HOW TO FIT A MOUNTAIN BIKE TO YOUR BODY - Free Fit Kit.

Hey joyriders, welcome back to the channel. We recently made a video on sizing. I love the video. We're freezing. It's like five degrees in my garage. It was a tough shoot. It was a tough shoot, but the content's really good. There's been a ton of people basically asking really good questions. It's almost a thousand comments, I think. Okay. We have the best subscribers. A lot of comments out of the UK. I have never ridden there, but that's a dream of mine. Maybe someday after COVID we do a camp there. Do a joyrider experience. Yes. Let's try to make that happen. So many people were sending me pictures and video of them on stools. My favorite being a guy that used his dining room chairs while his wife was away. But that's commitment, man. I hope he put something down and didn't just shred those chairs, but whatever. You can always get new chairs. Chairs are cheaper than SP150s. But a good fit is forever. And speaking of that, you're going to know your rad number today, and that is forever. We're going to go into some detail on that knuckle height and then how to make a kit that you can bring with you anywhere in your pocket. Bike shop, demo. And know exactly whether a bike is going to fit you or not. Super excited about this. The way bike geometry is going right now is forcing compromises. So a little background. Seat tubes have gotten significantly steeper over the past few model years. I've talked to people in the bike industry. This is what happened. The market is demanding. They want big wheels. They want a lot of suspension and they want short chainstays. With a normal, like let's say, 74 degree seat angle, there's no room. So a really easy way to solve that packaging issue is to steepen the seat angles. You know, normal seat angles go from like 74 degree to 76. Some bikes out there like 78. And that creates more space for the suspension. But then when you're in the saddle, the seat's now closer to the handlebars. So the seated reach is shorter than people are used to. Every degree you steepen a seat tube moves the seat forward about 20 millimeters. So then you can imagine why the bike manufacturers started to tack 20, 40 or more millimeters onto the bike reaches. What that gives you is a familiar seated reach. And that's how most people pick bikes. You go around the parking lot. You're like, oh, this feels about right. In our world, we're concerned with the rider area distance, which is the distance between your hands and your feet. And our goal is to make that distance and angle such that you can dynamically lock yourself into the bike. If you set up a bike to optimize that with modern geometry, the seated reach when you're in the saddle is going to be significantly shorter than you're used to. Okay. I understand that there's a theory out there that a longer seated reach helps you climb better. You know what? There's no data that proves that adding 50 millimeters to my stem makes me climb better. That doesn't exist. We know from our experience that if you set your bike up with an optimal rad, you will learn how to pedal the shorter seated reach. Your power numbers won't change. Actually, they might improve because you have more sprinting power. That said, if you are a cross-country racer or for whatever reason, you prefer a more extended seated reach, do what makes you happy. Just understand that as that rad goes plus plus and beyond, you're no longer locked dynamically into the bicycle. You're more like a hunk of meat hurdling to an uncertain fate. So in our last video, we gave you guys multipliers. We said take your height in centimeters and multiply by X to give you a target frame reach. Okay. It's based on a 40 millimeter stem and a normal handlebar. It's based on average proportions. Okay. But that number will get you in the ballpark. And it is better than the size charts you'll find on a manufacturer's website. A hundred percent. You cannot trust those at all. What we're going to do next is we're going to measure the rad of our body. A couple of you in the comments said, hey, would it work to measure your rad this way? And it will. They were right. Yeah. They knew. You gave me the idea and I disregarded it. Yes. And some of you commenters gave me the idea and I disregarded it and I was walking around and it came to me as my idea and now I love it. Okay. So we're going to do that. This is how you measure your knuckle height, AKA body rad. So wear your bike shoes, put your feet in a bike stance. If you're a mountain biker and you close your eyes and you do this, it'll be pretty freaking close. That's perfect. You have your hands at your riding width. Alex is going to hold a dry erase marker in that fist as if it's a handlebar. Now, this is the part where most people screw up. First of all, get your head as far away from your feet as you can. Get your shoulders as far away from your ears as you can. Go. Yeah, exactly. Bring them together and pull them down. Arms dead straight and punch straight down. Make your mark. There it is. All right. All right. That's it. I like centimeters. They're more precise than inches. What do you think it is, buddy? 31 inches, but I don't know how many centimeters, 80, which is 32 and a half. About what? Yeah. That's what we got. I thought my rad was 31 inches. Let me just make, go over there again. Yeah. And by the way, if you're like, that number's crazy, it's, it's really easy to make a mistake. What's the, what's the variation posture? Yeah, I think I did this and I think the number I have at home is 31 and I'm guessing here's why. When I look down as I'm making the mark, look, it moved one inch, below. And most people punch their shoulders and it goes up. There's a three inch variance that you could create. So make sure you're punching down. Yup. Yeah. And don't look. I keep measuring myself in high heels. Yeah. That's why I'm six foot. Measuring things is hard. The goal here is we're going to measure from the bottom bracket, the middle parallel to the frame, to the intersection of your grips. And the way we do that is you need a string. Okay. And you're going to run it from the middle of the top of one grip. So you put a little rubber band around the string to hold it in place. And then we'll, and then we'll come across. Look at that cable mess I got going on there. Gotta call that out because someone's going to give me a hard time. This cable situation is terrible. It's terrible. This bike should not fit me. It's my son's bike. He's a little taller than I am. So theoretically it'll be more, yeah. It'll be longer. It should be a little long. Right about a centimeter below the string is the intersection of your fist. So there's an imaginary line that we're really measuring to. Yes. That is right there. Yup. It's really the center of this grip that we obviously can't get a string into. Yeah. And it's running right through here. The zero points at the middle of the crank. Center of the bottom bracket. And we'll go parallel to the frame and we're measuring to that point. The four is about a centimeter below the string, right? And that's, so we'll call this bike 84. And if it were, if it were perfectly fit to me, it would be there. It'd be there. Yeah. So this bike is quite a bit large for me. How big would rad plus be? Like if I was wanting to ride rad plus. If you wanted to ride rad plus, I would cap it around 820. I could get this bike into a rad plus. If I, if I did a 32 millimeter stem. Yup. And I did a straighter bar and I could get it to a rad plus. By the way, I'm five nine. This is a medium strive and it's too big. It's too big for you. You want to measure your BMX dude? If you have a rad number, it works on a BMX bike too. This is a bike that cannot be too long. No, you can't. So we're using the same philosophy with the string from the middle of the top of one grip to the other. I'm really kind of getting excited to see where this ends up. Yeah. Interesting buddy. It's short. It's short. Now short I'm okay with. Short works. It's 77. So this is rad minus. That. Totally cool. That's where I would want it to be. But for this kind of a bike, rad minus, game on. My dirt jump bike is a little bit minus. When the rad is neutral, you have all of your torque and a lot of range of motion. When the rad gets short, you keep almost all of the torque, but you gain range of motion. So for a BMX freestyle bike or a dirt jump bike, rad minus makes a lot of sense. When you go rad plus, there's an immediate drop, a massive drop in torque. You can pull 300 pounds to here, but not to here. Pretty much everybody I work with, we end up rad neutral or rad minus. Another way that I'll check a bike sometimes. Oh yeah, this is great. You know what I'm going to do. Yeah. And it's why this bike is in the ballpark. BMXers are always on the ground, by the way. They do this to practice tricks like this. And even if you don't practice tricks, you just find yourself in this position. So next time you loop out on manual, make like you want to measure your rad. Exactly. Yeah. Just get in your stance and extend. And you can see that this bike, this feels really good. And what's interesting is that you can see that 30 millimeter delta between your knuckle and the bar. Like that's, that's exactly where it shows up. If you're out at a demo, and you're willing to be this guy, I don't know how many of you are, but you can do this with a mountain bike too, and get a pretty good sense of how that bike fits for you. That's wonderful, man. There's 80 right there. If you flip it over, that's 31 and a half. So I was about a half inch off when I had measured it myself. You don't have to go by the number. You just have to have something that you can bring with you. How often do you have a tape measure? Me? Very rarely. But if I was going to go to a bike shop, I can take this number and then put a knot in a piece of string. Get that knot right there. Yeah. Right at 800 or 80 centimeters, right? Yep. Now I can bring this anywhere. All I got to do is walk up to a bike. Yeah. Pretend it's my bike. Yeah. Okay. I'm at the shop. Um, hopefully I brought some rubber bands and another string to stretch across here, but even if I didn't, you could eyeball it. I can look from one grip to the other and eyeball this and know this is where Lee's rad is. And I go rad minus on my trail bikes. Yep. So this is, this bike's about 77. So he's about there. Easy to add a little bit of stem. Try to take 10 millimeters out right here. Can't do it. And it is a bummer. If you're using the calculator, my advice, and I've given it in the comments is go a little short. Yes. And by the way, Alex, that's exactly the opposite of the current wisdom out there. Right? Like every bike manufacturer you call tells you to go up. This is super cynical. If you go too short, you have to buy another stamp. If you go too long, you have to buy a new bike. Maybe that's why. No, I hope that's not why. And I don't think it is. You put one of these out with a knot on either end and start going up to bikes. They'll know you're joy rider. We got to make some joy of bike branded, uh, string. This is me. I think the thing that size Alex, that's the thing that's fun about it for me. I would cut off the rest of the string. Cause this ain't me. This is a basketball player or this is size Alex. It's 31 and a half inches. It's 80 centimeters. It's this piece of string with two knots in it. Yeah. Pretty dope. So if you like this video, you know what to do. Hit the like button and we will see you next time on joy of bike.