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Optimizing all Road Riding Positions

Seated, hands-on-hoods is one of five. If you've been fitted only to this position, you bought one-fifth of a proper fit session. All five postures inform both bike and handlebar geometries.

Road Bike Fit

This road bike fit protocol is designed to work with fit bikes that adjust horizontally and vertically; to take advantage of stack and reach data matching; and to consider all the positions common to road bike riding.

Steering Levers

Almost all attention in bike fit is given to the fit coordinates while in the aero position. But, pursuit contact points relative to saddles, armrests, and the steering axis is probably the next area deserving investigation.

Bikes as fit constructs

Bicycles are constructs of assemblies. Of course you know this already! But I'm talking strictly about how bikes fit. The notion that a frame alone determines fit is entirely wrong.

Evil stems and spacers

The defining fit characteristics of bikes are no longer solely contained in the frame. Or even the aerobars. Today's superbikes focus on the sins of the stem and anything round sitting above the frame.

Graphing geometric themes

The exercise here is in the understanding of a tri bike's frame geometry. There are several things worth noting, and this ought to impact, or at least inform, your buying decisions.

Year of the Contact Point

There should be a practicality to things that trumps even what the designer or seller intended for his product. Filling the gap between products-as-intended and products-as-needed is the tinkerer's raison d'être.

Adjust your Exit bike

It's a bit of inside baseball, only for hard core bike fitters and those who follow the process as a hobby. The Exit fit bike - the standard for tri bike fitting pros - undergoes a protocol change.

In between bike sizes?

Looking for a new bike, and find you're in between sizes? Your LBS owner will tell you to choose the smaller size, and he's been saying that since, well, forever. But it's the wrong answer, at least nowadays, at least in tri.

Devising a static tri-fit system

You've waited, you've wanted, so without further ado, here it is: a static fit system for generating rider coordinates. We'll describe it to you, and then tell you why you shouldn't use it.