Twenty Years Asking Better Questions

One of the more interesting questions I've been asked recently wasn't about saddle height, crank length, or why your riding buddy is absolutely convinced that one more spacer under the stem will solve all of life's problems, when clearly, removing all the spacers is the only correct answer. Joking. It came from the International Bike Fit Institute as part of their highest level of certification (Level 4). Among the questions was one that seemed perfectly reasonable on its face:

How many bike fits have you performed?

I stared at it for a while.

I've been fitting cyclists professionally since 2004. Somewhere along the way I owned a dedicated fit studio, completed graduate research in exercise physiology and biomechanics, earned a master's degree focused on cycling biomechanics, taught bike fitting around the world, worked in product development, and eventually opened RedEye Service Course. I honestly have no idea how many riders I've fit over the last two decades.

At this point, any number I gave would be somewhere between an educated guess and complete fiction.

The more I thought about the question, the less convinced I became that the answer actually mattered. If someone has performed 10,000 bike fits but still approaches every rider with the same protocol or leans into the same piece of technology, are they necessarily a better fitter than someone who has completed fewer but spent those years questioning assumptions, studying cycling and non-cycling movement, and refining the way they solve problems? Experience certainly matters, but only if it changes the way you think.

So that was essentially my answer.

A few days later I received a response from the certification committee that genuinely surprised me. They explained that the IBFI had recently revised their certification framework because simply recording the number of completed bike fits wasn't, by itself, a meaningful measure of competence. Instead, they now place greater emphasis on breadth of experience, continued professional development, contributions to the profession, clinical reasoning, and the ability to consistently achieve positive outcomes for riders.

Reading that felt strangely validating. Not because they awarded this classification—although I certainly wasn't going to argue with that—but because it reflected something I've believed for a very long time. The best bike fitters aren't the ones with the longest spreadsheet. They're the ones who never stop asking better questions.

That idea has quietly shaped almost every decision I've made throughout my career.

When I began fitting riders in 2004, bike fitting looked very different than it does today. Motion capture systems weren't commonplace. Pressure mapping was still years away from becoming widely available. We learned by watching riders, making thoughtful changes, and paying close attention to what happened next. For a lot of people, it just wasn’t intuitive and they fell off.

Looking back, I think that was a gift.

Observation came before technology. You couldn't hide behind software because there wasn't any software to hide behind. If a rider's knee tracked differently from one side to the other, or their hips shifted under load, or they continually overloaded one hand, you had to notice it yourself. More importantly, you had to figure out why it was happening.

As technology entered the profession, I embraced it enthusiastically. I became an instructor, teaching bike fit internationally. I worked extensively with motion capture systems, pressure mapping, and many of the tools that have become standard throughout the industry. Like many fitters, I believed technology would answer questions we hadn't previously been able to solve.

In a few ways, it did. Technology made documentation better. In some cases, and occasionally it improved communication with riders. It helped create consistency and allowed us to quantify changes that had previously relied on observation alone. While I was all in with tech for a few years, I don’t really use any of those tools anymore becuase I found they are actually a barrier to the more human connection and although they can be consistent, they mostly just consistently prevented me from being one with the rider in front of me - that became my arch nemesis in terms of outcomes.

The better the technology became, the more obvious its limitations became as well.

Two riders could produce remarkably similar motion capture reports while describing completely different experiences on the bike. One rider would comfortably ride six hours while another developed back pain after ninety minutes. One rider would constantly overload the left side despite appearing nearly symmetrical on camera - especially when the system is single-sided (don’t get me started). Another would have recurring knee pain that couldn't be explained by joint angles alone.

The software wasn't wrong. It just wasn't asking the same questions I was and that realization changed the trajectory of my career more than anything else.

Rather than looking for another bike fitting course, I began looking outside the bicycle industry altogether. If I wanted to understand why people moved the way they did, why certain tissues became painful, or why some riders compensated in predictable ways while others didn't, the answers probably weren't going to come from another seminar about saddle height.

So I went looking elsewhere.

That pursuit eventually led me into formal clinical training in manual therapy. I left the bicycle industry for a period of time to study soft tissue dysfunction, neuromuscular behavior, movement quality, and hands-on assessment under clinicians whose patients couldn't simply solve their problems by raising the handlebars five millimeters.

It fundamentally changed the way I see cyclists. The bicycle stopped being the starting point and the rider became the starting, middle, and end point.

That perspective also changed the way I think about expertise. Somewhere along the way our profession began equating experience with repetition and investment in technology. We talk about how many fits someone has completed, how many years they've been fitting, or how many certifications hang on the wall or what tools they use. In fact, the technology is all many bike fitters even advertise.

Those things matter. But only to a point.

Real expertise isn't performing the same bike fit thousands of times. It's allowing every rider to challenge your assumptions. It's recognizing when your current explanation doesn't quite fit the problem in front of you, then having enough curiosity to spend the next year—or the next decade—finding a better explanation.

Looking back now, what once felt like a collection of unrelated experiences makes much more sense.

Owning Structured Cycles wasn't separate from teaching bike fitting internationally. Teaching wasn't separate from graduate research. Graduate research wasn't separate from clinical education. Product development, biomechanics, coaching, manual therapy, and eventually RedEye Service Course were never isolated chapters. They were all different attempts to answer the same question.

How do we better understand the rider sitting in front of us?

That question still drives my work every day.

Recently, the International Bike Fit Institute awarded me their Level 4 – Master Bike Fitter certification. It recognizes me as someone who has not only achieved a level of fitting quality that matters, but it also means I am capable of effectively mentoring other fitters looking to learn the depths of what’s possible within the scope of bike fit. I'm grateful for the recognition, but if I'm honest, the title itself isn't what means the most to me. What matters is that an independent organization looked beyond numbers and protocols and chose to recognize curiosity, continued education, contribution to the profession, and the pursuit of better outcomes for riders.

I find that encouraging—not for me, but for the profession. Because riders deserve more than someone who knows how to adjust a bicycle. Riders deserve more than kinematics and quantifying their pedaling. They deserve someone who's spent a career trying to understand the person riding it.

After more than twenty years, I still don't believe I've figured it all out. In fact, I hope I never do. Every difficult rider who walks through the door teaches me something new. Every unusual compensation, every persistent pain pattern, every problem that refuses to fit neatly into a protocol reminds me that human movement is wonderfully complex.

And that's probably why I still love doing this.

The goal has never been to collect degrees, certifications, or letters after my name. Those have simply been milestones along the way. The real goal has always been much simpler: to become a little better each year at helping riders solve problems that once seemed unsolvable.

If that's the kind of bike fit you're looking for, I'd be honored to help.