How to deal with numbness & pain while cycling…

How to deal with numbness & pain while cycling…

Today on RIDE with Coach Parry, coach Devlin Eyden and Brad Brown talk about dealing with numbness and shoulder & back pain that comes with riding a bike...

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How to deal with numbness and pain while cycling

 

BRAD
Welcome on to this edition of a RIDE with Coach Parry. I'm Brad Brown. And with me, we've got our cycling coach Devlin Eyden. Dev, welcome back. Nice to touch base and catch up once again.

DEVLIN
Thanks, Brad. Yeah, good to be here and excited for things to come.

BRAD
Yeah, Dev, we've taken a bit of a hiatus on the cycling stuff. And it's not that we're not doing it anymore. it's just we've been so busy, sort of doing stuff behind the scenes, but the groundwork has been laid. We've got some exciting things happening here at Coach Parry. I mentioned in one of our previous videos that we're going to be introducing the entire team here behind coachparry.com on these videos and on the podcast. And if you're into cycling, triathlon, running, we've got you covered and we want to be able to learn from the entire team. So that's exactly what we doing today.

Dev, a great question in on the forums on the Coach Parry online community, someone was asking about pain and numbness when they cycling, they're finding that once they've been on the bike for a little while they start getting some numbness in their hands and in various other places. And also their neck and shoulder really starts hurting. What can you do? I mean, this is fairly common, particularly when you starting out and you start going longer than you used to. But what can you do to sort of counteract it? Is it a case of a cup of cement for breakfast? Or are there things you can do to get over it?

 

Check your bike setup

 

DEVLIN
Well, look, before we start prescribing cement I think let's get the biomechanics out the way. Look, first and foremost would be to start off with corrections in bike setup. So whether you've had a setup done and might need a little bit of tweaking or haven't actually got that far yet, that's going to be first and foremost. So when you start talking about things like numbness in the hands, for instance, more often than not the actual reach from your saddle height down to your handlebars might be too drastic, so your seat might be much higher than what your bars are. So that changes centre of gravity quite a lot and you've actually got a lot of pressure on the hands.

So your reach and your drop itself needs to be looked at from a setup point of view. And then we start talking equipment in the sense of decent grips. So if it's a mountain bike, maybe sort of foam grips rather than the hard sort of standard grips that they come out with, road bike maybe look at it kind of bar tape that you using as well. Then with that, I would say sort of focus a little bit more on the contact points on the bike. So especially when you're dealing with obviously your hands, good gel padding underneath the nerves on your hands as well is quite important. That generally helps quite a lot with the numbness.

When you talk about stiff neck and shoulders, again, the drop could be an issue because you could be really low reaching and have to really strain your neck quite a lot to look up the road. And then in saying that maybe to have a bit more of the background of the rider would be key as well just, are you a beginner starting out because more often than not I find with beginners a lot of tension and nerves on the bike. So gripping the handlebars as tight as possible because they're a little bit nervous, that comes with practice with a bit more skill and building confidence where you start to relax a little bit and just relax the upper body a bit on the bike as well.

The idea is not to have too much pressure on the hands not to be too strained because that also then affects handling of the bike and that sort of thing. So I think first and foremost let's look biomechanically, maybe have your setup double checked and then from there start looking at the equipment that you're dealing with before we then move on to possible strength and conditioning as well which could always help.

BRAD
Yeah, absolutely. And that's an easy fix, Dev, I mean getting a bike setup, we see it so often people buy bikes and they skimp on getting a professional bike setup as opposed to someone looking and closing their one eye and looking at angles that way. Go to someone who knows what they're doing. It's worth the money that you spend and it's definitely going to help. And something that I found that helps for the numbness on the hands, Dev, is if you cut a pool noodle and you then put it over the handlebars. It's nice and thick, it's soft...I'm kidding, don't go cutting up a pool noodle!

DEVLIN
I was gonna say the thing with the pool noodle's a little bit fatter so it affects your gripping on the bike so no, don't do that.

BRAD
I've got big hands, it doesn't work. Dev, it's been great catching up. Don't forget if you want some help, we've got a whole bunch of training programmes as well. If you want access to all of our coaches, Devlin, triathlon coach, running coach, all you need to do is head over to coachparry.com/cycling. That's where you can get all the details from our online training platform.

 

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