Insights / pain and patterns

Why the Same Spot Keeps Tightening on the Bike

Nicholas Barbousas / Rolfing Melbourne, Clifton Hill

If you ride regularly, you probably know the pattern. The same side of your lower back tightens after a couple of hours. One knee starts complaining on climbs while the other never does. Your neck and upper shoulders feel fine early in the ride, then become increasingly uncomfortable later in the morning, somewhere around the second lap of Kew Boulevard.

You stretch it or get it massaged, it settles, and then it comes back.

When a problem keeps returning to the same place, I find a more useful question is:

What is this area being asked to do, thousands of times, on every ride?

The bike magnifies small differences

Cycling is repetitive and relatively constrained. Your legs repeat a similar movement over and over, your pelvis is supported by the saddle, and your hands are on the bars. Your trunk supports you while your head stays oriented forward to watch the road. That's a lot of repetition within a fairly consistent movement pattern.

Now add a small difference between the two sides. It could be one hip moving a little differently from the other, one foot loading the pedal differently, a pelvis that tends to rotate slightly on the saddle, or an old injury that changed how you organise movement years ago. Off the bike you might barely notice, but over a three-hour ride that small difference comes along for thousands of repetitions.

Your body will still find a way to get the job done, because adapting to demand is something it does remarkably well. What interests me is how it's doing it, and what that strategy asks of the rest of the body over time.

The sore spot is one part of the pattern

Take one-sided lower back tightness. Your lower back may genuinely be working hard, and the reason could lie in how load is being shared elsewhere: one hip contributing differently from the other, the pelvis organising itself asymmetrically on the saddle, or the upper body adjusting for something happening below. Often several small differences are interacting at once.

These adjustments are strategies, and often clever ones, because they keep you riding. The difficulty comes when the same strategy is used ride after ride and the same tissues keep doing more than their share of the work. That area tends to be the one you notice first.

Sometimes a tight muscle really is just a tired muscle, but recurring problems deserve a wider look.

Signs it's worth looking at the bigger pattern

It’s worth taking a broader look when:

  • the same spot returns after treatment or stretching
  • it’s almost always the same side
  • symptoms appear at a predictable point, such as after a certain time in the saddle or a long climb
  • increasing your weekly kilometres reliably brings the problem back
  • two or three areas tend to become uncomfortable together
  • changing your riding position or bike setup changes the symptoms

Each of these is a clue, and clues need testing before they mean anything.

How I work through it

Looking at how someone stands, moves and organises themselves gives me a starting point, which I then test. My clinical reasoning follows a simple sequence:

I look for differences in how movement and load are being organised, then test whether they're related to the problem you're feeling. If they are, we work with them and re-check. If nothing meaningful changes, the idea probably isn’t explaining enough of the problem, so we look elsewhere.

Plenty of asymmetries turn out to be irrelevant, so my job is to find out which ones matter for you.

Your bike is part of the system

When you ride regularly, you and the bike function together. Saddle position, reach, bar position, cleat setup and other aspects of bike fit all influence the demands on your body.

If the bike setup is contributing to the problem, bodywork alone is unlikely to resolve it. Equally, a good bike fit won't necessarily show how the rider is organising movement Equally, a good bike fit won’t necessarily tell us everything about how the rider is organising movement. Often both deserve attention, and if you're already working with a bike fitter, I'm very happy for the two approaches to sit alongside each other.

What we're aiming for

Nobody is perfectly symmetrical, and you don’t need to be. Many left-right differences cause no trouble at all.

What matters more is whether your body has options. Can it share load as the demands of the ride change? Can different areas contribute when required? Or does it keep returning to the same strategy until one area becomes overworked?

So in a session I’m looking at the relationships within the pattern, asking questions such as:

  • Where is movement available, and where is it limited?
  • Where is load being absorbed?
  • Which areas may be doing more work than others?
  • If we change one part of the pattern, what happens somewhere else?

What repetition can tell us

One ride tells us very little, while hundreds of rides reveal the strategies your body tends to prefer. Repetition doesn’t necessarily create the problem, but it can make the pattern easier to see. So if the same area keeps tightening as your riding volume goes up, a good place to start is asking:

Why does my body keep giving this area so much of the work?