How sensitive are your knees to saddle height?

[Louis]

Let's say you have your saddle height dialed in as best you can and everything is working pretty much as is should. Based on you previous experience of tweaking your saddle position, how many mm motion up or down do you think it would take for you to then begin to have knee issues?

I ask because over the years I've been tweaking my saddle position and have been playing around with shims (a while back I raised my saddle a bit and it seemed to help my left knee, but made things worse for my right knee, so I concluded that I needed to add a shim under my right cleat - I did that and it seems to have helped quite a bit). Another story: the shim was in my "summer" Sidis (mesh). As the weather turned cooler a while back I switched to my "winter" Sidis (Lorica) which did not have a shim. By the end of the 35 mile ride I had some significant R-knee pain that lasted a day or so. That after over a month of no real knee problems. We're talking a less than 1 mm shim.

Am I just imagining this? I've concluded that not much motion can result in significant benefits (or significant problems), but I'm wondering how "long" most folks sweet spot typically is, not for power generation, but for happy knees.

TIA
Louis

[rnhood]

My guess is you might be experiencing some hyperextension. It doesn't take but a couple mm's especially if you have a bad habit of dropping your heel during the downward stroke - which effectively magnifies those mm's. I would keep the saddle a cm or two below the ideal height until you're sure your feet stay parallel to the ground during the down stroke (or at least remain consistent). Then you can inch up the saddle to get your ideal extension. During longer rides dropping the heal can happen naturally due to fatigue. Keep an eye on it.

Having said this, the knee is complex and there could be other issues. But hyperextension is the only one I ever experienced.

[Ray]

I rarely have knee issues from too low a saddle, but I get a lot less efficient and start spinning lower gears to compensate. I suppose if I didn't compensate somehow my knees might start to feel the effects. At this point, i pretty much have my position dialed in - I haven't really changed it even a little bit in the past 3-4 years. But in arriving at it, I pretty much kept raising my saddle in small increments until my back started bugging me, then dropped it a couple of mm. As much extension as I could do and stay smooth and not have any pain. But the height was the easy part - the fore/aft is where finding the sweetspot was the hardest and most important.

-Ray

[RPS]

Regarding knees I'm more sensitive to going up than down. Going down makes me work harder but doesn't seem to affect my knees as much as if I raised the saddle an equal amount.

As the weather turned cooler a while back I switched to my "winter" Sidis (Lorica) which did not have a shim. By the end of the 35 mile ride I had some significant R-knee pain that lasted a day or so. That after over a month of no real knee problems. We're talking a less than 1 mm shim.
I wouldn't expect 1 mm to affect me, and if this happened to me I'd first look for differences in cleat alignment or wear that may explain the pain.

Also, I know most people have one leg slightly longer than the other but I haven't tried shims to adjust for cycling. I tried orthotics as a runner to adjust but soon gave up on them.

[regularguy412]

I rarely have knee issues from too low a saddle, but I get a lot less efficient and start spinning lower gears to compensate. I suppose if I didn't compensate somehow my knees might start to feel the effects. At this point, i pretty much have my position dialed in - I haven't really changed it even a little bit in the past 3-4 years. But in arriving at it, I pretty much kept raising my saddle in small increments until my back started bugging me, then dropped it a couple of mm. As much extension as I could do and stay smooth and not have any pain. But the height was the easy part - the fore/aft is where finding the sweetspot was the hardest and most important.

-Ray

Same here for me.

I arrived at it a bit differently, though. I had been adjusting/raising the saddles on both my geared bikes. Then one day this summer, I was doing a recovery ride on my single/fixie (which I hadn't ridden in a couple of months). I noticed that I felt more powerful and more comfortable. When I got home, I measured the saddle height. It was (only!) 5 mm lower -- same shoes/pedals, same fore/aft. I lowered the saddles on both my geared bikes and, voila!, no more back pain. I never really did notice it in my knees. As an aside, I already shim my right cleat 4 mm due to a lumbar disk issue that causes my right leg to be 'short'.

Mike in AR:beer:

[dekindy]

If I let my spd-sl cleats get too worn down my knees will start hurting. In fact, one time when my fitter was replacing my cleats, he remarked how surprised he was that I was not having knee pain. I had not indicated so, but I was. From then on when it started getting difficult to clip in I was conscious that if my knees started to hurt I needed to replace my cleats immediately. It usually effects both knees. I have no idea how much difference in height results from worn cleats.

[Dave]

You may have other knee problems of a medical nature that you're blaming on saddle height. I read posts like this frequently. People want to blame minor fitting changes for knee pain because that's the easy thing to do. There are many knee problems that require medical attention or physical therapy to cure.

The problem could also be related to improper foot angle. A lot of people can benefit from Lemond wedges or canted insoles to correct foot alignment. The most common problem is a feet the tilt so the outside is down - forefoot varus. I had the opposite problem, forefoot valgus, but only on the left foot.

[Wilkinson4]

Probably 1cm since I run my mountain bike saddles lower. Ironically, I had a retul fit done this year and although I didn't think it was all that I did raise my saddle by 4mm with no ill-effect and it was already high so I thought.

Many years ago, I did a long long tour with some Lake sandal... After the first few weeks I almost quit because of knee pain which I had never had before.

I finally nailed it down to the sandals insole 'stack ht' being so much more than I had on my other shoes and raised my saddle by about 1.5cm. That was when it was set relatively low compared to now.

mIKE

[ultraman6970]

As older you get the knees get more sensitive, feet the same. It sucks get older (for some stuff, not for everything) :D

[benb]

I've noticed my knees getting more sensitive to saddle position over the years but I'm now starting to think a lot of it is muscle imbalances from making cycling my primary activity for years.

Mostly my hips with respect to lateral motion.. my right knee is much worse then my left knee and I've noticed my hip is much weaker on that side. Not with respect to hip extension or flexion, but the ability to raise my leg out to the side.. (gluteus medius) I can also see it if I try stand one legged on that leg.. it's much harder on that leg.

Last spring I landed in PT and they had me start working on strengthening my hips to get past my injury. This fall I've been working on it in the weight room and it's making a night and day difference. It seems to stabilize the motion of my knee when pedaling. You usually don't see too many hip exercises prescribed for off season training for cyclists but I did find it recommended for cyclists in an older book on weight training I have.

The other thing is calf strength.. I think mine has decreased quite a bit if you consider strength across the entire range of motion. This is supposedly a result of holding your ankle in close to a fixed position while pedaling. When my calf gets tight cycling it seems to contribute to knee pain.

[cmg]

after years of knee pain went to speedplay pedals, knee pain went away after the correct saddle height was established. foot pain from improperly spaced cleats became the new problem. took awhile to get it right and getting older doesn't help either.

[Charles M]

Am I just imagining this?

TIA
Louis


This is as personal as saddle shape...


Really nobody's advice is good for you as you simply changed something pretty controled and it resulted in "X".

I have a significant shim on one side in all shoes because if I dont, I can get what you got in a single ride... That others might not means squat to me and should to you as well.


I would make sure to rest the Knee properly and get a shim in the other shoe. That would be the only answer to my question if I were you...


I might also have a PT look at me and possibly get xrays to precisely measure leg lenth (because your body can make some pretty big compensation bends that will have the typical eyeball and motion test only tell you how much your body is already tightly off ballance).


In short. a small adjustment can make for big problems for some people and the only relevant comment here will come from you,,,

[rugbysecondrow]

I think Ben hit on something that can likely help regardless of your shims or MM differences. Cross train, maybe take less time on the bike and mix in some running, racquetball or basketball, swimming or jump rope...mix it up. I am not a PT (only pretend occasionally on the internet) but I can say that cross training is not only physically important, but also fun. I really enjoy riding, but I have been running and cross-training much more the past few weeks and haven't been riding for about 10 days...I feel great.

Regarding your MM differences, I have a Brooks saddle that can flex many MMs, during the ride based on where I am sitting, I move on the saddle based on what I am doing, so all those little fluctuations don't impact me. I guess I am not so locked in to one position for so long that a couple of MM have bothered me.

Best of luck.

I've noticed my knees getting more sensitive to saddle position over the years but I'm now starting to think a lot of it is muscle imbalances from making cycling my primary activity for years.

Mostly my hips with respect to lateral motion.. my right knee is much worse then my left knee and I've noticed my hip is much weaker on that side. Not with respect to hip extension or flexion, but the ability to raise my leg out to the side.. (gluteus medius) I can also see it if I try stand one legged on that leg.. it's much harder on that leg.

Last spring I landed in PT and they had me start working on strengthening my hips to get past my injury. This fall I've been working on it in the weight room and it's making a night and day difference. It seems to stabilize the motion of my knee when pedaling. You usually don't see too many hip exercises prescribed for off season training for cyclists but I did find it recommended for cyclists in an older book on weight training I have.

The other thing is calf strength.. I think mine has decreased quite a bit if you consider strength across the entire range of motion. This is supposedly a result of holding your ankle in close to a fixed position while pedaling. When my calf gets tight cycling it seems to contribute to knee pain.

[spamjoshua]

There are so many factors at play, it can be hard to narrow down the ource of the issue.

I know that for me, I am both very tuned to my saddle height, and also that the current state of my hamstrings and calves, how much stretching I have been doing, greatly affects the angle at which my ankle comes through the bottom of my stroke.

Muscle balance between quads and hamstrings, as mentioned, and stretching, can matter as much or more for me than a few mm here or there on the bike.

Trust your joints, if they are complaining, something is indeed wrong.

[Bob Ross]

Based on you previous experience of tweaking your saddle position, how many mm motion up or down do you think it would take for you to then begin to have knee issues?

Just recently went through this experiment. My saddle height got dialed in during a professional fitting I had almost 2 years ago. But this summer I started getting the idea that I wanted to try raising my saddle, because there was this somewhat indescribable sensation in my legs that they just wanted to be extending farther. So I tried raising the saddle by ~1.5cm.

Well, that was insane (obviously) and after about 5 miles I had to stop and lower it back to where it had been previously.

Next time out I tried a more modest change: 5mm
...and after 20 or 30 miles, I had knee pain. (Or rather -- since I have crappy knees & pretty much always have some kind of knee pain no matter what activity I'm doing -- I had a new type of knee pain.)

I tried splitting the difference: ~2 or 3mm. Same result: 20 or 30 miles into a ride, knee pain. So I put the saddle height back to where it was. No more knee pain...but still that weird sensation that I wanted to be extending my legs farther than they were going. On principal I moved it the proverbial RCH higher than that specified by my fitter just so I felt like I'd changed something, but it's probably barely 1mm higher than before.

Finally, Carl Strong suggested I try moving my saddle back in order to alleviate that sensation, and after a few trials at different setback distances, I settled on ~4mm farther back from where my fitter had put me. No knee pain, and I don't seem to get that sensation of wanting to be higher anymore.

[benb]

I think Ben hit on something that can likely help regardless of your shims or MM differences. Cross train, maybe take less time on the bike and mix in some running, racquetball or basketball, swimming or jump rope...mix it up. I am not a PT (only pretend occasionally on the internet) but I can say that cross training is not only physically important, but also fun. I really enjoy riding, but I have been running and cross-training much more the past few weeks and haven't been riding for about 10 days...I feel great.



The crap thing about it is at least for me I feel like my cycling has gotten me to the point where it has negatively impacted my ability to cross train.

E.x. the hip + ankle make it much harder for me to run without sustaining injury, and I'm fairly certain it was what caused me to have so much trouble trying out some martial arts classes last winter.

Meanwhile over the years I keep looking for a mm here or a mm there that is going to make everything magically better, when the solution is probably doing something else besides cycling.

[rugbysecondrow]

The crap thing about it is at least for me I feel like my cycling has gotten me to the point where it has negatively impacted my ability to cross train.

E.x. the hip + ankle make it much harder for me to run without sustaining injury, and I'm fairly certain it was what caused me to have so much trouble trying out some martial arts classes last winter.

Meanwhile over the years I keep looking for a mm here or a mm there that is going to make everything magically better, when the solution is probably doing something else besides cycling.

I understand. For me, I came to riding via triathlons so the bike has been an extension of my cross-training from the beginning. I ride about 3 times a week, lift weights/strength train about 3-4 times a week and run 1-2. During the winter I will ride 1-2 times and run 2-3 times. For me, I need to keep a balance. I want to be a better rider, but at the expense of what?