Is an Online Bike Fit Actually Practical?

So, as a cyclist, or a triathlete, you take some solace in the fact that most of the exercises you enjoy and need to pursue are still safe to do during this pandemic. There are still plenty of places you can go are you can safely ride a bike, run or what have you. You don’t really need a gym, and any gym-related exercises to do want to perform for a rounded healthy lifestyle, you can really do it home even if you don’t have equipment. That just takes a little bit of ingenuity that most of you have probably long since mastered, given how expensive gym memberships are anyway, how many jerks there are engines, and how expensive the equipment is even for home use.

However, even before this pandemic, you probably wished there was a more convenient and effective way to get a road bike fitting, as taking your bike to a shopping going through all the major moments in communication with specialists often took a big chunk out of your day, and you’re a busy person, who isn’t? Well, bike shops have offered online bike fit services for a long time, and I will be the first to say that the original implementations didn’t work all that well, because the Internet and computing themselves were a little too limited and not quite as well-implemented as they are now.

That said, the past 15 years or so have seen the Internet evolve considerably, and the proliferation of portable Internet-ready devices has furthered people’s integration of the digital into their daily lives by a factor of 1000. Even so, the past year and a half or so, ever since this pandemic has had society on lockdown, as seen the Internet evolve add an extremely accelerated rate above and beyond even that, due to necessity. Originally, it probably would’ve been another 10 years before food delivery and grocery delivery services were as popular as they are now, and things like telecommuting for work and school probably would’ve taken another 25 years to be grudgingly accepted by the boards of education and employers around the world.

Well, all of this is here to stay now, because nobody in their right mind is going to be willing to return to their cubicle when the pandemic is over, or return to the school that they were sick of seeing. So, even after this pandemic, the changes that have happened in our lives are permanent, for the most part.

But is an online bike fit practical, how does it even work?

So, how would you get a road bike fitting done over the Internet should mark right now, it’s really not safe to be going into bike shops unnecessarily, and a lot of bike shops don’t want you in there unless you have an appointment due to try to control the capacity of people and so forth. Don’t hold that against them, they are just trying to be safe!

Well, this works in a couple different ways, depending. There exist apps they can simply use a little bit of AI in scripting to ask you questions about your preferences, your bike model, some biometric data about your measurements, your terrain and what have you, and then recommend the best products within the budget you specify. This is how it always used to work back in the day, but these applications and the AI behind them are far more sophisticated than they were previously.

The other approach, which is kind of a hybridization of this and the old-fashioned way of going into the shop, is to talk to an expert who may themselves be working from home, or be working from the shop, just not with the shop accessible to the public. Using the AI to expedite it, so that they can see the many people they need to talk to, they will guide you through what you need, and how to make the installations yourself once they ship you the parts. Really, these adjustments and modifications aren’t hard to do, especially if you have them to talk you through it.