Adapting to the TT position (and yoga)
This was my first full year with a TT bike. I got my Argon 18 E116 in July 2015 and put in some very average performances on it.
Over a 10 mile TT, initially I was only about 30 seconds faster on my TT rig compared to my road bike with clip on bars. I’m not very flexible through my hamstrings and back, so I lost a lot of power in the TT position even with 20mm of spacers under the stem.
I think this is pretty common for people when they first ride a TT bike — it doesn’t make you massively faster initially especially if you already had all the right clothing (skin suit, aero helmet etc) before making the transition.
Several of the TTs I did in 2015 left me with no feeling in my hands. This made changing gears and braking very difficult, and was quite horrible in the one 25 I did. I never got to the bottom of why this happened, but I knew it wasn’t normal and in time I hoped I’d adapt and it would sort itself out.
My priority over the winter was just to put in lots of time in position to try and increase my efficiency in a TT tuck and to be able to ride for over an hour like that without any weird pains.
Literally all the turbo trainer work I did that winter was on my TT bike. Road rides were mostly on the road bike, but I did take the TT bike out occasionally if the weather was good.
The difference was huge, and I started to enjoy being on the bars and removed a 5mm spacer to drop the front end a bit. On the turbo there was still the urge to sit up if I was doing a hard effort, but on the road it just felt great being down on the bars.
Around May 2016 I decided to do some aero testing using the virtual elevation method (blog post coming soon). This showed about a 10w gain from removing the remaining 15mm of spacers and slamming the stem. The only problem was that holding that lower position was still horrible and I couldn’t imagine doing it in a race situation.
I decided to try some yoga after spotting that local legend Matt Downie had started doing it (it pays to Strava stalk). I’d thought about doing this before — here is the rough principle…
- Riding your bike involves putting forces through your pelvis via your glutes. These are big powerful muscles.
- If you have a weak core, there is nothing to keep your pelvis forward, and your pelvis gets rotated backwards.
- This means your hamstrings get tighter, as the point at which they attach to your pelvis is moved further back.
Doing something like yoga to strengthen your core stops this happening, and at the same time the stretching aspects give you more flexibility.
After a few weeks of doing 20 mins of yoga twice a week I started to feel a difference.
A couple of months later and all my spacers were gone. I don’t think this was 100% down to the yoga, but it definately helped. I expect in time I’d have been able to get lower anyway through natural adaption but I feel the core work helped accelerate this.
My power is still about 15–20w down compared to the road bike, but I think this is quite normal due to the diagram not being able to work properly in a tuck.
