. Absolutely, yep, yep. It's a nifty little trick and it can have some serious benefits, yeah. Yes. Good, excellent.