A recumbent bicycle will tend to cure any problems with back pain, or neck or hand pain, that you might have on your upright or "wedgie" bike. (Let's not even discuss the effects of narrow upright-style bike seats, okay?)
Recumbents do have some minor potential for their own special comfort issues. Most people just need to select a 'bent with a riding position and pedal/bottom-bracket height that suits their particular body. Let's be clear: for most people, recumbent comfort problems are not remotely in the same league with wedgie-bike comfort problems.
I had some moderately alarming right knee pain after Tour des Lacs 1999. In belatedly researching the matter afterwards, I found there seem to be three main causes of knee pain on recumbents, all of which applied to me in 1999. For the 2000 Tour I made changes in all three areas, and finished the ride with no knee pain. They definitely felt like they'd had a big weekend, but they didn't hurt.
I never had a clue about this until after Tour des Lacs 1999. I used to go backpacking in the Washington Cascades with a 40-pound pack (18kg) and it had to get pretty cold before I wanted long thermals or whatever. Of course, I was younger then. Any time you ride in chilly weather, you need thermal tights—or something—to keep those knees warm, otherwise you are risking injury.
I didn't find bicycle-style thermal tights that would fit me, short of special-ordering custom-fit ones at significant expense. I ended up getting some REI MTS midweight synthetic long-johns, in black, and wearing them under my bike shorts; that worked fine. Tour des Lacs 2000 was chilly enough in the mornings for ice on puddles.
I knew about this one, but perhaps didn't fully appreciate its importance.
Pedal cadence is important for healthy knees on any bike. It's even more so on recumbents, because your legs are braced between the seat back and the pedals, giving you enough leverage to really hurt yourself. Whenever you're applying pressure to the pedals, and especially when climbing, keep your pedal cadence up to 80-90 RPM minimum. If your cadence starts to drop on a hill, you've got to downshift as much as it takes to get it back up there. Early in the season, you may be climbing some hills pretty slowly.
Downshifting and spinning on a hill reduces the stress on your knee cartilage because the lower the gear, the less force you have to apply at any particular instant in order to climb a given slope. It's the same idea as having a block-and-tackle with more pulleys, or using a longer pry-bar: your feet move through a longer distance but don't have to push as hard while doing it.
I thought about getting a bike computer with crank sensor and cadence mode, but decided I could keep my cadence up well enough without cadence display. For my former Vision R40 I eventually bought a basic-functions Cateye Mity3, and my TerraTrike has a Planet Bike Protegé 9 computer; neither of those have cadence.
The classic geometry of bike pedals forces your feet to be parallel, or nearly so. This can be a problem for large people, people who just have large feet, women with wide hips, or people like me who just have the toe-out leg structure. People with this problem always tend to have their heels start hitting the crank arms while riding, and are continually having to reposition their feet on the pedals. Pedaling with your knee joints twisted into an unnatural position—for you—can also tend to cause excessive stress on your knee cartilage.
A physical therapist in California (Randy Ice, P.T., C.C.S.) has developed some nifty pedal adapters called Kneesavers that should help; the Web page has pictures. Kneesavers are little hardened steel adapters: you take your existing pedals off, thread the Kneesavers into the crank arms, and thread your pedals back into the Kneesavers. You end up with each pedal 0.787 inch (20mm) farther from the centerline of the bike.
I've been riding with Kneesavers since May 2000, and I'm much more comfortable. On 6/15/00 I rode 30 miles in about three hours, with one rest stop, including some short steep climbs. Then in September I rode the 75+ miles of Tour des Lacs 2000, and my knees were fine. I'm a believer.
Kneesavers are $45/pair plus $2 shipping/handling (as of 5/11/00). You can order them direct from Randy Ice's company, on the Web or by snail-mail; or Angletech (Woodland Park CO) is a dealer.
SCOR Productions
12300 E. Washington Blvd.
Whittier, CA 90606
Phone 310-943-9440
The human body has evolved to function in an upright posture over millions of years. Blood supply to the head is augmented, because your head is usually higher than your heart. For your legs and feet, the challenge is getting rid of the blood, and they've adapted to help pump blood back to the heart during exercise such as walking or running.
Every bicycle has a large and heavily stressed bearing called a bottom bracket (BB) at the axis of the crank arms and pedals; on upright bikes it's actually at the bottom of the frame. Recumbent bikes vary in the height of the BB relative to the seat, i.e. your heart and the rest of your body. CLWB's and LWB bikes sometimes have their BB as much as a foot lower than the seat base. Performance oriented recumbents, especially those designed in Europe, sometimes have the BB as much as eight inches higher than the seat base, for increased pedal power and for better aerodynamics.
When you're riding a recumbent with a high BB, depending on the reactions of your particular body, your legs and especially your feet can become somewhat starved for blood, tending to lead to foot or toe numbness after perhaps 60 to 90 minutes of riding.
On my former Vision R40, the BB and the seat base were pretty much at the same height, and I used to get mild toe numbness after an hour or two on the bike. So I have to suspect that high-BB low-racer designs are probably not for me.
L. M. Garcia wrote to me in November 2004 to mention that toe/foot numbness can also result from interference with nerve function due to excess pressure on the foot. This seems to have three main causes:
Something else you can measure on a recumbent: imagine a line between the end of the seat back and the junction of the seat back and base, and another line from there to the bottom bracket: that's the seat/pedal angle. Recumbents with larger angles are described as having an open seating position; those with smaller angles have a closed seating position.
Recumbents have good pedaling power because your legs are braced between the pedals and the seat back; gravity participates in this effect as well. Obviously if the seat/pedal angle is allowed to move towards 180° this brace effect will go away. A recumbent with a medium or high BB position can have the seat back more reclined, and this means the weight of your torso is partly carried by the seat back.
On recumbents with low BB position, in order for the brace effect not to be lost, the seat back will need to be more upright to maintain an effective seat/pedal angle. This means more of your torso weight is going to be concentrated on the seat base. Some people find that after an hour or two on such a bike, they have to get off the bike for a bit to restore circulation to their hindquarters. Some people refer to this effect as "recumbent butt."
Both of these related effects—toe numbness and "recumbent butt"—are very subjective. You may get one or the other on certain kinds of bikes, or neither. There's a whole spectrum of body positions available in the different recumbent models on the market; "happy medium" is probably represented by bikes with the bottom bracket (pedal axis) at the same height as the seat base, or slightly below. I suppose it's possible some people may be susceptible to both toe numbness and "recumbent butt" (not on the same bike, I hope). There's no way to tell for sure without an hour or two of real riding on the bike in question.
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