Phil Burt has fitted some of the greatest cyclists in history. Tour de France winners, Olympic gold medallists, world record holders. Three weeks before Bradley Wiggins' hour record attempt, Phil dropped his crank length significantly and removed 30 millimetres from the front end of the bike. That is the level of detail that separates performance from potential at the highest level.

But when I asked Phil recently what gives him the most satisfaction in his work, it was not the elite results he mentioned. It was the athlete who walks into his studio and says that cycling is keeping them sane. The person for whom getting on the bike is not just training. It is the thing that holds everything else together.

That is the athlete Phil says he is built to help. And that is the conversation we had:

Check it out: Why Comfort beats FTP in Long Distance Cycling​

FTP is the engine. The chassis decides how far you go.

FTP is the number that dominates cycling conversation. What are you pushing on Zwift, what does your power meter say, what is your threshold. Phil's position on this is blunt. FTP is an isolated marker. It tells you about the engine. It tells you nothing about whether the chassis can handle it.

He sees athletes regularly whose FTP is high and whose performance is going nowhere, because every inefficiency in their position is costing them far more than any training gain can recover. And he sees athletes whose FTP barely moves after a bike fit but who can suddenly ride for six hours instead of four, get off the bike without pain, and run properly afterwards.

The question is not how big the engine is. The question is whether the chassis is built to support it.

Millimetres matter more than you think

Phil changed my handlebar width by roughly a centimetre and adjusted the flare on the bars. That is it. That is the entire change. (see the images above) The result across three five-hour gravel rides on rough terrain in the Yorkshire Dales and the Peak District was that I got off the bike feeling composed rather than beaten up. No neck pain. No shoulder ache. Instead of fighting my position, I was finding lines on the trail and climbing efficiently.

He also persuaded me to move to 165mm cranks across all my bikes. At 90rpm, your hip closes on one side 45 times per minute. Over a five-hour ride that is tens of thousands of repetitions. Shorten the crank by 5mm and you reduce the load on that joint with every single one of those repetitions. After three cartilage surgeries and a snapped cruciate, that reduction is not trivial. It is the difference between knees that hold up on a long ride and knees that do not.

Phil's point is that millimetres matter in cycling precisely because the movement is so repetitive and so low-impact. You can cycle well into your 70s and 80s. That is a lot of repetitions. Getting each one even slightly wrong, over time, adds up to a body that breaks.

You don't know what you don't know

When I asked Phil who needs a bike fit, his answer was immediate. Everyone, because the point is you do not know what you do not know. He has seen athletes arrive carrying a bag of ten saddles, two thousand pounds worth of equipment, wanting to know which one to use. His answer is always the same. Start with the position. Until the position is right, the saddle cannot do its job.

This is something I see reflected in my coaching regularly. Athletes invest heavily in equipment and training load, and almost nothing in the fundamentals that allow those investments to pay off. A poor position on the bike does not just cause discomfort. It corrupts the run. The psoas muscle, shortened and compressed over hours in the saddle, is part of what makes the first kilometres off the bike feel like you are running in concrete shoes. Address the position and you start to address that too.

Bike fitting is now accessible wherever you are

One of the barriers for many athletes has been geography and cost. An in-person session with a fitter of Phil's calibre is not cheap, and it is not available everywhere. Phil has been working with the MyVeloFit app to change that. Using AI visual technology, it captures your joint angles from video taken on your own phone. That gets you around 70 percent of the way there. Add Phil's expert review process, which involves him watching the footage, reviewing your answers to a structured questionnaire and sending back a detailed video response with a plan, and you have something genuinely useful for a fraction of the cost of an in-person fit.

If you are not near a quality fitter, or you simply want a starting point before committing to a full session, it is worth investigating.

What this looks like in the real world

Phil said something that has stayed with me. His job is not to change anything until the athlete understands why the change is being made and has given the green light. Because 50 percent of the improvement comes from the athlete understanding the reason. That is not a sales line. It is a coaching principle, and it is the same one I apply with every athlete I work with. A plan you understand and believe in is one you will actually follow.

The best engine in the world is wasted in a chassis that cannot support it. If you have been chasing FTP and wondering why the results are not following, it might be time to look at the bike.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• FTP tells you about the engine. Bike fit determines whether the chassis can support it. For long-distance athletes especially, position and comfort decide far more than peak power once the hours stack up.
• Small changes produce significant results over long rides. A centimetre of handlebar width, a 5mm reduction in crank length, a saddle moved a few millimetres forward. Repeated across thousands of pedal strokes, those adjustments compound into a body that holds together rather than one that falls apart.

• • You do not know what you do not know. Getting a fit is not about being told something is wrong. It is about having the full picture, understanding what is working, what is not, and making informed decisions from there.

A good bike fit supports everything else you put into training. In SWAT, we build programmes that respect the whole picture, strength, mobility, recovery, and the time you spend on the bike. If you want a structure built to keep you performing year after year, find out more HERE:

Thanks for being part of the tribe. I’m here to help you stay Battle Ready! Simon