Avoid wrist, arm and back pain by positioning yourself correctly on your bike. Getting your pelvis into the correct position, and using your core to generate power will make you more efficient on the bike and prevent low back pain.
Hi, this is Dana Ranahan from Body Works Sports Physiotherapy in North Vancouver and today we’ve got Angela on her bike and we’re going to go through a few tips to help you out on the road out there. So we’re going to take a look at Angela’s positioning on the bike from the side and one of the things that Angela told me is that she likes to tend to ride up on her hands and so she was worried that the bike was a little bit big for her. So I wanted to take a look at Angela’s positioning with this in mind and help here to position herself better so that one, she can reduce either the pain through her wrists or shoulders or low back; and two, she can improve her efficiency on the bike. So effectively we wanted to start by looking at the position that Angela holds her pelvis on the bike and if she becomes rounded or flatten through her mid and lower back and sometimes people do this through their hips, effectively the handlebars become further away and it feels like you have to stretch out to reach through to it.
So the first tip that I wanted Angela to try was to think about bringing her back to a more neutral position, and you don’t want to arch it, but you want to think about this being somewhat neutral and so the weight on your pelvis is shared between the front and the back of the pelvis. Now right away we can see that Angela has moved forward and it’s a little easier for her to reach the bars and so that should take some pressure off. Now the other thing we want to look at is the positioning of her hands, just grab the grips for the moment, now we want to think about keeping a bit of an angle here, a 30 degree angle roughly, so you’re not getting too much vibration through your arms. If you have a straight arm it tends to lead to neck and shoulder pain and a rigid position on the bike, it doesn’t allow you to adapt to the road or to adapt to different things that happen. So those are a couple of key things. So maintaining your back neutral, thinking about a little bit of a 30 degree bend through your arms to just soften the load through here.
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