 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 your aerodynamic gains will far outweigh any slight power loss if you lose any power. I don't think you'll lose anything. So welcome back to the Friday vlog series where in today's Friday vlog series, we're going to break things into one part. We're going to focus purely on my cranks. I've changed from 172.5 to 165 after over 10 years of road cycling, and I'm going to share with you my initial impressions after three months of riding on 165, what impact it's had. And at the start of this video, that was Neil Stambry, you saw, who was a bike fitting expert based out of Queensland, Australia, who has since become quite the bike fitting YouTube celebrity and rightfully so, the man knows his stuff. And that there was our very first discussion after the best bike fit I'd ever had in my entire life in Brisbane at Cam's Collective mid-March this year. Now there's one bit of commentary that I want to share with you that came from Neil and I can't find it. We've had a lot of discussions and maybe he set it off camera. And you would probably think, if you've listened and watched Neil before, the way he's able to articulate technical information in a very clear and precise manner, he's second to none, but the quote that I want to share with you, it's pretty simple. And what he said was, you're just going to feel a lot better. And that stuck with me because over 10 years of road cycling, I've never really felt right on the bike. I don't feel like I'm sitting naturally at all. I feel it hard to ride comfortably in the drops. I'm copying a lot of wind, which is an ideal for someone with a wider frame than most cyclists I compete against. And I feel a little unbalanced on the bike. And while I was super impressed with Neil's fit and I felt like it was going to have a big impact, it was actually his comments surrounding the crank length change that I started to fixate on because I felt like it could be the defining factor that changes my cycling for good. So I decided to bite the bullet in June this year when I changed the cranks over from 172.5 millimeter to 165. Why 165? Let's hear what Neil has to say. 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 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. So let's break this video into five main parts. Five noteworthy changes or improvements in my cycling that has occurred over the past three months since changing crank lengths that I want to share with you. Number one, let's talk about my cadence. Number two, let's talk about my position on the bike. Number three, let's talk about my balance on the bike. Number four, let's talk about the seat change that's been needed. And number five, let's talk about power and speed. But before we talk about those five main items, let's hear what Neil has to say about why 172.5 millimeter cranks seem to rule the roost. 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 everyone followed the herd and that just became a thing for a long time. So number one, let's talk about cadence. So my cadence has definitely increased. A comfortable cadence when pedaling aerobically used to be around 90 to 95. However, now with new cranks, we're talking comfortably around 100. Now, I've definitely noticed the cadence increase without even looking at the numbers. And while five to 10 RPMs isn't a significant increase, it's definitely noticeable from a muscular fatigue perspective over the course of, say, a three to four hour ride. What a lot of people don't realize is when you actually slow the cadence down, you lean more or tap more into the muscular skeletal system. And when you pedal at a higher cadence, you're more cardiovascular system focused. And as a result of being more higher cadence focused over the course of a longer ride, both aerobically and anaerobically, I have noticed a lot less fatigue in the muscles. And I particularly noticed this after reviewing the Merida Reacto recently, going back to the 172.5 millimeter cranks, I definitely noticed my fatigue levels were higher after the Saturday bunt ride, which is about three to four hours in length. So there's a definite advantage from a muscular fatigue perspective over the course of longer rides. And at this stage, I'm not seeing any disadvantages from the higher cadence, although time will tell when I start riding in aggressive criteriums. Let's hear what Neil had to say about that topic. 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 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 point number two is my position on the bike. And there has been some massive changes there. The whole point of this exercise was to help me with my hip impingement. And let's hear again what Neil had to say about this. 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 forward. Your head will go down. The front end will go out and down. And that is exactly what has happened and quite a fair bit more. This was Neil speaking after he refitted me with the new 165 mil cranks. So first thing we noticed when I looked at you is that you were dropping your right hip quite badly, which is one of the things that you were doing when I first saw you back at Cams in Brisbane before we fitted you. And in that case, the solution was to move your feet further apart and fit a six millimeter shim and a few other things to the bike. You were doing that again, which you weren't doing when you left my clinic last time. So we had to iron that out and... Why was I doing that, you think? It wasn't what I thought it was. I thought it was because you were overweight and you'd lost condition. Oh, my God! And people, as they lose condition, they become tighter and stiffer in some parts of their body. So if they put on a fair few kilos, they have trouble with knee strike to the gut, that sort of thing. But in your case, the solution was actually a bizarre one. We actually needed to move your feet closer together again. And that's a result of this one of the four sort of main things that we changed today after looking at you with the shorter cranks was moving your feet closer together than they were with the longer cranks. Now, the logic behind this is actually pretty good, but I really wasn't expecting to make this change with you because it's quite rare that this happens. As we moved the cranks shorter, your knee rises less high at the top of the stroke, which allows you to roll your pelvis forward and all sorts of nice things. In your case, it also unloaded a lot of your femoroacetabular impingement or hip impingement, we call it. And as it unloaded it, your knees were able to therefore your femal was able to sit in more internal rotation. So in other words, your knees didn't kick out as far due to the shorter cranks, which was great, which means that we were able to narrow the cue factor down and you suddenly stopped dropping your right hip or you pretty much completely stopped dropping your right hip when we moved your feet back closer together. So that's a nice side effect in your case of the shorter cranks. It's obviously unloading your hip impingement to quite a substantial amount, which is what I was really hoping it would do. In conjunction with that, we needed to raise the seat a total of about nine millimeters. So you'd already gone up five, which was pretty safe. And we went up about another four millimeters from there. The seat went back about four millimeters at the same time. And I think I explained this to you when if you've got the crank arm spinning around like this, because the crank is effectively shorter, your foot sits further back, sort of towards the back of the bike due to the shorter crank, right? Which logically all else being equal, and this is a bit of an oversimplification, but all else being equal, your pelvis can sometimes go back in a commensurate manner. And in your case, yours went back about four millimeters just to keep you nicely balanced. If we left the setback where it was, you were leaning forward and placing too much weight on your hands and you're just too quite heavy. And moving the seat back a little bit, just restored the balance that we had with the longer cranks. So the seat went up nine, it went back four, your feet got closer together. And the big one that you'll be super happy about is the stem is now slammed. We've dropped the bars 10 mils in addition to raising the seat nine, which is great, but you've created a small chimney effect again. So in the end, we experimented reducing the height of your shim as part of our efforts to stop you dropping your right hip today. And that did nothing. So we've left you with a six millimeter shim, but the biggie for me, the really interesting thing was being able to move your feet that much closer together. It was about five or six millimeters closer together than they were in total than what we had with the longer cranks. So you'll notice when you look at the footage of yourself from the side and compare it to your old footage when you're doing that FTP test with your longer cranks, your spine is, it's still rounded to a small extent, but it's a million times better. Your pelvis has rolled forward about five or 10 degrees and your back is much flatter. And I would guess that your head is sort of five to 10 centimeters lower than it used to be. And that's one of the primary sort of determinants of frontal area is how low your head is essentially and your frontal area is the biggest kind of predictor of wind drag. And this is like we said before, it's an efficiency sport. And if you present less frontal area to the wind, if you are less of a windsock, you will go faster for the same wattage. So that there, what Neil is describing are quite some significant aero gains. For the first time ever, I have a slammed stem. And in addition to that, for the first time ever, I can get into the drops comfortably and basically ride there all day long with quite poor flexibility at the moment because I'm not working on my fitness. So the aerodynamic gains that I'm already seeing and no doubt we'll see when I start racing could potentially be a game changer and an interesting thing to add on top, which is arguably equally as important. And that is number three, the better position has enabled me to be better balanced on the bike. Now you see, I've got quite a heavy upper body and quite a heavy gut at the moment too. And the heavy upper body came from my days as a schoolboy rower and living in the gym. I used to love lifting weights and pumping iron with Arnold Schwarzenegger was one of my favorite documentaries in the 90s when I was a growing school lad. And as a result of this, it's hard not to place much weight on the handlebars because there's quite a fair amount of weight there. However, with my hips now rolled forward and my shoulders and arms able to extend more naturally, I find I have way less weight on the handlebars. And my ability to ride no hands just easily take my hands off the handlebars is far superior than it's ever been. In fact, my confidence on the bike, handling it, et cetera. I feel like it's gone to a new level. So I'm super excited to see how this revised confidence is gonna carry out when I get back into some aggressive criterion racing. Point number four is the seat change. And as you can see, I've currently got the SMP, I think it's called a Volkor, which is actually Niels, he's lent it to me on the BMC. And I have to say, it is the worst looking seat I have ever seen. It's completely ruined the look of the BMC and it will continue to ruin the look of road bikes that I purchase in the future because it looks like it's gonna be a seat that I now maintain. It's working out unfortunately really well. And the main reason why I changed seats in the first instance, why I reached out to Neil was because my old mates were getting crushed into the seat. Being able to rotate my hips and roll further forward on the seat inadvertently, I'm sorry ladies, it's the truth, crushed my nuts. And this seat right here provides ample room for them to live and breathe without any torment and it kind of forces you to sit in the one spot too, which I think is a really good thing. Number five is how the cranks have affected power and speed. Now I bring these two together, power and speed, because I think many of us, myself included, we get fixated on the power numbers when the ultimate goal is speed. And the thing about power and even watts per kilo, it becomes less relevant when you're up in the air hitting a lot of wind. As aerodynamics play a major role in speed. And I know myself, while some of my power numbers are reasonable, my aerodynamics are crap. So let's have a final listen to Neil and hear what he had to say on this topic after fitting me to the shorter cranks. In your case, it's done all of the things that I expected it to do. And yeah, I think you'll really like it. As long as you don't end up losing too much off your top end and I'll wait down the track and see when you do some sprint tests, when you're back in shape and you do some tests down the track, my guess is that your 20 minute power will go up slightly and your sprint will essentially stay the same. But if you look very closely at your data, you might find that it takes you a little bit longer to get to the peak power of your sprint as compared to the longer cranks. A few more pedal strokes, perhaps. But you'll notice your overall cadence will go up. That's one of the things which you probably noticed right on the road already. Your average cadence tends to come out five or 10 cycles higher at the end of a ride. And your efficiency due to wind drag will mean that this will be worth it in your case. As a person who's trying to go fast, who's racing and trying to train and race at a high level, it'll be worth it. And I can tell you right now, while I don't have the comparison data, and even if I did, people would be picking at it because of the conditions outside, I feel a lot faster for the same power output. For example, at a top end zone too, sort of an aerobic output, I feel like I'm about one to two kilometers per hour faster. So instead of riding at 31, 32 kilometers per hour, I am now riding at 33 to 34 kilometers per hour, which is massive. And that is purely from sitting lower on the bike. So I think when it comes to speed, assuming I can maintain the same power output, I should be a lot faster on the bike. But in terms of power output, unfortunately I can't give you those numbers right now. I just don't have the fitness. So in comparison to the start of this year when I was training for the Melbourne to Warnable, which unfortunately I crashed out of. So that means there will be a part two of this video series. This is just the first impressions. So we can actually have a look at my power data. What does my sprint, five minute power, 20 minute power, et cetera look like on shorter cranks? Even if I lost five to 10% of all my power numbers across the board, now having better aerodynamics, feeling a lot more comfortable on the bike and potentially being able to ride harder for longer would still easily make this decision worthwhile. So time will tell regarding power numbers, but as it stands right now, I am super happy with the investment that I've made not only with my time but also financially to move onto shorter cranks. It's been potentially, I think right now I can definitely say a game changer. I'll catch you all in the next video.