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Primal Pro Women at RetulThe Primal Pro Women's Racing Team, was in attendance at Retul Denver last week for Retul'ing. Since Primal is a new team this year with a new bike sponsor--BH Cycles--we were faced with the daunting task of selecting frame geometries for the girls without seeing them for a proper sizing appointment. This sounds "primal," so to speak, but it is not uncommon on even the most well-funded professional squads with whom we work. So, our first job was to order the correct bike sizes for these girls to match geometries as closely as possible to the bikes they rode last season. We did this by looking at the stack and reach of the frames. By looking at those two numbers we could discern what frame geometry of the BH Cristal bikes would accommodate the positions the girls rode last year. After ordering, we crossed our fingers and hoped everything would fall into place. We conducted Retul 3D motion and power analysis on the girls to correctly position their bikes. For the most part, the girls fell effortlessly into our normative limits. However, as is common on any team of this caliber, there are members who have to handle the process a bit more slowly. In one particular rider's case, we isolated that her saddle height was very low because her knee and ankle extension angles were significantly limited. over the years she has adapted to this type of riding by relying heavily on her Quadriceps and Gluteal muscles. In order to better balance her muscle recruitment, we would like to raise her saddle 10-15mm. However, we were able to raise her saddle only 2mm during the fit. Some habits are hard to break. This sort of behavior is not uncommon when dealing with professional riders, as there are always self-selected positions that they have become extremely familiar with. Trying to change the position can at times present more stress than it is worth--for both the fitter AND the rider! ;)
At the end of the day, we had fit 8 road bikes, and 3TT bikes. |
