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Originally Posted by Ralph
Technology has changed almost every profession you can name. Sometimes for the better, and sometimes not....IMHO.
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It's easy to embrace technology without questioning if it's better or not, which is where this is heading. There's little doubt that bike fitting has gotten much better than it was 25 years ago, but at the same time we've focused so much on the technology that we've lost track of the end goal. My opinion is that cycling should be focused on the rider, not the bike, not the fitting method and certainly not the numbers. A good rider on just about any bike that kinda fits is far better off than an unskilled rider with the best bike and what the computer says is a good fit.
The marketing is a different story. I know it' a VHS vs. Beta scenario, the one with the better marketing, not the better product, wins. There are many places saying "we have the latest technology" and one idiot saying "learn how to ride", who do you think is gonna win? Just the same, I have a marketing strategy that's been working. I play with the competitive nature of cyclists. If you ride with a group, and then one of the riders starts getting better on the bike than the rest, they all want to know how, and how they can do the same. Their knee jerk reaction is to spend more on the bike - that's OK, I happen to work at a bike shop and I'll be glad to sell them some new carbon wheels. At some point they should figure out it's the rider, and they'll need to follow the same steps - I say should because very few of them do. I'm still working on that...
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Originally Posted by EDS
I don't think the fitter needed the video to make the changes but it helped me understand why he was recommending certain changes to my position. It also helped me understand what changes I may need to make, or what to look for going forward.
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Did the fitter make changes to the bike or how the rider uses the bike? If he didn't need the video and he only changed the bike, the video was purely a sales tool - I'm guessing the fit with video is more expensive than the fit without? If the fitter made changes to how you ride, the assumption must be that your perception of what you're doing is accurate, 'cause once the fitting is over, so is the video feedback. Allow me to burst that bubble for you, it's not.
The saving grace here is that it's not that complicated. The cameras were probably already in place, it gives you something to look at, and it gives you the sense that the service was better than it would have been without it. The more complex the fitting systems get the more lost in the process the clients become. I went to Retul University, I watched a room full of fitters looking at numbers on a screen, and somehow they missed the fact that the rider was outside of her range of motion on one side.