A few years ago I sprained my ankle while hiking. Though I recovered from the sprain itself, I had some occasional lower leg issues, mostly after strenuous hikes. I finally went to a physical therapist.
What I learned from my pt is that, to protect against a repeat injury, I had unconsciously started rotating my left foot toe out. As I’d started to suspect, this was affecting my cycling. When I set up my cleats for the first time a little over a year ago, I just went with how much my feet normally rotated. It turns out that led to over use of certain muscles on the outside/front of my upper leg. Especially if I didn’t stretch carefully, and if there was even a little fatigue in those muscles, it could led to failure in workouts and other cycling issues. While I have some exercises to do to fix the issue for hiking, I just changed the rotation of my cleat, and drastically improved the left leg issues I was having.
However, I am now using other muscles on my left leg that had been neglected, most noticeably the inside of my left leg above my knee. This still feels much better and not likely to cause me to fail workouts. But I did bump my workout down a few watts. I think I’m using the right muscles to the right degree now, but some are underdeveloped, especially compared to the same muscles on my right leg.
I think I have a leg imbalance–though I don’t currently have a way to confirm this. However, during my recent threshold workout, during a later interval, I found it harder to keep up my power and realized that I was using my left leg less–the inner leg muscle burning (I don’t know if this is the best description) I’d been experiencing had gone away. I consciously used my left leg more and fixed that temporarily, allowing me to put out more watts, though that muscle burning came back. So, questions:
1 Will just training as normal fix this imbalance? I would guess so, but I’d love to hear from anyone who has been in a similar situation.
2 Are there any exercises, either on or off the bike that might help speed that?
3 My power meter is spider based (Power2Max NGeco) so there is no way that I could get 100% accurate information about leg balance, but I could buy a software upgrade for 50 € to get an estimate of left/right balance. That data had never seemed worth paying for before, but I’m wondering if it could help confirm and correct any imbalance? Basically, is it worth it?
(Before anyone asks, my PT has given the okay to keep doing all the cycling and hiking I’ve been doing so far. I’ll probably bring this up in our next session, but since she’s not a cycling specialist, I think I may learn more from this forum. If this really is just a muscle strength issue, I don’t think it falls under a PT’s purview)