Dee Dub said:
Following up on something I saw in an earlier thread (maybe by Tamyka??)
which I think referred to one (if not both) knees rolling in through the
pedal stroke. I think the idea was to drop one's heel through the
stroke to eliminate this behavioural excentricity.
My curiosity is three fold:
- the almost unconscious movement of the knee may be less than
efficient
- it may predispose a rider to injury
- it looks bad (I won't address the hackneyed (hack-kneed) chestnuts
of style like sock length or jersey design)
I first remember seeing mirror image perfect knee alignment on Erik
Breukink climbing a mountain in the tour in the late 80s. Pure
machine-like efficiency and precision. 😎
Any comments about these issues mainly preventing injury and maximising
pedalling efficiency? Any advice appreciated. 🙂
Cheers
Dee Dub
--
Dee Dub
Hey there Dee Dub,
this is one I was thinking about, because if you look at pics of Lance
from front on, his knees are in quite close. Max-the-guru said there's
one spot he doesn't worry about knee issues and that's any movement at
the very top of the pedal stroke - just because in his experience it
tends to be blocking at the hip joint (from tight hip flexors etc);
however if it's a gradual roll etc then it's bad, bad, bad.
I think mirror image perfect knee alignment requires mirror image
perfect knees and feet and hips, which I don't have - one hip sits
higher and more forward than the other. The physios and podiatrist I saw
said they didn't care where it was, as long as my knees were moving in a
straight line (i.e. vertical or slanted in towards the bar was fine as
the actual angle was Q-angle based and nothing I could do about that),
and my hips weren't rocking or anything.
The reason I need to hold my knees out (opposite of a lot of people) is
that I'm internally rotating my femur, causing weird circles with my
knees, almost hitting the top tube, and basically blocking my ability to
use my vastus medialis (the part of your quads that's towards the inside
of the leg), and putting all the work on the vastus lateralis (outside
part of the quads). Thinking about "knees out" doesn't actually put my
knees out to the side at all, it jsut makes them move in a straight
line, and all of a sudden I've got heaps more power output. It's great!
The heels-down thing is not about my knees but rather because I have of
late been getting tight calves, probably from not running as much as I
used to; letting my heels come up is worsening the problem.
Tam
