StargazeCyclist

13cm +7. My bar drop is small so the reach isn't excessive. With the longer stem my elbows have more leverage and bend less, therefore less tired.

koala logs

You actually shouldn't be supporting a significant amount of force or weight with your arms to require any leverage. If you are, you may need to re-visit your bike fit or riding posture.

When I do 6 hour non-stop centuries, my arms are still fresh at the end of the ride. If you're trying to do a TT position, at least do it properly using aero bar if you're going to do it in long century rides.

timtak

I think the leverage that Stargaze is referring to is right-left leverage to steer, which is easier with longer stems (though not as quick).

But I think Stargaze is supporting his a larger than common proportion of his weight his arms on his road bike bars. What is the need to do a TT position properly? The UCI have outlawed TT positions on road bike bars (e.g. see Alexandar Richardson's dismissal from the Tour of Turkey) because, I think, it can reduces manoeuvrability in a peloton but road bike bars provide superior braking and handling to TT bars, so a TT position on road bike bars is a good alternative or compromise when riding alone on roads with cars.

I only stopped doing it because my knees started to hurt due to weak butt muscles and the need for a major glute workout, which can be achieve by more old fashioned pedalling methods.

koala logs

When he said something about getting less tired with his arms by having less bend on the elbows is what hinted me to think he is supporting more weight on his arms than necessary.

It takes us back to his back posture in the OP pics. A concave back will most certainly load your arms more. This is why no pro racers ride in such posture and most of them adopt a convex back posture and some more or less straight like for some female pros but never concave.

A convex back posture will not only lighten the load on your arms but also lighten the load on your lower back, saving you from potential exercise-related injuries later on. It doesn't look good from a non-cyclist perspective but is actually the better, less injury-prone, and the more comfortable posture to get used to. Ironically, for the OP to achieve such posture, he would have to reduce the stem length of his bike as I've read, he switched to even longer stem recently and of course, start training with the right back posture. At least straight back posture would be better, but not concave.

I agree, engaging the glutes especially in the main power stroke will reduce pressure on the knees and most certainly help prevent knee injury during exercise.


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NormaG31

You are not alone. My knees hurt too and I am sure the pain is not normal. Question is, what to do next? 1. From your experience and others, knee pain seems to appear when the saddle is lowered around 1-2cm. So you could consider raising your saddle by 1-2cm. Or 2. Bike fit specialist and professional bike fitter can help. Bike Fit changes include saddle height, fore-aft saddle position, saddle tilt, saddle nose width, and crank length. Every human being is unique, and different bike fits work best for different people.

timtak

Yes, engaging the glutes does reduce the pressure on the knees, which is one good thing but it it also exercises the glutes.

It seems to me that as men get old, their "core" (butts) have a tendency to get weak so that their legs bow outwards like the guy in this photo (he is about 85 but it starts at around 50).

This is Why Knees get Sore by Timothy Takemoto, on Flickr

It is this bowing, rather than simply use, that wears the meniscus in knees and causes soreness and the need for glucosamine etc. The bowing is caused by a loss of rotational strength because our knees are like a drinking straw, and the spiral helix of muscles and sinews keeps legs straight in use.

Eternal Louth: Straw Legs by Timothy Takemoto, on Flickr

The muscles in our legs - quads etc - get exercises when we stand, walk, get up and sit down in a chair but the muscles in our bottom tend to need deliberate attention, especially to rotational strength. Old men like golf so much because of this rotational muscle strengthening, I think.

If one uses ones glutes in ones pedalling stroke then it will also strengthen the butt. I find that I have to do additional rotational exercises too. I did try all sorts of saddle positions, and pedal extenders, and glucosamine and thousands of other core exercises but femoral rotation hit the spot for me.

Background, in case anyone is interested
I was lucky in a way because I got a spinal hernia due to over-doing crawl swimming leg kicks, when I got too fat to jog, and I had not yet taken up cycling, when I was about 41. The spinal hernia caused "glute amnesia" in my right buttock. That simply means I deliberately, and unconsciously, avoided using the muscles in my right buttock because moving them caused a bit of sciatic pain. I used a very quad intensive style of cycling for instance, to avoid the very slight pain in my butt. This meant that my right buttock was particularly weak.

It then became clear that my buttock weakness was causing knee soreness because my right knee would get (still gets) sore first. The reason for the connection between butt weakness and knee soreness was far from clear at first but the connection was clear, and put me onto to the region of my body that needed exercise but (butt!) still I could not find out what sort of weakness it was.

I did so many squats, and all the exercises recommended by Dr. Back (Stuart McGill) glute abductions, flying dogs, standing flying dogs, and then CARS, Rumanian (one legged) squats, Rumanian squats on a gyrating machine, hydrants and donkey kicks and while doing this, there was one move, a hydrant to a donkey kick that gradually made me aware of the need for rotational strength (this is also provided by Rumanian squats which is probably why they where the next best move).

Our legs are not egg beaters so we may not think of rotational strength as being all that important but imho rotational strength is the missing link. I started off by doing The Twist (of Chubby Checker fame) but that does not allow for adding resistance. I also bought and still use a large scythe. I saw that (reverse) clamshells were a solution but I found it difficult to get a god workout lying down. Eventually I worked out how to sort of do a twists backwards with a band attacked to a wall as in the above video. I am only demonstrating reverse clamshells but the opposite exercise is easy enough to do too. My legs were really on the way out at 55 with sore knees and hip instability. My right hip was sort of coming out of its socket when I did lunges and curtsey lunges. Now at 57 I am riding as fast as I have ever done, and getting a glute workout as a I ride.

I also have a theory that, perhaps, the evolutionary aspect of this is that, femoral rotational strength is achieved as a result of coitus. We don't only glute abduct our pelvis, but twist it forwards and backwards as well. This very strange exercise will then be required of those who have found a second mate - humans live for a strangely long time, about long enough to mate and rear two families. Conversely those that have not amassed the wisdom or social capital to be able to rear a second family will not be chosen to do the special rotational exercise, and will tend to wither away due to sore knees and hip instability. This congenital defect of the two legged animal, together with an exercise that is difficult to achieve in hunting and gathering activities, puts evolutionary pressure on the accumulation of wisdom. The cavemen, and jocks, who are just physically strong therefore, have a tendency to fall apart, but the wise, the nerds, the **** sapiens, get to live twice. Now everyone can live twice, or cure knee soreness, if they buy some bands and do the exercises in the video above.

tomato coupe

This **** gets weirder with every post.

timtak

Definitely weird, but is it true?

It seems to me (and others) that there needs to be a mechanism for faux-Lamarcian evolution of acquired characteristics at least in the case of humans to explain our increasing complexity. This is generally assumed to be the Baldwin effect which argues that those who have acquired characteristics can improve their reproductive success and thus produce offspring that are more likely to acquire the same characteristics.

The mechanism I am proposing here whereby not only do acquired characteristics lead to reproductive success, but also the failure to acquire such characteristics, and not be sexually selected in middle age, leads to accelerated senescence, would turbo charge the Baldwin effect. It would ensure those that where anything but possessing of acquired characteristics would fail to reproduce the second time around.

I hope that some people try the exercise. Good bye glucosamine.

StargazeCyclist

Convex vs flat back... This thread recommends rotating the pelvis forward and riding with a flat back.

https://www.bikeforums.net/road-cycl...discovery.html

I have tried both position and it is easier to scan the road with the flat back position. In any case the 13cm stem is not too long (the 11cm one is obviously too short) and I don't find 'hand' pressure to be a problem.

StargazeCyclist

I don't understand the obsession with hand pressure. Usually the complain is with numb palm or wrist pain. For riding in the drops I managed to solve it by fine tuning the angle of the bar, so that the wrist is straight and grip parallel to the four bones below the four fingers. This avoids stressing the sensitive parts.

koala logs

Convex is easier on the core muscles. Straight and concave back gave me unending lower back issues when I'm trying to ride with my arms unloaded on nonstop >5 hr rides. Most of the pros on TdF ride with convex back posture even on their TT bikes and for good reason, the races can be very long and is one way to make sure, your back will last you the whole race. A sore back will ruin your ride for sure.

koala logs

Minor hand issues ignored can lead to serious problems requiring surgery. It's a valid thing to obsess about......and most members here are A LOT heavier than you!

roadsnakes

Everyone`s different
BUT
I`d raise the seat, raise the handle bars, and bring the bars in closer to you.

Carbonfiberboy 

I am totally down with this. Picasso fathered a child at 91 and had 2 lovers, each with a house on his street. Until I saw a Picasso exhibit, I didn't realize that a lot of his art was simply too hot to appear in art books. I take glucosamine anyway. One never knows what the right thing is to do until it's too late. It's not always possible to go back and fix things. So far, I've either been lucky or wise. It's hard to tell the difference, which is the reason one sees so much BS being published. Like this bit of tommy-rot right here.

cyclezen

Can I ask? Are you taking Glucosamine as a treatment, for say, OA? or as a preventative?
Ride On
Yuri

timtak

Carbonfiberboy

I hope you try the exercise though, should your knees hurt.

Tim

Carbonfiberboy 

I have a little time right now and that's rather a fun question, so I'll tell you a story . . .

When my wife and I were first together, 50 years ago, she'd been living with a smoker and had terrible asthma. She couldn't walk between 1st and 2nd streets in downtown Seattle without stopping to catch her breath a couple times. I'd always been an active boy, so that was an issue. I started training her and she gladly put up with it because she got results. We started walking 1/2 mile and then longer and eventually tried a short hike in the mountains and pretty soon were doing long day hikes, then backpacks.

When we hiked, our knees would hurt on the descents, both of us, so we took ibuprofen, which made the pain go away. After one summer of that, I thought, "What if we don't take it? What happens?" What happened was that gradually our knees quit hurting on descents at all. The Ibuprofen was preventing our knee tissues from getting stronger. As every young woman knows, ibuprofen prevents prostaglandins from accumulating, except that they are necessary to promote healing in the athletic context.

Except our knees would still hurt after some serious abuse and that wasn't fun though we were getting stronger. So, being me, I did some research and discovered that as far as I could tell from the studies, glucosamine sulfate helped cartilage heal while glucosamine hydrochloride did nothing. None the less, the anti-supplement docs mostly did studies with the form which didn't work. Of course. So we started taking 750mg of the sulfate form every morning and in about a month of that, our knees stopped hurting, no matter what and still don't. Later I added MSM (Methylsulfonylmethane), 900mg in the evening (I cap it myself in 00 to save money).

I had a meniscus tear maybe 15 years ago, got surgery, and the doc said my meniscus, other than the tear, was in perfect condition. Neither of us have any knee pain, period. Of course we don't just ride, we hike, walk, and lift including deep squats, so there's that confounder. Whatever. What we're doing works, but maybe only because we've been doing it for the past 45 years or so. Turns out, you don't wear out so much if you just "do the right thing." First backpack we did was from Iron Gate to Ross Lake, 97 miles and 17,000' in 13 days. I went in with 75 lbs, my wife with 50. I think this was in 1978, back in the bad old days of cotton clothing and wool sweaters.

cyclezen

Thanks, so both a treatment and a preventative...
Good stories, I love stories.
Also a firm believer that anecdotal info is worth considering for lots of things...
I have a hereditary history in my mom's side of family for OsteoArthritis. Grand Mom and Mom both had it. I have very light symptoms in the hands... But, so far, rest of the body seems unaffected, for now.
Mom took Glucosamine Liquid and MSM, and it helped her a little, but she had it very bad...
I'm not taking either at this time, but always aware and if symptoms increase, I will reconsider.
Thanks
Ride On
Yuri

timtak

Carbonfiberboy

Thanks for the glucosamine versus glucosamine sulphate distinction. I think you had said it before but I ignored you there too!

Should you be so kind as to tell me where (if online) you get your cheap glucosamine sulphate that you measure out yourself I would be grateful.

This paper finds a significant difference between nothing and glucosamine sulphate.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...bstract/213562
This paper did not find it helped hips but there were confounding factors such as hip replacements
https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/abs/...00802190-00005

Still, I have not had sore knees, and my dislocating hip no longer dislocates, nor do my hips hurt when running, since starting doing the exercise mentioned above, which I only do a couple of times a week these days. I have always done squats, fairly deep, and Rumanian squats for a while before I discovered the exercise above. Rumanian squats were helpful. They also result in rotational strength.

By the way, completely off topic, is there anything about the modern road bike, about its geometry perhaps, other than the existence of brifters, that makes people use them so much? Everyone seems to cruise around on their brifters.

Carbonfiberboy 

I buy the glucosamine as caps. The MSM I cap myself.

With a modern bike set-up, on the hoods with horizontal forearms, the back is as flat as it's going to get. With normal elbow bend, the hoods position is comfortable for long periods while still being somewhat aero and offering many hand positions. Using the hoods much improves hand comfort over being in the drops.

The drops are then only used for OOS efforts and descending with more extended arms, less aero than horizontal forearms on the hoods, but safer.

BFC

I think the correct terms are LORDOSIS and KYPHOSIS