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Dialing in Cleat Position For More Power and Less Pain

With regular pedals and toe clips your foot can move a bit to find it best position. With clipless pedals your foot is held in a fixed position so it is important to get the cleat placed properly for your unique bone and muscle structure.

Installing the pedals is easy but putting the cleats on your shoes can be difficult with the variations of adjustments available. Most cleats are adjustable front to back, side to side and rotationally for angle. If you get the set up of your cleats wrong it will put foot, ankle and knee out of alignment. Over time this can lead to pain and potential long term injury.

The easiest route to proper cleat placement is to head into the shop and get me to position them for you. It's cheap and will save you a lot of potentially painful trial and error. If you'd like to do it yourself, the following guidelines will help you get set up with the least amount of problems.

Fore-Aft Placement

In bare feet, feel for the joint (first metatarsal phlange joint for you anatomy junkies) under the ball of your foot at the base of your big toe. To pin point the location of the joint wiggle your big toe up and down. Put your shoe on and check for that point. Lightly mark the sole with chalk or marker.

Now place the cleat based on the following chart.

Size 36-40 5mm behind the ball of the foot
Size 41-43 7mm behind the ball of the foot
Size 44-46 9mm behind the ball of the foot
above Size 46 10 mm behind the ball of the foot

Check each foot separately as one foot is usually bigger than the other changing where the point of the big toe joint is.

Rotational Placement

Your feet have an angle they naturally sit at. Your cleats should be set up to put your feet in this position on the pedals.

To find your foot angle, sit on a high bench or sturdy table with your knees bent at a 90 degree angle. Holding your feet level, lean forward until you are in your riding position.

Look at the angle your feet sit at. I use a large protractor to measure the angles of each foot.

This adjustment will apply mainly to Shimano and Look pedals. If you use Time pedals there isn't much angle adjustment but the pedals themselves have lateral and rotational float so your foot will find it's correct position naturally. Speedplay pedals have a rotational adjustment on the cleat to adjust for this.

Side to side placement

This one is hard to do on your own as it has to do with pedal stance on the bike. If your feet are too narrow or too wide your knees won't track properly over the pedals.

A few things to look for.

If your knees flair out wide when pedaling, your feet are probably too close together. Move your cleats towards the inside, closer to the bike. You may also need to put a spacer on your pedal to move it out.

If your knees lean in towards the top tube it can be indicative of either too wide a stance or fore foot varus. This is a tendency for the big toe to sit higher than the baby toe. 90 per cent of people's feet sit this way because we we're made for walking not riding. Most cycling shoes have a flat toe box, so your foot is forced flat with each pedal stroke. The fix for this is either shimming your cleats, orthotic insoles or a combination of the two. By aligning your foot, you'll get more power to the pedals and reduce the chance of overuse injuries to your knees. I recommend the Lemond Lewedge shims to correct for forefoot tilt.

Leg Length Imbalance

If you feel like you can't ever find the right seat height you may have a leg length imbalance. Riding with an imbalance can lead to knee problems as well as hip and lower back pain. With this if one leg is getting correct extension the other will be over or under extending. This can be from actual bone length differences or a structural imbalance in the hips. If the difference is less than 6 mm then it usually isn't much of a problem, but anything more than this should be corrected. The general rule is to correct for half of the difference, so if discrepancy is 8 mm we adjust your shorter leg 4 mm.

This can be accomplished by shimming your shorter leg cleat and moving the cleat of the long leg back slightly. This is just an example because depending on whether the difference is in your upper or lower leg, I will use different techniques to correct for it. Think of your feet as your base of power. If your base is unstable, you will not get the power to the pedals.

About the Author

My name is Winston Endall. i'm a bike shop owner and cycling coach. Over the last 12 years I've worked developing my Speed Factory Training System to allow real people like you to maximize their fitness. My system lets people with jobs and families build a high level of cycling performance with the minimum time spent each week. Speed Factory combines bike workouts, crosstraining and flexibility work to make you a stronger overall athlete in as little as 4 hours per week. For more information go to my site http://www.cyclecambridge.com

Demonstration of need for Bike Fit Cleat Wedges