The hip, the band, and
the hours in the saddle
The outside of the knee starts talking in the last hour of a long ride, never the first. The band itself barely moves, and the part that does is muscle.
The outside of the knee starts talking in the last hour of a long ride, never the first. The band itself barely moves, and the part that does is muscle.
Every clinic in this field offers to release your IT band, and most riders have spent a winter on a foam roller trying to do it themselves. It is worth knowing what happened when somebody actually measured it.
Six iliotibial bands, taken with the tensor fasciae latae still attached, were loaded on a testing machine to the point of a clinical stretch and measured along their length. The tissue does deform, so nobody can honestly tell you it is immovable. But it deforms unevenly. About four and a half percent at the muscular end up by the hip; about one and seven-tenths percent down the outside of the thigh, which is exactly where the roller goes. And the people who took the measurements would not say the change lasts. Their own conclusion is that it is uncertain whether it amounts to anything sustained.
The other half is older and stranger. The band was long explained as flicking back and forth across a bump of bone at the knee and rubbing on a small sac of fluid. When anatomists went looking for that, they found the band anchored to the thigh bone by fibrous strands rather than sliding over it, and the sac was not there. Not in a cadaver, not in a living volunteer, not in the people being scanned for the problem itself.
What that leaves is more useful than the sales version. The band is not a strap that can be let out. It is tension, and the tension has sources. The tensor fasciae latae at the front of the hip and the glute behind it both run straight into it, and both are muscle. That is the difference between a page telling you what it will do to your IT band and one telling you where the hour goes.
Figures from Wilhelm et al., International Journal of Sports Physical Therapy, 2017; Falvey et al., Scandinavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports, 2010; Fairclough et al., Journal of Anatomy, 2006.
And the boundary is the same here as everywhere else on this site: if it turns out to need a diagnosis, a scan or a prescription, Jonathan will say so and point you to the person who can, rather than work around it.
Two figures you already know, and the arithmetic nobody does. There is no score at the end of it: the number is a description of your week on the bike, not a prediction about your knee.
Whatever that number is, every one of those turns moves the hip through the same narrow range, and never through the whole of it. The hip does not fully extend or fully flex at any point in a pedal stroke, in or out of the saddle, so the flexors work permanently semi-shortened. Running takes the hip through full extension. Sitting takes it through nothing. This is the third thing: a small range, repeated, in a position you are fixed into.
Those lines are the Edge Diagnostic's, unchanged: find it on the body.
The riding is the point, and nothing here asks you to do less of it. What a standing arrangement does is take the same recurring load seriously on a schedule, rather than waiting for the ride where it stops being background noise.
Most people riding volume come every three or four weeks, and closer together through a block building towards a sportive or a long weekend. The Rhythm: cyclingWhat a standing arrangement looks like
At 5 hours a week and 85 turns of the pedals a minute, that is about 25,500 turns of the pedals, in a normal week, roughly 663,000 across a season, between April and September.
Whatever that number is, every one of those turns moves the hip through the same narrow range, and never through the whole of it. The hip does not fully extend or fully flex at any point in a pedal stroke, in or out of the saddle, so the flexors work permanently semi-shortened. Running takes the hip through full extension. Sitting takes it through nothing. This is the third thing: a small range, repeated, in a position you are fixed into.
The riding is the point, and nothing here asks you to do less of it. What a standing arrangement does is take the same recurring load seriously on a schedule, rather than waiting for the ride where it stops being background noise.
Most people riding volume come every three or four weeks, and closer together through a block building towards a sportive or a long weekend. The Rhythm: cyclingWhat a standing arrangement looks like
Not necessarily, and this is not an instruction to throw the roller away. Plenty of people find it takes the edge off and it costs nothing. What the measurements say is only that the mechanism is not the one on the tin: you are not lengthening the band, whatever it feels like, and if months of it have not shifted this then that is useful information rather than a sign you were doing it wrong.
It might be, and that is worth saying plainly: saddle height and cleat position come up in every serious account of this, and a saddle that is too low closes the hip further on every single turn of the pedals. Jonathan does not fit bikes and will not pretend to. If your position is the thing, the person to see is a fitter. What happens in the room here is the soft tissue that position has been loading.
Some of it. The mechanics are identical (the same partial arc, the same hip that never quite opens), but the number of repetitions is the thing that differs, and it differs a lot. Knee pain is reported far less often among people who commute than among people racing, which is a fact about two groups rather than a prediction about you. Put your own hours into the panel above and the arithmetic is the same either way.
Because the knee is very often where it is felt rather than where it starts, and that argument is made properly on the pain page rather than half-made here: the chain walks it backwards. What is added here is the specific case of a bike: a fixed position, a narrow range, and a band whose tension is set further up the leg.
Possibly, and Jonathan is the one who will say so. He is not a physiotherapist, and this is soft tissue work, one-to-one. If what you have turns out to need a diagnosis, a scan or a prescription, he will tell you and point you at the right person rather than keep you on the table.
Yes, and it is why the panel above asks about a normal week rather than a year. A season that stops and restarts asks a different question from a steady one, and the end of a block is where it usually gets noticed.
Hip or position. One of those you can change this week with an Allen key, and the other is why changing it sometimes does not help.
Book a sessionOr start from the situation rather than the sport: something already hurts, or nothing hurts yet.