by Ben Hallam
There is an interesting article in the latest issue of Manual Therapy relating to cyclists with lower back pain (http://www.manualtherapyjournal.com/article/S1356-689X(12)00042-2/abstract).
The results from this study mirror what I see regularly during bike fits; the people that complain of lower back pain tend to be the ones that sag back onto their saddles and flex from the lower back. This lumbar flexion puts additional strain on the back muscles and tissues and makes it very hard for the core muscles to stabilise the spine. As they found in the study, simply changing the bike position (in this case tilting the saddle which has been shown to sometimes relieve low back pain) often doesn’t change someone’s learnt motor program (their learnt posture on the bike).
The take home messages from this study would be that a) positioning the bars too low can encourage lower lumbar flexion and potentially increase the likelihood of lower back pain and b) position changes need to be combined with both on and off the bike posture correction to help strengthen the core and maintain a neutral pelvic posture while riding.
1 comment:
Take a look at Postureright, it’s a product from lutaevono and helps quite well with keeping a good back posture :)
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