our bike fitting service is here to help you get the best from your bike, be it an existing machine or a prospective new purchase, helping you be stronger on the bike, improve your comfort and endurance, and also if desired, obtaining some free speed through being more aerodynamic.

Our Bike fitting options are varied and are configurable to meet your specific needs.

Basic Bike Fitting - £99 gets you best fitted to your existing machine, using your existing bike on our Tacx Neo trainer, establishing the best possible fit for you on this bike, making the modifications where possible to achieve this.

Skeletal Measure and Fit  - £149 this approach ignores your existing position and starts from first principles, measuring your key skeletal data points, running that through the advanced BikeFitting calculator to get us to a fresh starting position,  

Advanced 3D Fitting - £199 - using the full capabilities of our advanced bikefitting rigg from BikeFitting.com, with its advanced capabilities to adjust and test for optimal crank lengths, it's live pedal stroke analysis to explore pedaling efficiency, high speed live video analysis to see how your body performs under stress and with it's speed and ease of exploring different saddle and handlebars, this is perfect for complex fitting needs and those who intend to compete or simply get the maximum performance from themselves and their machine.

Optional Extras:  Shoe Fitting, Custom Insoles, Saddle Fitting... see below for details:

3D Custom Insoles - distinctly better than off the shelf insoles (and infinitely better than anything we see other local fitters doing with pieces of foam and bar tape!) ours are 3D heat moulded to your specific foot shape and needs, where we ensure they hold your heels and arches in their optimal position, there are 3 levels of stiffness available which match your likely power outputs - Sidas Hemp insoles at £60 are perfect for smaller framed  and those with less than 180 watt 60min FTP, our Sidas Pro Carbon insoles at £120 are our most popular insole, optimal stiffness for for those with less than 250 watt 60 min FTP, and then for those with Pro level power outputs we have Sidas Pro Carbon Ultra £220. 

Feet Comfort: if you struggle with foot comfort, if you get toe numbness, if your toes suffer from cramping, if you've ever experienced burning pain in the sole of your feet whilst riding,  then these are all signs that your shoes are poorly fitting.  the most frequent issue is width, along with poor support from the shoe.  Cris has studied feet to an unusual level of detail, since he himself struggled with burning feet on long climbs, and knows the causes and resolution to all sorts of issues relating to feet.  

Saddle Comfort: The nervana of finding the perfect saddle for your needs has lead to an industry of "saddle fitting" technologies.  all of these technologies are marketing tools to help sell you more saddles.  These tools promis to find you the perfect saddle and through 'pseudo-science' (i.e. fake claims) they convince you the saddle they select for you is the perfect solution.  The truth is that no measuring tool can find you the right saddle.  you cannot measure comfort, it can only be felt.   Cris has built his extensive understanding of saddle shapes, and through a process of testing you on 5 different saddle shapes he can quickly identify the ideal shape profile, and then work out ideal widths and padding density.  our approach is following a saddle fitting we prefer to loan you a saddle for a couple of weeks before you buy it, as we only want to sell a saddle that you and we are 100% confident is right.  We stock a wide variety of saddles from Prologo, Fizik, Ergon, Brooks and Selle Italia.      

Bike Fitting Duration: Typical bike fittings take between 2.5 to 3.5 hours. Sometimes we need 2 or more smaller appointments to test and address how to overcome long term issues, or for example, to adapt you to a new ideal TT racing position.

Bike Fitting Focal areas: All bike fittings are about focusing on the ideal Trifecta of Power vs. Aero vs. Comfort. You can achieve success in 1 or 2 of these 3 focus areas, but it’ll often be at the expense of the 3rd. So I’ll help you work out your priorities and not unsurprisingly most folk simply want comfort, but I can help in all 3 areas. I’ll spend as much time teaching you how to improve power, help yourself be more comfortable and help yourself become more aerodynamic, as much as making adjustments that achieve the same goals.

While bike fitting is a science, it is also an art: Your bike fitting position is not something that can be calculated based on a formula. Formulars get you close, maybe 85% close... but the difference in feelings between close and spot-on are enormous... and the variables infinite. All bike fitting formulas are flawed, as they are unable to cope with immeasurable variances such as your feelings, your aspirations and your level of flexibility or injury. Thus the art of bike fitting is based on starting from known ideals and working out for each rider how best to interpret those, without assuming you are a 21 year old 6 foot tall Male pro level rider, who sits on the bike for 35 hours a week, as their level of capability will enable a very different position than 99.99% of customers who want a bike fitting.

My Methodology: I have studied Bike Fitting for the past 40 years, and more recently formalised my studies of BioMechanics, which has allowed me to adapt and grow my approach based on constantly challenging my previous understandings and assumptions. The types of people, and more importantly the expectations and abilities of these people now riding and needing bike fitting, are very much different from those who rode 10, 20 or 40 years ago.

My bike-fitting system is based on using the BikeFit(tm) approach developed by Paul Swift along with latest ideas and insights from Phil Burt, Keith Bontrager, as well as my own observations and understandings of the need to adapt positions to our current level of cycling capability and capacity. Formally defined methodologies are great, but as anyone who’s been indoctrinated into a methodology knows, they all have strengths and weaknesses, and it’s down to the creativity of the user to interpret adjust and apply that method sensibly.

My approach starts from the feet and the interface between your feet and the pedals (cleats and shoes), and study the stability and alignment of your feet through your ankles to knee and hip joints. For those riders increasing the duration or intensity of their riding, any misalignments will present themselves in the form of pains and strains, which can be avoided with careful placement of the cleats to position the toes and heal in the right positions to best transfer power.. Occasionally we need to utilise pedal axle extensions (for riders with feet need to be positioned outwards due to their specific placement of hip joint and knee joint)

Having established the alignment of your legs and the way your pedalling motion impacts upon your positioning I'll begin to adjust the positioning of your saddle. Saddle height is key to you creating the available power, yet also depends on the riders level of confidence and intended type of riding (tarmac, or off-road) as to what the right height should be.

Saddle angle - the rule of thumb is to set the front half of your saddle flat (parallel to the ground). On my own bikes, my saddles have to be flat or I can’t sit comfortably, but my position is a typical ex-racer aggressive position. The reality is that this rule exists to be broken. Many roadies will swear blindly that a saddle is wrong if it’s not flat, but I’ve significantly changed my view over the last 15 years, due to two things evolving. Firstly saddle shapes have developed, meaning that where you measure the flat section of saddles is in itself unique to each saddle. Secondly as more people in their 40’s and beyond have been coming back to, or starting afresh with cycling, their hip joint and spinal flexibility often require saddles to be angled with the nose down a few degrees. Some people need up to 7 degrees of slope on their saddle, so as long as it’s not transferring pressure to the arms and building up tension in shoulders from having to constantly push your bum back up onto a saddle, then I happily break the flat saddle rule with full confidence that it's justified.

Saddle fore-aft positioning is key to dynamically balancing you on the bike such that your body weight is suitably distributed to both wheels. Ideally approximately to 40 to 45% over the front wheel and 55 to 60% over the rear wheel. This is what enables you to start feeling at one with the bike, as it carves through corners with great levels of feedback, rather than making you feel nervous through unexpected oversteering or understeering.

Finding the ideal Handlebar height and distance from the saddle is dependant on your intended style and speed of riding, as well as levels of flexibility and injury. Racing cyclists find being stretched out such that they can fully engage upper body muscles is key to performance, whilst more leisurely cyclists often find such a position too aggressive and unsustainable. My approach seeks to balance comfort with power and aerodynamics, whilst keeping close eye on bike handling dynamics. Stability can be significantly undermined by the hands on the handlebar being too far behind or in front of the front tyre and front axle I.E the frontal contact patch of your bike and steering pivot point. I will position your hands such that the steering input forces are producing a natural balance for stable steering purposes, as well as producing a comfortable position for yourself.

Education is a key aim of my fitting method. I focus as much on sharing the advanced riding skills and techniques, as this has a significant impact on your ideal position. Many riders don't engage their upper body effectively in the process of riding with strnegth and efficiency. I help you understand the art of riding well, the art and feel of ankling to produce an efficient and powerful pedal stroke, how to steer and carve the bike through corners using your hips to direct the machine, how to be dynamic on the bike, how and when to engage your core and ride using your upper body to drive the pedals, rather than leaving your upper body to simply absorb the pain of the road surface below.

High Tech Tools? Getting a bike fitting has become an industry in it’s own right, with many high tech very expensive tools being used by unskilled and inexperienced bike fitters, producing some very poor outcomes. I know this because I have had many people referred to me after a failed expensive bike fitting. The limitation of the technology based tools is that they are only as good as the data that drives their analysis, and the fitter using them. And still the data they drive their methodology from still is overly biased towards the ultra-lean all skin and bone pro cyclist who spends 40hrs a week riding their bike, rather than 40 hrs a week at their desk or on their feet.

Of all the wonderful technology out there, I invested heavily in the BikeFitting.com adjustable fitting rig from Shimano.  This was following extensive testing and insight from other similar systems from Guru, iDMatch and Retul.  my insight is that every system is full of faults and often gets in the way of a good fitting,  most of the bike fitting is about your feelings and using my decades of experience and carefully using eyes and ears to understand your needs and feelings, these are not things measurable by tools and any tool that gets in the way of the fitter detracts from the quality of the fitting.