Well, I decided to take the plunge and try myvelofit premium. TLDR: I felt like I got zero value from it.
For context, I have had a Retul fit 5 years ago on a different road bike. I also feel like I have a very dialed (self) fit on my gravel bike. But I have a new road bike and it’s more aggressive stack and I’m running shorter cranks (165 mm) and a much narrower bar (33 cm). Riding the bike outdoors, I could tell the current setup wasn’t quite right but I was unsure what the issue was. So I felt that I could use another “opinion” on my fit.
Well, I did the flexibility evaluation and got good to moderate on all criteria. Then I got to fitting the bike and selected a performance-oriented fit. Uploaded my videos and … it felt everything was good, no suggestions. Huh.
So then I purposely started messing with seat height and setback to see how it would respond. It was happy with surprisingly high saddle heights. It complained about my back angle way more than had any relevance. I then tried to get to more optimal recommendations for the various angles, but subjectively my fit was getting worse.
I was being very methodical and only changing one thing at a time and then riding at 90% FTP for several minutes before taking the video and uploading it. This took lots of time to experiment with. It was getting frustrating.
All the while I was re-watching YouTube videos of Neil Stanbury (Road Cycling Academy) and James Thomas (Cade Media) to help guide me. Finally, I decided to give up on MVF and go purely subjective and use Neil’s guidance. I quickly settled into a better fit than MVF was giving me.
While I was testing out my last tweak, I came upon the below video that really hit the nail on the head of why fitting via video is not going to work well.
The summary is there’s three things that are red flags in bike fitting (he’s talking about in-person fits, but it applies to apps even more so):
- Relying on joint angle measurements. You have to judge the motion, not the angles. (What’s worse is MVF only looks at the side, not the front and back, so a lot of important motion is missing)
- Fail to conduct physical assessment. Although MVF does optionally have you do an assessment, it is really simplistic and can’t see any left/right differences.
- Disregarding a leg length discrepancy. Even 2 mm difference usually requires fixing via shims. MVF has no idea if you have a discrepancy and can’t address it.