How to set up cycling cleats: Pro tips for quick and accurate setup

do you suffer with niggling knee pain or perhaps even back pain when you ride your bike did you know that that can potentially be down to how you set up your cleats on your shoes keep watching I'm gonna run you through some simple setup guidelines so the interface between your foot and the bicycle pedal is such an important part of cycling biomechanics if you get stuff wrong here at this sort of first contact point it gets the effects of that can get knocked on up the kinetic chain and can be the reason why you get problems even in your back so what I'm going to look at or what I'm going to try and explain is some sort of basic setup principles now this isn't going to solve every bike fitting issue and niggle out there sometimes it does require more in-depth investigation by a qualified bike fitter this is more about you know if you've never fitted a set of cleats before how to get those bolts on your shoes you know in a sensible wind sort of biomechanically correct position not just sticking them on in the middle as some people do obviously there's adjustment range in a cleat quite a lot of adjustment as it happens so you can adjust for aft and also left and right and as I said that adjustment is there for a reason so it's not the right thing to just pop your cleat straight in the middle and go from there so so much adjustment available on cleese where do you start well let's have a look at the forward and fore and aft adjustment first the accepted norm there is that bar mechanically speaking we are our most efficient or most powerful if the pedal spindle sits underneath the ball of our foot so there's a simple way to find out if that's the case and I'll show you how okay so what do we mean we talk about the ball of the foot well it's pretty easy to find it's easy if you look at your foot without a sock on as I'm doing here we're talking about the point at the end of the first metatarsal which is this kind of knuckle behind your big toe here this sort of bulbus edge to the inside of your foot which you can feel really easily so that's one and then the second point is just back from the little toe here they last knuckle on the end of the fifth metatarsal so those two points there so what we're trying to find is that big protruding bones we find the middle point there it's easy to sort of generally push with your thumb and feel where that is find the center of that and what we're going to do is just make a small dot on the shoe then I'm going to do the same on the outside of the shoe just behind the end of my little toe knuckle where that fifth metatarsal ends ok now this stage that's all we need to do now I'm gonna take the shoe off again and you see this way I'm bothered to mount me cleat at this point is it's much easier to do this without the cleat on the shoe I'm gonna take a straight edge and just line up the mark I made on the outside of the shoe with the mark I made on the inside of the shoe I'm gonna take a pencil and just draw across the carbon so what makes cleat fitting even simpler and something that people don't often know about cleats actually is whether it's local Shimano or whatever system there's generally a mark on the outside of the cleat which dictates or indicates I should say where the center of that pedal spindle will be once you're clipped into the pedal body so this little mark on this look cleat here is quite easy to see it's all I'm gonna do is I'm gonna line that mark up on the line I've just made on the shoe and simple as that really I now know that when I pull that cleat on that's going to be orientated underneath the ball on my foot ready to sort of have optimal power transfer through to the pedal spindle so that covers the fore-and-aft placement of the cleat but what about the angle that's are you'll even more important because that can be primarily one of the causes of knee pain particularly and things other things up the kinetic chain so it's a tricky one they can sometimes be a bit of trial and error a fundamental mistake that's often made is that people try and pedal with their feet in indead parallel straight lines sort of almost assuming that that's the the optimal position it's not the optimal position is whatever your body that takes is is correct for it and now that well me may mean that your feet want to be heeled in they might want to be heal out but it's really important that you let them and kind of do what they want to do and not fight against it if you can imagine your foot wanting to be in this position and you're trying to pull it back into straight there's a huge amount of twisting forces that go up through your knee and your hip and that can lead to obvious problems further down the line especially with the repetition of the cycling motion so a technique of so much OB once which is really useful for this is to just sit up on a kitchen worktop or a table I'm going to show you now so if I just hop up on the workbench allowing my legs to kind of go completely relaxed from the knee down what this does is it allows your kind of lower limbs and feet particularly to kind of hang and sit where they naturally want to sit and what that tells you is quite useful for your cycling position because if my feet was a hang like this for instance I'm obviously completely exaggerating that or like this or like this whatever it's quite important that you take that into consideration when you're setting up your please it's as I say it can be a huge amount of force that you're pushing twisting your foot around if you're trying to make it do something it doesn't want to do so yeah that's that's a good start point now for the actual setup with a cleat sometimes it can be quite confusing when you look at the shoe and you think oh I can't want to put my heel in how do you translate that to the cleat which way am i twisting it I don't know so again another technique that I find useful I put my hand out straight is if that's my 12 o'clock I put my shoe on the top and then for example I want my heel to go to the outside of it okay so now what I do I keep that position I turn the shoe over and that shows me that I need to orient technically in this direction I just run through that again so if I use my hand as my 12 o'clock put my shoe there I want to turn my shoe heel out turn over and then I know which way that cleat is gonna have to be adjusted so I can just tweak the adjustment across tighten up those bolts clip into the pedal and go from there okay so we've covered this sort of fore and aft adjustment of cleats you can see there we've also covered angular adjustment of the cleat there's also one other way that you can adjust a cleat and that is just left to right that's called q-factor that's the technical term for it it's a tricky one adjusting q-factor is probably moving into an area where you're starting to need the advice of a professional bike fitter it's not something that I personally would recommend people play with that much the fore and aft and the angular stuff that's that's fine it's pretty easy to find your norms and and what works for you me that but with the Q factor as a general rule it's probably best to start off somewhere fairly central on the adjustment range with that and if you feel like you need to adjust it as a probably time to seek the advice of a qualified bike fitter okay so now I'll click the shoe into the pedal so hopefully you can see there is a range of adjustment in either direction a few degrees in either direction and and what that is there to do is to just give you our foot that freedom to move a little bit as you push down and put power through the cranks what that flow isn't there to do really is to give you your optimal position should always try and set up what feels most comfortable to you in the in the middle of that float range so that you know whatever you or preferred position is you've still got that little few degrees in either direction the other thing you need to look out for when you're setting up cleat angular adjustment is that you're not clipping heels on frames or when you come around at this point in the pedal stroke rubbing all the anodizing or even material away from the crank arm if you find yourself doing that and that is something where you feel your your foot is comfortable in that position at that point I'd probably be looking to seek the advice of a professional bike fitter and maybe look at other solutions that can help you overcome that as I said at the start none of this is going to solve every problem to do with soon and pedal and cleat stuff but yeah hopefully it's a really good start point and certainly far better than just bolting your cleats on in the middle of the shoe and hoping for the best alright so that's the basics of cleat fitting if you've got any questions or comments please leave them below and also keep an eye out for more how-to videos and tech videos coming soon

Channel: Cyclist

Views: 262,532

Rating: 4.9334636 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: Re00TwUyMZo

Length: 7min 43sec (463 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 24 2020