Shorts
Finding the right cycling short for you can be a nightmare, especially if you suffer from saddle sores. Until only recently, no short manufacturer produced a saddle and vice versa, so it was a lottery trying to find the right combination.
Even within the few who do, there’s no guarantee they will work for you and your unique body attributes.
We offer a service through the Saddle Health Clinic where once everything else is optimal (position, saddle choice, skin care – the basics), we can either make you a short or modify your existing one with a better chamois.
For time trialists and track riders, this is an especially attractive service as skinsuits ofte don’t have the chamois in the right place to protect you from saddle sore.
Saddle
Whilst dramatic and a last resort, making a bespoke saddle really is the only option for some people. We offer this service through our partners at Gebiomized with pressure mapping, however we add the vital information and insight that pressure mapping alone cannot provide, therefore arriving at a saddle solution that works for you.
Shoes/Cycling Orthotics
The foot/ankle complex is the link between a cyclist’s power areas – the hip and knee – and the pedal. So much energy can be lost at these joints, and as so much force is transferred up the lower limb, it can cause pain and injury.
It’s vital to get it properly housed within the cycling shoe, especially if you want to optimize power transfer or reduce injurious forces at the knee; the most commonly injured joint in cyclists.
Orthotics are widely available but not many supplying them understand the nature of what a foot actually does in cycling. We see many people with rear foot footbeds supplied for cycling, which in reality is a forefoot sport (as the contact point is under the front of your foot in cycling, and never moves). All the power is transferred through here.
My philosophy is a cycling insole not only needs to catch and guide the rear part of the foot but needs to deliver the fore-foot and support it.We work with podiatrists who can deliver this.In his work with Dave Simmonds in the build up to Rio 2016 Olympic Games, Phil Burt helped create the now famous and much copied aero shoe. This was a full carbon bespoke cats and made shoe that reduced drag by up to 1.5%.
To many, putting a carbon fibre orthotic inside a carbon fibre shoe seemed like madness. But surely, we argued, in a cycling where we don’t have to land and take off, where the shoe is simply attached to a pedal and never moves, the shoe should be the hard rigid orthotic!
Typically, Burt was more interested in the biomechanical properties that these delivered and we now are in a position to offer the Burt/Simmonds bespoke shoe.
Through a novel casting process and a redesign of the usual Simmond upper, this shoe delivers all the benefits of a custom cycling orthotic into the shoe itself, without the issues associated with wrapping the whole foot in carbon (which is problematic and costly at best).
Off Bike Self Care Products
Often the issue is you, not the bike or the position…
So you might have to work on yourself off the bike to achieve your goal on it. If you do, quite often we will recommend products that will help you get there quicker and easier.
We work with the companies that make foam rollers, trigger point balls, etc, to help produce high quality products that meet the requirements of cyclists.