The best bike fitter? What makes the great ones?

*Author's Note: I am a physical therapist and realize that everyone has a bias and a viewpoint.  I hope you'll find the following information logical and thoughtful.  It's not meant to discourage or belittle anyone and I think it should make sense to most readers.*This is a topic that is argued (and trolled) over on message boards and forums but has only been addressed tangentially in most cases.  Who is most equipped to be the best bike fitter?While there are more certifications for bike fitting, not all of them are created equally and none guarantee that they will produce an exceptional or even adequate bike fitter.  These programs are anywhere from 2-7 days long each and they are structured so that anyone can take them even without any experience at all.So what is entailed in becoming a great bike fitter?Three variables determine how good a fitter is:

• How deep is their knowledge of human movement?
• How many fittings have they done?
• What is their investment in technology?

1. Human Movement BackgroundDo you have to be a physical therapist?  No, but I'm not going to lie...it does help.  Just memorizing and knowing some basic anatomy isn't going to be nearly enough.This knowledge is comprised of three steps:

• Knowing the anatomy.  This is the basic stage and it's where the bike fit classes begin and end.  They don't really advance past here into step 2
• Knowing the kinesiology or how the mechanics of the joints function.  For example, understanding how a ball and socket joint's motion differs from a sellar joint -- the arthrokinematics especially -- is critical to making good decisions on the bike.
• Having a lot of opportunities to apply this information.

Someone with a degree in anatomy and/or physiology will be at an advantage but having a lot of clinical experience is an enormous bonus because of the ability to learn how the body responds and reacts o different changes in thousands of patients.Working in a clinical setting treating thousands of clients a year gives you the chance to learn what 'normal' and 'abnormal' really is.  This is why I said that it helps to be a practicing PT.  I have talked to dozens of medical professionals of all areas -- radiologists, cardiologists, PTs, OTs, surgeons of all flavors -- and all of them have the same ideas regarding education and experience and one radiologist said it best.  (I'm paraphrasing)"School teaches you a ton of information.  But then you begin your practice and quickly realize that the black and white information you learned is actually a whole bunch of gray.  I needed to see 5,000 "normal" X-rays before I even understood what abnormal was."Unless you are seeing and assessing many people every day for years, as your typical PT does, you can't lean on this base of knowledge later on.  Which leads to the second key...2. You need to do a lot of bike fittings.If you manage to get yourself into  scenario where you get to perform or learn from a steady diet of 1-3 bike fittings a day, which is fairly rare, it will likely take you a couple of years to become exceptional.  It just takes a while to see enough complex scenarios (and successfully work through them or screw them up royally and learn from that too) in order to have enough of an internal database to make sound decisions.This brings me to the single biggest area of bullshit from some bike  fitters: they lie about how many fits they've done.  I think some count every time they see someone on a bike, whether they're in their car driving or watching the Tour on TV.So if you run into a 30 year old individual who claims 6000 bike fits to their name (I have run into this) then you can, silently or otherwise call BS.I do about 300 bike fits a year.  What do I count as 1 bike fit?  If I see someone for a fitting and then they come back 2 more times for follow ups over the course of the next 5 weeks, I count that person as a single bike fit.  I don't count my follow-ups.  250 is a decent number; certainly not the most, but after doing this for 15+ years and being a PT for almost 20 years, I haven't had a complex client present to my Studio where I was unsure of how to successfully get started in solving their issues in many years.3. TechnologyBike fit technology is a tricky subject.  If you're trying to perform a truly exceptional bike fit, you need to have premier-level dynamic measuring technology.  As I've said before -- if you can't measure it, you can't fix it.The other side to this coin is that technology is no replacement for a lack of knowledge and unfortunately it often is.  Many bike shops use fancy tools that pack a lot of "Wow!" factor but they're not equipped with skilled people to actually use and make complete decisions from all the information these systems give.Having the technology is great, but if you don't have the previous pieces of the puzzle -- the academic and clinical knowledge, and the experience of thousands of bike fittings under your belt -- you won't be able to leverage that technology and use it to its fullest capacity.The PT who hasn't been doing bike fits for very long will struggle to use all aspects of the data that the technology will provide them.  Ditto to an even greater degree for the shop employee who may have been doing fittings for a number of years but doesn't have the database of academic and clinical knowledge to refer to.I think it makes intuitive sense as to why it's important if you're looking for the best bike fitter near you that they have done a lot of fittings, they understand the anatomy and physiology, and that they have top level motion capture technology.  But why is it so important to have clinical expertise in some area of human movement, like a PT, ATC, or MD might?  As I mentioned earlier, treating thousands of patients a year over many years gives clinicians a huge trove of "if this, then that" sort of treatment data to rely on.But couldn't you get this by doing a lot of bike fits?  Yes, you could.And wouldn't this data be more specific since it would be gained dealing strictly with cyclists in the context of a bike fit?  Yes, the knowledge gained from these fits might provide the fitter with more specific knowledge to use on the next fitting.But the problem is simply a numbers game -- it would require the fitter to do a lot of bike fittings over many years just to catch up.  On a slow day as a PT I probably saw 9 patients, but that number was more likely to be 15 most days.  So in order to keep up, let's say that a bike fitter would need to do 6-7 fittings a day over the course of a standard Monday through Friday work week in order to match the bike fit knowledge gained by the clinician.  That comes out to roughly 1700 bike fits a year.  That's a ton.Is it possible?  Maybe, but I think it's exceptionally unlikely.But this is probably a semantic argument because a clinician has another advantage.  A bike fit, by its nature, is a balance between changing the bike to fit the rider, as well as changing the rider to fit the bike some.  This is done through specific exercises to target the weaknesses and shortcomings of the rider.  The clinician by design is best suited to this task.  There will come a point in many bike fits where the non-clinician will have to stop what they're doing and refer the client to a clinician to have their deficits delineated and addressed.  In fact, some bike shops will offer this as part of their fitting process by working with a local clinician to help do some of the assessment and the corrective exercise prescription.

So who should I go see?

A while back I posted a question on Twitter asking if you'd rather get a bike fit from a PT who had no technology or a bike shop that had the latest and greatest tech out there?  This question can't truly be answered as written, because there are too many variables left out, but here's how I would address it:Most of the decision would depend on the bike shop.  If the shop fitter had been diligently studying, learning, and refining their knowledge of anatomy, kinesiology and all things human movement, and had been doing bike fittings for more than 3 or 4 years then I would take a chance on them.  This level of commitment should be rewarded.  However if the shop were using video technology I might change my mind.  Using video requires you to make fit decisions based on just a few measurements -- of a single pedal stroke in most instances -- because it takes so much time to accurately draw measurements on the handful of joint angles and distances you're looking to assess.  If you've ever measured this way you'll know that you can get different numbers for a single measurement on subsequent pedal strokes shown in the video and repeatedly and accurately drawing the joint angle lines the same way every single time requires patience and a lot of skill and practice.Infrared motion capture lends itself much better to bike shop use since the data is taken from a period of pedaling, usually 15-30 seconds, and the joint angles are taken automatically.  All the operator needs to be able to do is set the landmark dots on the rider ahead of time in an accurate way -- much easier than setting angles on a small, potentially blurry, screen after the fact.  Additionally the infrared systems will average joint angles for the capture period taken -- so every time the knee bends to its maximal amount in that 15 second period will all be averaged together to provide one number -- which provides a bit of natural smoothing of the data.For most cyclists though, this decision on who to go see is likely to be between two bike shops.  Do you go to the shop with the new technology or the one that's been around forever doing fittings for years.  Another tough decision.  Just as technology is no guarantee of a good outcome neither is doing bike fits for the last 20 years.  I would argue that if an established bike shop who purports to take their bike fitting very seriously has not invested in some advanced technology, I would question why, and this would be a red flag for me.But still, there's lots of gray area...sometimes the best thing to do is to talk to some of the people that have been fit at this shop.  I wouldn't be too concerned about knowing what they did to the person's fit, but I'd ask what was explained to them about the changes being made?  How much detail did they go into when explaining their rationale for the changes?  Did they assess the rider off the bike?  (One of the bike fitting schools doesn't teach their fitters any movement screening or even a rudimentary off the bike assessment -- this is s huge red flag)  Did they discuss in even a basic way, some exercises the rider could do to improve their fit?All of these answers would make the decision much easier.  The fitter should be explaining what they're doing and why....in detail.  They should first assess the rider off the bike, otherwise they'd have no way of knowing what they're correcting for.  Any bike fitter can learn a half dozen of the most common exercises that most endurance athletes need to work on.Lastly I would be wary of a fitter that's too confident.  I'm not saying you want a wishy-washy fitter.  Not at all.  Of course they should be confident in their skills.  But I'd be careful when someone is too sure of the solution too quickly.  The most skilled fitters, just like an expert in any profession, will have seen so many scenarios that they should be able to  think of multiple results, both positive and negative from executing a given change, and so at times they will stop to consider these, and explain them to the client if it's important enough.  This sort of pensiveness or thoughtfulness is often the hallmark of an expert.  They've seen enough that they're not willing to bet the farm that this one will go exactly the same as the last ten.What are your thoughts about this?  Are there aspects of this as a cyclist or as a bike fitter that you can relate to?  Leave a comment below and let me know what you think...