#2. Steve Hogg

There hasn't been a single person or organisation that has made as much bike fitting information readily available and free to the public than Steve. His bike fitting website/blog is the most detailed, informative and viewed bike fitting resource in the world today and Steve has committed an immeasurable amount of his own personal time, over many years to answering troubled cyclists questions and emails from all over the world, in the hope the advice he can provide, will help both them and others resolve their positional issues. 

Steve has been in the industry for over 30 years and you can check out his CV here.  ..... It's impressive!

When I started the business, I already had ideas about training with Steve; that was my goal, but like anything in life you have to gain experience and put the work in and so I set myself the challenge of an apprenticeship. I said give myself 5-6 years and if I feel ready I’ll go for it … if he’ll accept me. The thing was, Steve didn’t accept everyone that applied to train with him and he definitely didn’t rubber stamp everyone either.

I’d been corresponding with Steve for probably 8 or 9 years and in 2018 during a visit to the UK  I met with Steve, by invitation, to take a look at some methods he was currently developing. Steve was keen to get across the idea that bike fitting is more about bodies than bikes, in the sense that the more functional issues we can fix for the client before they get on their bike, the better the outcome. I was intrigued further and so in 2019 I packed my bags and my bicycle and flew for 26 hours to Canberra Australia to spend three weeks with Steve and his wife Margaret immersing myself in learning Steve’s low velocity mobilisation and foot correction protocols, hanging by the pool, soaking up the Australian sun, eating amazing food and riding bikes.   

I personally think Steve is a rare breed. He seems to be one of the people in the world that can retain information better than most. So for example, my brain works like a hard drive, I fill it up, but then when I want to immerse myself in a new topic, space needs to be cleared on the hard drive to make way for the new data, in other words I forget things, or when I have the answer, I throw out the working in how I got to the answer. With Steve I think there’s just 100TB more ram in there. When he speaks, he might recall a book he read in the 80’s and start talking about it as if he’s literally reading off the paper. My point here is that I find people like this are much better at assimilating data, processing it and developing new ideas. It seems to be a ‘thing’.  Most people are “in the box”- thinking about things from the most obvious perspective - but Steve is different and I think that is very much on display in his online blog.

The idea that one might think about bike fitting from a neurological point of view rater than a bio-mechanical point of view really struck me the first time I read it all those years ago, that every motion performed on a bicycle starts with a signal from the brain, it seemed to me to be quite profound. Mainly I think, because I was trying to solve my own bike fitting issues with the primitive attitude that a formula or knee angle was all I needed.  Now as a bike fitter, I have taken that idea, that basic premise and developed my own ideas and bike fitting practice around it.

So what is the basic premise?

This basic premise is the starting point for this blog.  Please read it here, because in my opinion it is the starting point for a bike fitter, it is what people should think about when they think about bike fitting and not the centralised images you find all over the internet.

  I would say there is actually a subsection to functional challenges as well, which I will call environmental challenges. In the main that is nnEMF and if you read my “Is Zwift killing you?” article you can learn more about my thoughts on those issues there.

But for now, the three main challenges to a riders position in space are functional, positional and neurological. If we work to reduce those - then we work in a decentralised fashion to achieve individualised outcomes for each rider we fit.