Cycling Insoles – For More Power In Your Pedal
A cyclist can spin their wheels between 5,000 and 7,000 times per hour.
With this amount of repetition, proper cycling biomechanics is necessary in avoiding overuse injuries and enhancing performance.
Enhance Your Cycling Performance
Orthotics for Cycling cleats are designed to provide foot stability for efficient pedalling and lower extremity alignment by:
1. Improve the cycling economy
2. Provide postural stability
3. Improve pressure distribution across the sole of the foot to restore 1st ray load-bearing
4. Proprioception and biomechanics of bi-pedal motion can be improved with the use of full contact custom orthotics
avoid your risk of overuse injuries
Overuse injuries are the leading cause of a rider needing to stop.
Orthotics are commonly recommended for cycling to decrease pain, injury, and improve performance.
Many professional riders use orthotics for these reasons.
Custom Orthotics play a significant role in improving biomechanics and neurosensory input.
Simply put they are an incredible asset to your riding economy.
Why?
The body does everything it can to produce a consistent and efficient force to the feet and pedals.
Everything the body does amounts to the force produced in this area.
Body imbalances as well as poor bike fit can drastically affect this.
Cycling Shoes May work against you
If you look at a cycling shoe, it is very stiff and flat. Creating maximal surface area for the foot to contact the pedal.
However, if there is a flat overpronated foot, it remains in a flat, overpronated position in this shoe without support.
Energy can easily be lost at this weak link in the chain of force up the leg.
Due to compensations for poor biomechanics, tissues can be overstretched or stressed, which commonly causes injury and pain.
A fully supportive and corrective orthotic in your cycling shoes creates a better-supinated posture that translates into more rigidity and greater transfer of power.
‘‘But the only contact point with the pedal is the ball of the foot?”
A chain is only as strong as its weakest link.
Energy has to be delivered from the legs, core, and upper body down through the foot and ankle to the pedal.
If you are flat-footed, a significant amount of the force you place on your feet will stretch and flatten the middle of the foot, resulting in a large loss of pedal power.
Some of the energy also goes to creating abnormal tissue stresses as the mid-foot attempts to achieve stability and transfer force.
Also your leg muscles, such as the posterior tibialis, must spend extra energy trying to stabilise tarsal (mid-foot) posture.
Proprioceptive Feedback
Orthotics majorly enhance your functional performance while cycling.
But another major benefit of full contact cycling orthotics is that you won’t even need to think about it. The orthotics put you in an optimal position so you can concentrate on the race!
Proprioception is more simply just referring to the relationship between your movement and your brain in any environment.
Without proprioception, a rider is completely dependent on external feedback to make adjustments to body position, power output, and tactics.
This is akin to playing a sport without access to a scoreboard or video replays.
Imagine playing football without being able to see where the ball is or if your teammates are open.
Without proprioception, a cyclist can only rely on their own internal sensations and the limited feedback they can get from their bike and the road.
It is what lets us know where our limbs are without looking, and without it, riding would be impossible.
Proprioception is the sense that tells us where our limbs are without looking. It is made up of receptors that tell your brain where your limbs are without looking.
Orthotics provide proper biomechanics and can stimulate the proper nerves and muscles to provide a proper sense of where your feet are in space.
The contact with the foot allows for more efficient and effective feedback to position and force production.
It also allows the body to better correct imbalances or weak output.
Another reason a full foot correction is important over an (off-the-shelf) insoles or even no correction, is that a custom orthotic will provide corrections for your feet in all directions of motion.
Meaning that if you correct the posture of the foot with a custom orthotic for cycling shoes, you affect the rearfoot, midfoot, AND the forefoot!
If you allow one or more planes of the foot to escape correction, the overpronation will occur in those planes.
The foot is a three-dimensional structure and requires three-dimensional support to achieve postural correction.
Good biomechanics in the legs and trunk can also be affected by foot position in a cycling shoe.
By creating supination at the foot, you can correct for tibial and femoral internal rotation, knee valgus, hip varus, and pelvic anterior rotations in all three planes rather than just the frontal or sagittal planes.
This will help align the body to produce more force as well as treat injuries such as patellofemoral pain syndrome (PFPS), Illio-tibial Band (ITB) Issues, Piriformis or Sacro-iliac Joint (SIJ) Pain.
By using Unisoles custom orthotics in your cycling shoes,
you externally rotate the tibia (shin bone),
which abducts (turns out) the knee and allows for better patellar (knee cap) tracking,
which externally rotates the femur (thigh bone) and allows for lesser tension with the ITB and hip muscles,
which posteriorly rotates the pelvis and relieves pressure on the pelvis, hip and lower back.
Getting Orthotics from a Podiatrist has never been easier
Our Smart Form Process is simple
Complete Our Smart Form
Using the information from your smart form our Podiatrists will be able to create your custom orthotics to suit your needs.
Take Your Scans & Record Your Gait
Within the Smart Form, our unique technology allows for easy scanning from your smart device.
Move Better Than Ever
Within 3 days of receiving your order your custom Unisoles will be manufactured and sent to your doorstep.
Our Unisoles Podiatrists are with you every step of the way.
With Unisoles, there’s no reason to be worried about purchasing orthotics online.
One of our major benefits is the 30-day follow-up support.
After we deliver your custom shoe insert, your podiatrist will reach out to ensure you’re satisfied.
If you have any questions you can also contact us directly via the chat icon in the bottom right of your screen. We’re always happy to help.
