HOW TO FIT A MOUNTAIN BIKE TO YOUR BODY | Free Fit Kit

[Music] hey joy riders welcome back to the channel we recently made a video on sizing i love the video we're freezing it's like five degrees in my garage this is a tough shoot it was a tough shoot but the content's really good there's been a ton of people basically asking really good questions it's almost a thousand comments i think okay we have the best subscribers a lot of comments out of the uk i have never ridden there but that's a dream of mine maybe someday after covid we do camp there do a joyrider experience yes let's try to make that happen so many people were sending me pictures and video of them on stools my favorite being a guy that used his dining room chairs while his wife was away but that's commitment man i hope he put something down and didn't just shred those chairs but whatever you can always get new chairs chairs are cheaper than sb-150s but a good fit is forever and speaking of that you're gonna know your rad number today and that is forever we're gonna go into some detail on that knuckle height and then how to make a kit that you can bring with you anywhere in your pocket bike shop demo and know exactly whether a bike is going to fit you or not super excited about this the way bike geometry is going right now is forcing compromises so a little background seed tubes have gotten significantly steeper over the past few model years i've talked to people in the bike industry this is what happened the market is demanding they want big wheels they want a lot of suspension and they want short chain stays with a normal like let's say 74 degree seat angle there's no room so a really easy way to solve that packaging issue is to steep in the seat angles you know normal seat angles go from like 74 degree to 76 some bikes out there like 78 and that and that creates more space for the suspension but then when you're in the saddle the seats now closer to the handlebars so the seated reach is shorter than people are used to every degree you steep in a seat tube moves the seat forward about 20 millimeters so then you can imagine why the bike manufacturers started to tack 20 40 or more millimeters onto the bike reaches that gives you is a familiar seated reach and that's how most people pick bikes you go around the parking lot you're like oh this feels about right in our world we're concerned with the ryder area distance which is the distance between your hands and your feet and our goal is to make that distance and angle such that you can dynamically lock yourself into the bike if you set up a bike to optimize that with modern geometry the seated reach when you're in the saddle is going to be significantly shorter than you're used to okay um i understand that there's a theory out there that a longer seated reach helps you climb better you know what there's no data that that proves that adding 50 millimeters to my stem makes me climb better that doesn't exist we know from our experience that if you set your bike up with an optimal rad you will learn how to pedal the shorter seated reed your power numbers won't change actually that might improve because you have more sprinting power that said if you are a cross-country racer or for whatever reason you prefer a more extended seated reach do what makes you happy just understand that as that rad goes plus plus and beyond you're no longer locked dynamically into the bicycle you're more like a hunk of meat hurtling to uncertain fate so in our last video we gave you guys multipliers we said take your height in centimeters and multiply by x to give you a target frame reach okay it's based on on a 40 millimeter stem and a normal handlebar it's based on average proportions okay but that number will get you in the ballpark and it is better than the size charts you'll find on a manufacturer's 100 you cannot trust those at all what we're gonna do next is we're gonna measure the rad of our body a couple of you in the comments said hey would it work to measure your rad this way and it will they were right yeah they they knew you gave me the idea and i disregarded it yes and some of you commenters gave me the idea and i disregarded it and i was walking around and and it came to me as my idea and now i love it okay so we're gonna do that this is how you measure your knuckle height aka body rad so wear your bike shoes uh put your feet in a bike stance if you're a mountain biker and you close your eyes and you do this it'll be pretty freaking close that's perfect you have your hands at your riding with alex is going to hold a dry erase marker in that fist as if it's a handlebar now this is the part where most people screw up first of all get your head as far away from your feet as you can get your shoulders as far away from your ears as you can go yeah exactly bring them together and pull them down arms dead straight and and punch straight down make your mark there it is all right all right that's it i like centimeters they're more precise than inches what do you think it is buddy 31 inches but i don't know how many centimeters 80 which is that 32 and a half about what yeah that's what we got i thought my rad was 31 inches let me just make go over there again yeah and by the way if you're like that number's crazy it's it's really easy to make a mistake what's what's the variation so his posture yeah i think i did this and i i think the number i have at home is 31 and i'm guessing here's why when i look down as i'm making the mark look it moved one inch right below and most people and i can see their shoulders and it goes up there's a three inch variance that you could create so make sure you're punching down yep yeah and don't look and don't look i keep measuring myself in high heels yeah that's why i'm six foot measuring things is hard the goal here is we're going to measure from the bottom bracket the middle parallel to the frame to the inner section of your grips and the way we do that is you need a string okay and you're going to run it from the middle of the top of one grip so you put a little rubber band around the string just to hold it just to hold it in place yeah and then we'll and then we'll come across look at that cable mess i got going on there you got to call that out because someone's going to give me a hard time this cable situation's terrible it's terrible this bike should not fit me it's my son's bike he's a little taller than i am so theoretically it'll be more yeah it'll be long it should be a little long right about a centimeter below the string is the intersection of your fist so there's an imaginary line that we're really measuring too yes that is right there yep it's really the center of this grip that we obviously can't get a string into yeah and it's running right through here the zero points at the middle of the crank center of the bottom bracket and we'll go parallel to the frame and we're measuring to that point the four is about a centimeter below the string right and that so we'll call this bike 84. and if it were if it were perfectly fit to me it would be there it'd be there yeah so this bike is quite a bit large for me how big would red plus be like if i was wanting to ride rad plus if you want a ride rad plus i would cap it around 8 20. i could get this bike into a red plus if i if i did a 32 millimeter stem yep and i did a straighter bar and i could get it you can get to a red plus by the way i'm five nine this is a medium stride and it's too big too big for you oh you want to measure your bmx dude if you have a rad number it works on a bmx bike too this is a bike that cannot be too long no you can't so we're using the same philosophy with the string from the middle of the top of one grip to the other i'm really kind of getting excited to see where this ends up yeah interesting buddy it's short it's short now short i'm okay with sure it works it's 77. so this is rad minus that totally cool that's where i would want it to be but for this kind of a bike rad minus game on my dirt jump bike is a little bit minus when the rat is neutral you have all of your torque and a lot of range of motion when the rad gets short you keep almost all of the torque yeah but you gain range of motion so for a bmx freestyle bike or a dirt jump bike rad minus makes a lot of sense when you go rad plus there's an immediate drop a massive drop in torque you can pull 300 pounds to here but not to hear pretty much everybody i work with we end up rad neutral or rad minus another way that i'll check a bike sometimes oh yeah that's great you know what i'm going to do yeah and it's why this bike is in the ballpark bmxers are always on the ground by the way train tracks they do this they practice tricks like this and even if you don't practice tricks you just find yourself in this position so next time you loop out on manual make like you want to measure your route exactly yeah just get in your stance and extend and you can see that this bike this feels really good and what's interesting is that you can see that 30 millimeter delta between your knuckle and the bar like that's that's exactly where it shows up if you're out at a demo you could do the wheeling and you're willing to be this guy i don't know how many of you are but you can do this with a mountain bike too and get a pretty good sense of how that bike fits for you that's wonderful man [Music] there's 80 right there if you flip it over that's 31 and a half so i was about a half inch off when i had measured it myself you don't have to go by the number you just have to have something that you can bring with you how often do you have a tape measure me very rarely but if i was going to go to a bike shop i can take this number and then put a knot and a piece of string get that knot right there yeah right at 800 or 80 centimeters right yep now i can bring this anywhere all i got to do is walk up to a bike my bike yeah okay i'm at the shop um hopefully i brought some rubber bands and another string to stretch across here but even if i didn't you could eyeball it i can look from one grip to the other and eyeball this and know this is where lee's yeah rat is and i go ride minus on my trail bikes so this is this bike's about 77 so he's about there easy to add a little bit of stem try to take 10 millimeters out right here can't do it it is a bummer if you're using the calculator my advice and i've given it in the comments is go a little short yes and by the way alex that's exactly the opposite of the current wisdom out there right like every bike manufacturer you call tells you to go up this is super cynical if you go too short you have to buy another stem if you go too long you have to buy a new bike maybe that's why no i hope that's not why and i don't think it is you pull one of these out with a knot on either end and start going up to bikes they'll know your joyrider we gotta make some joya bike branded uh string this is me i i think that's the thing alex that's the thing that's fun about it for me i would cut off the rest of the string because this ain't me this is a basketball player or something you know this is size alex it's 31.5 inches it's 80 centimeters it's this piece of string with two knots in it yeah pretty dope what's up what's up what's up jeff lenosky i know lost to you the great man so if you like this video you know what to do hit the like button and we will see you next time on joy of life

Channel: Joy of Bike with Alex Bogusky

Views: 105,284

Rating: 4.9571071 out of 5

Keywords: How to fit a mountain bike to your body, How to fit a MTB to your body, how to fit your mtb, Mountain bike fit kit, mountain bike fitting guide, mountain bike fitting tips, mountain bike fitting basics, does my mountain bike fit, fitting my mountain bike, how to pick the perfect mountain bike, mountain bike size guide, what size mountain bike do i need, what size mountain bike should i get, What size mountain bike should i get for my height, how to bike fit yourself mtb

Id: rHagRovHSYs

Length: 11min 49sec (709 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 18 2021