Bike Fit Question – Glutes firing a lot!

Equipment
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Hi everyone,

On my road bike my glutes are firing a ton… Usually this is cited as a good thing, but often they are fatiguing more than my quads!

Any ideas what this means about my bike fit? And potential things to try to find a position that will give a more equal distribution of load?

Cheers!
Dan

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I am far from an expert on dialing in loading on muscle groups, but I think it’s important to share some pictures of your existing bike setup for anyone to have even a chance at helping here. Side shots at a minimum, with you in your most common or problematic position as best as you can guess.

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I’m super interested in the results of this thread because… my glutes don’t fire at all! And physical therapists are always telling me my posterior chain is weak.

1 Like
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I’ve been having a similar thing recently. The first couple crits of the year and when I finish both glutes feel like they got punched.

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In general, the saddle further forward causes more quad engagement and further back causes more hamstring/glute engagement. Since everything is connected this doesn’t mean you can change this one thing to fix it. For example saddle for/aft also impacts your center of gravity so if you have your center of gravity forward you can put too much weight on your hands.

For me getting shorter cranks (172.5->165) 2 months ago helped engaging my glutes and hamstrings more (more impact on my glutes) This has the negative impact of my glutes being way underpowered vs my quads so not really fixed yet. It also caused more engagement of my quads higher up my leg. I didn’t have any major noticeable issue originally but when getting a fit with a leomo device getting my fit good for the bottom of the pedal stroke hurt the top of the stroke. Trying to make sense of this led to looking up hip impingement which seemed to fit:

The problem is my hands got much more sore after my first century of the year last weekend then I would have expected. But I don’t think my glutes can handle the saddle being back further and putting more load on my glutes if the hand pain is from a center of balance issue

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also can be useful to see where in the pedal stroke the muscle is supposed to be used to know which part of the pedal stroke needs to be looks at: The Primary Muscles Used for Cycling and How to Train Them