Diy Bike - Fit Savvy Saving Or False Economy?

Getting professionally fitted to your bike can be a costly business. Is it really worth it — or can you sort your own set-up quite adequately for free?

- Michelle Arthurs-Brennan

Bike-fit is big business. For about £150, you can get your position checked by a trained eye at your local bike shop. Parting company with about four times more cash will get you a physio-led fit with biomechanical assessment as standard; and if money’s no object, you can take it one step further with aero-optimisation in a wind tunnel. Alternatively, you could do it yourself — without paying a penny.

Cyclists have been self-fitting for decades, of course, often with the help of a friend, a mirror, and a trusty plumb line. Is paying someone else to set you up on your bike like buying a dog and barking yourself? Then again, is DIY fitting a risky business inviting injury troubles? Keep it simple and save cash, or pay the experts to see you right — which approach pays off in the long run?

It’s a question on which former Team Sky consultant and British Cycling physiotherapist Phil Burt is surprisingly candid: “I once stood up at a bike-fit conference and said a pretty controversial thing: not everyone needs a bike-fit. Some people — who I call micro-adjusters — are more vulnerable to changes in their environment and contact points. Others, who I call macroabsorbers, tend to be able to absorb small changes — their set-up may not be optimal, but it won’t hurt them.”

Few people understand the importance of correct position better than Burt, and yet: “Not everyone can afford a bike-fit, and you might be able to use rules of thumb to sort yourself out.”

At his eponymous studio Phil Burt Innovation, the bike-fitter extraordinaire wrote his book Bike Fit to help other people do his job for him. Naturally, a book-guided fit is substantially simplified, with more rules of thumb and fewer individual considerations.