Does your riding position influence the chances of head injury?

[cycle tramp]

Both sides of the for and against, have brought some pretty compelling arguments, using examples from different countries...
The against (compulsory) helmets tend to use arguments drawn from statistics the Gremany and the Netherlands.. those for (compulsory) helmets tend to draw statistics from other countries...
..one thing which might not have been studied is whether different riding positions, in the event of just falling from a bike, influences the potential injuries you may suffer...
..ages ago it was said that a drunk person falling over may suffer less injuries as they didn't tense their body before impact, whereas falling over whilst sober meant that you were more at risk because naturally you would tense up...
...in places like the Netherlands and Germany there is a prevalence to ride in a more upright relaxed position, whereas in America and Britain the chances are you would be riding in a more sporty position, perhaps with less relaxed upper body (or not)... does anyone know if there has been any studies into whether the position you ride in influences the injuries you may receive, perhaps even to the point of saying which riding position may cause you to be at risk from greater head injuries?

[Cugel]

Both sides of the for and against, have brought some pretty compelling arguments, using examples from different countries...
The against (compulsory) helmets tend to use arguments drawn from statistics the Gremany and the Netherlands.. those for (compulsory) helmets tend to draw statistics from other countries...
..one thing which might not have been studied is whether different riding positions, in the event of just falling from a bike, influences the potential injuries you may suffer...
..ages ago it was said that a drunk person falling over may suffer less injuries as they didn't tense their body before impact, whereas falling over whilst sober meant that you were more at risk because naturally you would tense up...
...in places like the Netherlands and Germany there is a prevalence to ride in a more upright relaxed position, whereas in America and Britain the chances are you would be riding in a more sporty position, perhaps with less relaxed upper body (or not)... does anyone know if there has been any studies into whether the position you ride in influences the injuries you may receive, perhaps even to the point of saying which riding position may cause you to be at risk from greater head injuries?

There's a tendency, in our scientific age, to attempt simple explanations for everything. "Studies" of all kinds are constructed that define both questions and the already embedded answers, often via a process that constructs what is data or fact; and selects what of them are legitimate to the study and which have little or no relevance, based on what the studier wants to be true.

One of the unspoken objectives of this cod-scientific approach is to support some economic or ideological agenda, often unstated but also often transparently obvious nevertheless. The overall effect of this approach in attempting to find certainties within what are in reality highly variable and complex matters, is that binary positions on those matters are formed, promulgated and ossified into the wider cultural conversations.

**********
Or, to put it more specifically in relation to your question about riding position: there are far too many relevant factors involved with head-bangs and cycling to provide one simple answer for all cases of all cyclists and all bikes riding in all circumstances.

Personally I try to ignore all the storm und drang about cycling helmets to make a better risk assessment for myself and my own particular modes and history of cycling. This tells me that it's highly unlikely but possible that I'll have a fall and even more unlikely that if & when I do that I'll bang my head, since I never have in 64 years of riding a bike and gawd knowns how many thousands of miles. Examination of general cycle helmet construction and physical features (from the manufacturers and testers themselves) also suggests that such helmets, anyway, provide only small protection from relatively small head-bangs.

So I don't wear a cycle helmet when road riding. I might revise the assessment if I did MTBing in a forest; or rode as a commuter down roads full of street furniture and inconsiderate pedestrians, for example.

Others will have many different factors to consider if they do their own risk assessments. Some people fall off their bike a lot! Others may have a shape or a bodily habit that leads them head first into any fall. For them, a helmet might be a good idea.

*********
As to your "upright position" question - perhaps the best response, after mentioning the many other factors confusing the whole business, might be: correlation is not causation, especially when there's another 20 factors that might correlate. Does eating porridge rather than co-co pops for breakfast increase or decrease the chance of banging your head when you fall off your bike? Someone might well have "a study" to correlate such events, persuading a helmet maker to produce a special helmet for co-co pop addicts!

*****************
You could construct "a study" for yourself. Ride in various positions and record the number of falls for each. You may have some results in 20 years, although they'll probably be worthless as there were 25 others relevant factors involved that you didn't notice.

[Nearholmer]

If you have a sudden unplanned dismount not involving another moving vehicle, all the energy involved is your own kinetic energy, and the faster you’re going, the more of it there is, by a square law.

So …… a factor to consider is that sportier position and riding style tends to be associated with greater speed than does “sit up and beg”, so at minimum any attempt to characterise injuries by riding position probably needs to “control out” speed as a factor.

TBH, I can’t imagine that the data to allow a comparison actually exist (for all the reasons Cugel mentioned as I was typing).

[Carlton green]

Decades ago I was cycling into a headwind up an incline on a wide and clear road, nothing in sight for a few hundred meters. Head down I pushed along with the occasional car overtaking me, one of them was a driving school car which then parked at the side of the road. Head down I didn’t notice the new - and totally unexpected - obstruction until I was virtually on it; my brakes went on but my frame got bent and I got a nasty impact around my tackle . My head had pain in it but not due to impact on it for I stayed upright on the bike, none of me touched the car and only my feet touched the ground.

Riding style is important and ever since I’ve been mindful to have constant vision of the road ahead - stuff happens and particularly so to the inexperienced. I don’t use a helmet, it’s a personal choice, but I do do a lot more risk evaluation and I don’t ride fast. I’d say that riding on the tops of drop bars - as I usually do - and riding with flat bars gives better sight ahead than riding on the bottom of drop bars; better sight likely leads to less injuries in general and that likely leads to less head injuries.

IMHO the biggest safety feature on any bike - and so by relative orders of magnitude - is the rider (plan to and work at not having any injuries and accidents).

[Jdsk]

...
So …… a factor to consider is that sportier position and riding style tends to be associated with greater speed than does “sit up and beg”, so at minimum any attempt to characterise injuries by riding position probably needs to “control out” speed as a factor.
...

Yes, listing potential confounders is an important part of establishing what's known and what isn't known.

Jonathan

[Jdsk]

... does anyone know if there has been any studies into whether the position you ride in influences the injuries you may receive, perhaps even to the point of saying which riding position may cause you to be at risk from greater head injuries?

Thanks for identifying the need to look for the evidence. But I don't expect to see it appear in this thread in this forum.

But you will probably get the traditional alternatives: whataboutery, changing the question, straw man arguments, ad hominem stuff, cherrypicking the data, anecdotage, tribal affiliation...

Jonathan

PS: Thanks to the posters who do use and promote evidence-based methods. Maybe one day the numbers will increase. Things can only get better!

[PH]

Yes



https://www.popsci.com/article/diy/fast ... d-vehicle/

[pjclinch]

As noted above, things tend to inter-relate, so on the one hand it's difficult to isolate position from e.g. speed, but is that a good idea anyway?
A TT rider is probably at greater chance of crashing than A N Other cyclist because of a combination of being on narrow skis, weight well forwards, going very fast and their ideal aero position not involving looking where they're actually going... The position isn't ideal, but you'd likely only adopt it if you were going fast. At the other end, sat bolt upright tends to correlate to a good view and going slow with weight well back, but the slow bit is a lot because it's hard to go fast sat up in the wind.

My feeling on a recumbent (mine is feet first!) is I'm less likely to do a header because I have quite a bit further to rotate if it all goes wrong. As I understand it, Ordinaries (aka Penny Farthings) were somewhat notorious for leading to a "header", compounded by the extra vertical height.

So... yes, position probably does affect things, but what the bike you're riding encourages you to do may well have a bigger effect. Due to the small wheels and short wheelbase I suspect if all else is equal I'm more likely to go over the bars of my Brompton than on my MTB, but all else isn't equal: I don't ride down stoopid descents on the Brom, so despite (or perhaps because) the MTB being a more capable and dependable machine I'm far more likely to exit it somewhat dramatically (and thus more likely to hit my head).

Pete.

[Nearholmer]

If we attempted to answer the set question properly, on “an all other things being equal” basis, we’d have to consider all foreseeable SUD modes, and that would lead to recognising that going over the front isn’t the only way of coming off a bike, and it might lead us to examine which SUD modes are most likely to lead to head impacts, and whether going over the front is actually among them. It might not be.

[pjclinch]

My guess is the most common SUD style is sliding out which again I guess tends no to have too many particularly energetic head whacks...
But nobody much is recording this kind of stuff to know with much certainty. We're very much limited by the data sets people use for their research which tend to be stuff people record in case it might be handy/to tick boxes, rather than designed to answer particular questions.

Pete.

[Audax67]

Yes



https://www.popsci.com/article/diy/fast ... d-vehicle/

There's a lovely German expression - kopfüber in die Nacht = head-first into the night - that pretty well covers it.

[sjs]

... does anyone know if there has been any studies into whether the position you ride in influences the injuries you may receive, perhaps even to the point of saying which riding position may cause you to be at risk from greater head injuries?

Thanks for identifying the need to look for the evidence. But I don't expect to see it appear in this thread in this forum.

But you will probably get the traditional alternatives: whataboutery, changing the question, straw man arguments, ad hominem stuff, cherrypicking the data, anecdotage, tribal affiliation...

Jonathan

PS: Thanks to the posters who do use and promote evidence-based methods. Maybe one day the numbers will increase. Things can only get better!

On a dark and rainy afternoon, probably in February 1980, while riding on drop bars in Bridge Street in Cambridge, just by St John's college, in a north-westerly direction, I rode into the back of a parked car which I had completely failed to notice, damaged the bridge of my nose and wrote off my bike. There, that proves it.

[Cugel]

My guess is the most common SUD style is sliding out which again I guess tends no to have too many particularly energetic head whacks...
But nobody much is recording this kind of stuff to know with much certainty. We're very much limited by the data sets people use for their research which tend to be stuff people record in case it might be handy/to tick boxes, rather than designed to answer particular questions.

Pete.

In every and any fall or knock off a bike I've suffered in 64 years piloting the two-wheeled dream machines, I'v always hit shoulder, hip, elbow or ankle (sometimes all four) never me bonce. Mind, most of my falls were in the first two years of cycling, learning the limits of bicycles on a Coventry Eagle heavyweight sporting tyres that were not exactly up to modern standards and using brakes that didn't care to work in any kind of damp.

Of those many cycling falls by others I've witnessed, I've not seen anyone else bang their head either, excepting one who went over the bars and face-planted, after a mudguard stick-jam and another who fell whilst near stationary but was grabbed by the front wheel sinking into a rut. The first had a helmet that wasn't even scratched, although he needed 40+ stiches to his face and inside his mouth, as well as a jaw-fix and several teeth replacements. The second had scratches on his helmet but no compression of the polystyrene stuff yet he suffered a long term debilitating injury to the vertebrae in his neck that put him in a wheelchair.

This doesn't mean that cycling helmets have no use but it may be one indicator that their function is nowhere near the often hysterical claim that "a helmet saved my life". One day a clever engineer might devise a set of procedures that tests for helmet effects on real-life cycling falls of the vast number of fall-kinds there can be. Currently I know of no such test or any test that comes near enabling a buyer to know what use a helmet really is.

You can imagine that a good quality cycling helmet (which is probably about 5% of those sold) might be useful in some low speed impacts as in falling off in an urban environment full of poles and kerbs .... or riding in the woods. Otherwise, they seem to be a poor attempt to address a set of risks that are relatively low, compared to say fell walking, ice skating or going up and down stairs at home.

[Nearholmer]

I’ve conked my head once, possibly twice. The definite was the bike sliding out from under me on ice two winters ago, and I was glad I was wearing a helmet. The other was when I was a teenager, and I still don’t know to this day whether I hit my head (no helmet) because my arm hurt so much I wasn’t thinking about my head, but I am pretty sure I was “out” for a few moments/minutes, so probably did, and I don’t know what caused the incident either - although the front wheel was buckled I have no recollection of hitting anything.

[853]

In every and any fall or knock of a bike I've suffered in 64 years piloting the two-wheeled dream machines, I'v always hit shoulder, hip, elbow or ankle (sometimes all four) never me bonce. Mind, most of my falls were in the first two years of cycling, learning the limits of bicycles on a Coventry Eagle heavyweight sporting tyres that were not exactly up to modern standards and using brakes that didn't care to work in any kind of damp.

Last September, after over 50 years of scarring my knees, elbows and ankles, I had my first crash to involve hitting my head. It was a bit of a strange one, but the conditions are worth explaining to describe a case that is not often considered.

The rural lanes of South Derbyshire are relatively flat and although they don't have kerbs and footpaths they often have a raised grass strip of 1-2 metres wide before a low hedge giving very good visibility. The crash occurred when turning 90 degrees left into another road. Conditions were dry, hot, and sunny but for some reason (which I still can't explain) part way through the turn both wheels went from under me as if I'd hit black ice. The result was that I went around the corner on the ground, and my head struck the bank of grass and compacted ground to the left of the apex corner.

Although I pulled my head away from the ground, the bank was around a third of a metre high so I physically couldn't pull it away far enough to avoid hitting my head. I now have fresh scars on my knee and elbow, and a small dent in my helmet. I was riding with a fast club group at the time, so my Garmin told me I hit the ground at 20mph, and took four seconds to stop. For what it's worth I was riding on the brake hoods at the time, but my 'bars are a lot lower than my saddle so it would count as a 'low' position.