Article Text

Download PDFPDF
44
BIKE POSITION-AN INSIGHT INTO ATHLETIC ABILITY TO ADAPT TO CHANGE?
  1. P Burt
  1. British Cycling, Manchester, United Kingdom

Abstract

Background The ergonomic interaction between a cyclist and their bike (bike fit) is a potential source of injury and under performance.

Objective Expose the potential link between those riders who continually adjust their position (micro adjusters) and those do not (macro absorbers), and injury.

Design Descriptive narrative of the longitudinal injury data and bike positional changes.

Setting National Cycling Centre GB Cycling team. Clinical and technical rider input?-clinical, technical. All training and competition venues.

Participants Podium and Podium Potential National Team athletes (16 female, 45 male).

Interventions Injury/Illness Performance Project (IPP) injury audit, monitoring of bike set up and alterations made.

Main outcome measure Reduce injury; improve performance by optimizing bike set up.

Results Over the course of 2 years injury data audit collection a subjective correlation was noted between those riders who became injured and those who were sensitive to changes in bike set up. Riders who did not get injured observationally were less sensitive to positional changes. Changes to other equipment set up-pedals, cycling shoes elicited the same trend.

Conclusions Does bike set up and a bike rider's sensitivity to it reflect their ability to adapt to and absorb change? This could be a useful parameter in identifying those individuals at risk from sudden bike set up changes, not only in position but also equipment and training i.e. the micro adjuster's vs. the macro absorbers of the world. More research is needed to establish the strength of the observed correlation. Ongoing injury audit has been adapted to capture this data.

Statistics from Altmetric.com

Request Permissions

If you wish to reuse any or all of this article please use the link below which will take you to the Copyright Clearance Center’s RightsLink service. You will be able to get a quick price and instant permission to reuse the content in many different ways.