Tight chest during the bike leg

Triathlon Forum
1

During my second triathlon on the weekend, I noticed that I was getting a tight chest on the bike (below the ribs on each side) to fix this, I had to sit up and drop my heart rate and take some deeper breaths. I ride with my cockpit very low, putting my body in a very flat position while I am on the aero bars.

Am I riding too low on the bars or could this be a different fit problem? everything else is comfortable but I wasted about 30 seconds to a minute sitting up out of the aero bars to get recomposed and I would rather stay in them.

2

Sounds like your hip angle is too compressed. Possible solutions:

  1. Get your saddle steeper
  2. Get shorter cranks
  3. Raise your bars up and sacrifice a bit of aero for comfort (which will be faster anyway if you’re having to sit up)

Difficult to tell which it is without seeing pics, and even pics are no substitute for a good fitting.

4 Likes
3

Thanks for the reply, I had a feeling that might be the problem.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G4VNQw1hyqo

so I took a video of my current position that might help some of the diagnosis. I’ve thought about shorter cranks, not sure what I should be look at, these are 172.5 in length.

I would prefer to keep the bars where they are but work out a different solution

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4

Your position is not that low. And the 172.5mm cranks look fine. My guess is that you were going too hard.

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5

You really aren’t very low. Your position is a bit relaxed, not aggressive at all.

Your shirt is loose - how lean are you? How strong is your core? How experienced are you? My bet is that you went too hard based on your overall fitness and strength.

Remember, things are very different at race intensity, so the reaction to things like fluids and nutrition change dramatically with intensity.

Consistent steady progress is likely your answer.

6

His position isn’t that low…but maybe its’ the camera angle…that shirt doesn’t; help, but I think he’s a bit of a shorter stocker build, so his hip angle does look fairly closed. He would benefit from a nose-less saddle so he can rotate his hip forward, and/or shorter cranks. If that’s a size small frame and he’s <5’9", he might want to try 165’s.

I hate to be blunt… but if he has a decent size gut (can’t tell with that shirt on), he’s low enough that it could be restricting breathing a little.

I also agree that overall fitness comes into play. It’s easy to let the adrenaline take over in a race and go a LOT…I mean a LOT harder than in practice. I remember in sprint looking down and seeing my HR pegged… then wondering why late in the ride my legs were toast and I had cramping issues on the run. I bet is some folks has a powermeter, despite having for example a 250W FTP, they’d see tons of 500+ watts efforts in an Olympic distance. Riding at 200% isn’t ideal for good pacing.

1 Like
7

Sorry about all that!

  1. Camera angle was hard with it coming off my phone on the dining table haha. Also sorry about the top, just came back from the gym! haha
  2. I do have a little bit of a gut, I’m probably about 5kg above six pack / flat ab level.
  3. I did go really hard, I felt like my first race I was a bit lazy, so I took 3 minutes off my time for this race which put me about 30th out of 600 for the bike leg. So overall pushed harder than I normally would have.
  4. I would like to get more aggressive with my position but my stem is 90mm enve stem which has 0 rise or fall in the angle but is slammed.
  5. Frame size is a medium and I am currently testing the specialized sitero saddle which has less of a nose.
  6. Experience: I started riding just over 6 months ago, this is my second triathlon and I’ve had about 10 rides on this bike overall with 2 of them being in a race.

So all in all I was probably going harder than usual and lack some core strength and fitness. I’m not sure how I can adjust my position but this has been pretty fast so far, just don’t want to get injured!