<p>Numbness when riding usually relates to:</p>
<ol>
<li>Your riding position is off. Your seat may be the wrong height or the bike may not fit you well enough.</li>
<li>Usually combined with #1, the clip or cleat if you’re using the weirdly named “clipless” pedals, presses a spot in your foot repeatedly. </li>
</ol>
<p>The goal is to make sure your bike seat is the right height and the seat post angle to the pedals fits you so you can spin the pedals with a fairly even pressure. You should be kind of straight up and down so your leg can spin through the entire cycle stroke without accentuating one pressure point. </p>
<p>Bike fit is weird and it’s really difficult for women because their legs can be longer and upper bodies shorted and many bikes put them in a position where they sit too low for their legs but still have reach for the handlebars. That causes nerve pinching in a bunch of places as well as less power and knee pain.</p>
<p>As a mechanical fix, try a lower gear and spinning the pedals faster. It’s better aerobically and it decreases foot pressure. You can then vary the settings to change how your body experiences the stress. Cyclists ride huge distances because they spin without mechanical restriction. That’s learned and requires a good fitting bike to do really well. Spinning really means not pushing but pulling the pedal through the circle of spin and making that transition is perhaps the essential step in becoming a real cyclist. You can’t push, push, push forever because that is muscle work and that burns the oxygen in your muscles and becomes anaerobic as lactic acid builds up and you tire. Learning to spin so your leg pulls back and up and through shifts the burden to your lungs and you can breathe forever.</p>
<p>[As a note, cyclists often refer to “pulling” a gear. When you spin the pedals, you build strength for pulling higher and higher gears aerobically, which means higher sustained speed. That’s how people ride for 20-25 mph for 8 hours straight; they’ve built up over time to pull high gears without pushing. If you watch the really top cyclists, even on many climbs you can see them pulling the pedals up and back even as the motion becomes exaggerated.]</p>
<p>These are hard things to get right. I rode for many years, starting with road bikes and moving into hardcore trail bikes, and it was rare when a bike worked perfectly with me. For example, I found myself more comfortable on a woman’s trail bike because it had a more sloping top tube that let me jump off or on to the tube when crashing without killing my crotch. I also found that “more comfortable” saddles caused more problems because they let me sit in one place for a long time - they’re built for you to sit in one place. I had fewer issues when using old fashioned harder saddles that like a hard chair make you shift around frequently. You might try a saddle that doesn’t encourage you to sit in one spot all the time because that one spot means all your mechanics repeat all the time and our bodies aren’t meant for absolutely repetitive motion over a long time; we break down if we don’t change up.</p>
<p>One last point: in running, toe & forefoot numbness is associated with forward leaning. You see this with ellipticals when people lean on the arms. On a bike that can mean your seat is in the wrong spot - often too low - so you’re pushing on one spot or it can mean your seat is too far back.</p>
Thanks for the info. I feel like an idiot though because I am using a recumbent stationary bike…not a “real” bike. :o
Will try to change my position and move around a little more.</p>