Imagine yourself on a ride; every bit of your energy propels the bike forward. Your legs descend perfectly straight, like pistons. Your pelvis is perfectly symmetrical and stable. Your breathing is perfect. Most importantly, you are aware of all of this because you have developed a great connection with your body. This is what this chapter is all about.

I have been bike fitting for over eight years. Looking back, I realize my journey into bike fitting is not anodyne. After I started having problems with my position, I looked for solutions, but no one could genuinely help me close to me. I also felt like people elsewhere didn’t have what I was looking for. The reality is that I wasn’t looking for a simple bike fit; I was looking to know deeply how one should become one with a bike. I was looking for a purpose.

In my bike fitting and coaching, I want to serve as a guide. I can do most of the fitting for people, but when people are able to internalize the changes, something magical happens. Uninternalized knowledge is useless. However, in the context of bike fitting, this ability to understand changes is only possible when people have developed a solid kinesthetic intelligence.

The word kinesthetic is derived from the Greek roots kinesis (κίνηση), meaning “movement,” and aesthesis (αἴσθησις), meaning “perception” or “sensation.” Together, they form a term that refers to the perception or awareness of movement.

We can correlate this to Howard Gardner’s research. According to him, there are eight types of intelligence, and kinesthetic intelligence is the type related to movement.[7] This concept is closely associated with proprioception, which is one’s ability to know where his body is in space without looking at it, and also interoception, which is the ability to feel the body feedback from the inside, such as feeling muscle activation or for example, a sore throat indicating a need to hydrate. You know, the things we don’t feel anymore, even though they were evident to us as children?

In my world, I call it kinesthetic awareness. This is a critical component of my philosophy, which matters in understanding your bike fit and yourself. Developing it will help you significantly in your cycling journey. However, working on the other types of intelligence can also yield massive benefits. You want to be a complete human, after all. As Abraham Maslow, a prominent humanistic psychologist, said: “What a man can, he must be.”[8] A cyclist is still a man, so what a cyclist can be, he must be. It means you should work towards your potential to live the only true life, the examined one.

An easy way to improve your kinesthetic awareness is to focus your attention inside of your body during the ride. You can focus on feeling how you engage with the different contact points: the insoles in your cycling shoes, saddle, and hoods. Is the pressure well distributed? Do you feel the same pressure left/right? You can also draw your attention to your muscle activation: glutes, quadriceps, and hamstrings; when standing, you can add the lats and calves. Are the muscles working in unison, or do some muscles do significantly more work? You can also focus on the breath. Do you breathe with your belly or shallowly? Is your breathing pattern controlled and consistent? This is a form of active meditation. Any form of movement can be used to dig deeper into your kinesthetic awareness.

You can also practice a passive form of meditation, again feeling the same things, points of contact, muscle tension or relaxation, and breathing mechanics. Both active and passive techniques are great for improving your connection with your body and developing body awareness. One trick to focus on these internal feelings more is to close the eyes. We can tune in more deeply with others by removing our most dominant sense, sight. So, close your eyes and feel. If you decide to do this while riding your bike, stick to the trainer.

All my contact points are minimalistic since I want to feel how I engage with my bike. I ride without socks and use Naboso textured insoles, so I feel where my feet contact the insoles. I also ride a Selle SMP Forma saddle; this model has no padding, which makes it simple for me to feel the saddle, contouring the shape of my pelvis with precision. Finally, I ride gloveless on my GRX Di2 hoods, which have some nice texture to them, and when I wear gloves, in races, I wear minimalist gloves without gel. Consider a similar approach to help you improve your body awareness.

All of this talk about kinesthetic awareness leads me to posture since great kinesthetic awareness will allow you to feel how you hold yourself at all times. Like many others, posture is a subject that we should mention everywhere, though not many people know about it. Great posture is an indication of proper muscle equilibrium and, therefore, a great way to access it.

On the subject of posture, most people wear heeled shoes in their everyday lives. They raise the heel compared to the forefoot, shifting the weight towards the latter. This is often known as a drop in the running community. Since the body is a kinesthetic chain, this is not a great idea, as impacting posture somewhere will impact it everywhere else.

To test it quickly, stand barefoot on the ground and feel where the pressure is under your feet. Also, look at your posture in a mirror. Now, put something under your heels so they sit slightly higher than the rest of the foot. You will likely feel a shift of the pressure toward the front of the feet with an increase in your lumbar and thoracic curvatures.

Switching to barefoot shoes was a revelation for me. These shoes are flat, thin, wide, and flexible, allowing natural posture and foot movement. I struggled with my left foot stability for many years on and off the bike. I went to podiatrists and searched for solutions myself, being helped by other bike fitters without definitive success. Still, after about six months of walking around in barefoot shoes, I had solved most of my left foot problem. This is because feet are comprised of muscles like the rest of the body, and these muscles need to be used to do the proper work. If you want to keep your body healthy with a minimal need to do off-the-bike exercises, barefoot shoes will be beneficial. This is also a great way to connect more deeply with your body as you feel the contact with the ground, leading to a greater connection to your body’s signals.

To assess your own posture, find a flat wall; by this, I mean a wall without a baseboard. Stand against the wall without forcing any posture. With optimal posture, you should have three points of contact while looking straight ahead. From top to bottom, you would touch the back of the head, the thoracic spine between the shoulder blades, and the sacrum—behind the pelvis at the base of the spine. Also, if you draw your navel towards the third lumbar vertebra, trying to make your belly flatter, you would have no change in your lumbar spine curvature. The space between it and the wall, which should be about the thickness of your hand, would not change. This indicates a proper deep-core activation.

The deep core is comprised of five key muscles, and it’s often called the stability box. At the front, you have the TVA with a horizontal running of the muscle fibers. This is the natural corset; at the top, you have the diaphragm, which plays a pivotal role in breathing mechanics; at the back, you have the multifidus; at the bottom, the pelvic floor; on the sides, the internal obliques. A proper deep core function is correlated to an appropriate breathing function; you can’t have one and not the other.

To assess your breathing mechanics, place one hand on your chest, the other on your belly just above your navel, and take a deep breath. That’s all the instructions I am giving you for now.

If you used your mouth, try again. The mouth is for eating, not for breathing, at least not at rest or during easy movement; during an effort, it’s a different story. If your belly flattened and you raised your shoulders significantly, try again as well. Proper breathing mechanics are characterized by an expansion of the belly for the first two-thirds of the breath. If we want to be accurate, breathing is a 360° action as the whole ribcage expands. When you are breathing, your diaphragm should contract, which means it lowers to give more downward space to the lungs; this action makes your belly bigger as the viscera are pushed out of the way by this action. This is why some pro cyclists, in an effort, look like they have a significant belly; this is actually a sign of healthy breathing mechanics.

To return to the postural assessment, I often find that people have an increased forward head posture coupled with an excessive curvature of the thoracic curve, an excessive curvature of the lumbar spine, and a forward projection of the shoulders. This would mean only two contact points, with the one behind the head missing, and a reduction of the spinal curvature when bringing the navel inwards. If your posture is not optimal, it’s an excellent opportunity to get it back into balance. A combination of a great bike fit, adequate training on and off the bike, and barefoot shoes will help grandly here.

Body awareness, which includes both proprioception and interoception, leads to a better understanding of yourself, which will help you make better choices in all areas of your life.

Summary:

• Developing your kinesthetic intelligence will serve you well in your cycling journey.
• Focus on feeling your contact points, muscular activation, and breathing during cycling.
• Know your posture and work towards the correct one.
  

[7] Howard Gardner, Multiple Intelligences: New Horizons (New York: Basic Books, 2006).

[8] Abraham Maslow, Toward a Psychology of Being (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1962).