“To perform a squat, for example, you need good ankle, knee and hip flexibility,” he explains. What’s more, if you have a stiff lower back, you’ll typically overreach with the arms, putting too much weight on the hands and causing tightness across the upper back and neck.”įor Simpson, who worked mainly with BMXers and sprint cyclists, flexibility is also important for cross-training. “Without it, your power output will be reduced because you won’t be able to get maximal force from the gluteal muscles. “You need a good range of motion in the hips and lower back to achieve an aerodynamic time-trial position,” says Graham Anderson, a physiotherapist who has worked with everyone from Olympic cyclists to weekend warriors. “If muscles get tight, they pull on bones and put things out of alignment, increasing the risk of pain, discomfort and injury,” she says.īut poor flexibility - and its consequences - don’t just give you bad posture and hike up your injury risk, your cycling performance is at stake, too. “Postural changes like this can lead to chronic problems such as lower back pain that will affect your daily activities, not to mention your riding, in the long-term,” he adds. Poor flexibility doesn’t just give you bad posture and hike up your injury risk, your cycling performance is at stake, tooĪs an example, the forward-leaning, crouched position adopted by roadies and track cyclists tends to make the hip flexors tighten and shorten (“every cyclist I know has hip flexor tightness,” says Simpson) causing an anterior pelvic tilt and an excessively arched lower back. “It’s not a natural movement like running or walking, and is therefore more likely to cause muscular imbalances and postural changes.” “Riding a bike is not something that we evolved to do,” says Mark Simpson, former lead strength and conditioning coach at the English Institute of Sport, who worked with the British Cycling team. But there’s a major reason why the same may not apply on a bike. The theory is that tight leg, hip and trunk musculature increases elastic energy return. Research on runners, published in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning, found that those who performed the worst in a ‘sit and reach’ test (a measure of hamstring and lower back flexibility) had the greatest running economy, a measure that could be described as their ‘miles per gallon’ rate. Scientists still hotly debate the topic of whether stretching is beneficial for athletes, detrimental or makes no difference either way. But does it matter? Well, it depends who you ask. To compound the problem, cycling is one of the few activities in which muscles contract only concentrically (while shortening) and not eccentrically (while lengthening) and over time, this can result in what’s known as ‘adaptive shortening’, the process by which muscle fibres physically shorten.
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