Hi folks,
Just wanted to spread the word that we have a professional bike fitter in the Lehigh Valley now, or at least another one.
I worked with John Strom last night, here is his info:
http://www.cyclefitters.com
Please don't interpret this as an advertisement but rather just a consumer report.
I was extremely impressed with his professionalism. His "shop" in his converted garage is very complete and he has invested in all the right tools. He spent close to 3 hours with me and was very patient and thorough. We worked on the mountain bike only since that has been giving me back aches. I am going for my road bike next Monday.
I guess this is premature as I haven't ridden the bike yet, I'll post something on that soon. However even just the spinning I did during the process indicates improvements will be (hopefully) meaningful.
He starts with a thorough interview to see what kind of cycling you do and what you want out of it. He looked at every aspect of setup but the two big issues I wanted to address were back pain and knee pain (chondromaacia or these days patello-femoral syndrome).
Short version of the results is that my seat was WAY too far back - like almost a full inch - which was killing my back. Related to that my seat was actually too low even though I thought I was on the higher end - this was also due to the seat being too far back and me needing to lower it just to reach the pedals. So we moved the seat forward and up (higher is better for chondro sufferers so this is good). I had just changed to a 10mm longer stem which proved OK. As I figured I am between a small and medium (in Giant anyway) but we got the small to work out, although I need a zero-setback seat post.
On the subject of seat height he focused on joint angles at the bottom and top of the pedal stroke, not some percentage of some body measurement like inseam. I thought this made sense...many of you probably alread knew this but it was cool to see it in practice.
As for the knee issues they are pretty much just due to wear and tear but by looking at the biomechanics we hope to stop the progression at least. My cleat position was actually pretty good, he tweaked it only slightly, and I wound up buying a pair of orthotics which I already knew I needed. He had what looked to be good quality "off the shelf" stuff that came in lots of sizes for different arch lengths (60 bucks vs over 300 for custom ones). He sets up lasers to track your knee and ankle through the pedal stroke. Without the orthotics I over-pronate which basically means my arch collapses inward, which leads to the knee and ankle shifting inward as well and thus screwing up the lines of force. With the orthotics things lined up much better and hopefully I won't be pulling the patella out of line.
Again I guess I need to ride to verify - but I am very optimistic!