A reader writes:
My stupid question (asked with the understanding that you are not a medical professional but a great resource and researcher): Can biking on a touring bike be bad for your back? Can biking on inflated tires on bumpy roads – because you’re too lazy to reduce pressure or anxious about reinflating them – be bad for your back? How can you mitigate potential back problems from biking on a touring bike? Are recumbent bikes less safe on busy roads – they look that way to me, even with the flag on back?
Thanks for the question! As you mentioned, I am not a medical professional, but I do ride touring bikes, and I also have a back, so I think that makes me at least qualified to respond anecdotally.
The first thing that comes to mind is to point out that riding a bicycle can be both beneficial and detrimental to one’s health.
If your bike is well-fitted, you don’t have any underlying health issues, and you exercise good judgement regarding volume and exertion, it’s an established way of getting fit, and doing so in a relatively low-impact way compared to, say, running.
But cycle tourists tend to take this to something of an extreme, riding all day, every day, with few breaks and few rest days, often for months or years on end. I remember one rider joking about how, on their days off, they would only ride 50km or so instead of the usual 150 or more.
You don’t often hear about back injuries sustained as a result of riding in this way. I would guess that’s partly because people on long-haul bike trips have spent time adjusting their touring bikes to fit as well as possible. But it could also be because not everyone feels the need to publish the story of their trip-cancelling back injury to the world.
So, crashes or accidents aside, it is of course possible to injure yourself through the physical act of cycling, whether because of poor bike fit leading to repetitive strain injuries, or from pushing your body too far beyond what it’s capable of, triggering some underlying condition or weakness that appears to be caused by cycling but was already lying dormant, or for some other reason.
To answer part of your question more directly, I would say that mitigation strategies for cycle touring-related injuries – back or otherwise – begin with the purchase or building of the bike itself. Getting a touring bike properly fitted in advance of your tour won’t eliminate the potential for pain, discomfort and injury, but it will greatly reduce the risk, and give you a head-start in the inevitable process of minor tweaking you’ll go through on your journey with that bike in order to get it feeling just right.
And when it feels just right, then – all else equal – it hopefully means your body is telling you it’s fine to keep on riding like this.
But things change on the road. You mentioned riding bumpy roads with firm tyres – it seems to be that this could certainly contribute to the jolting and jarring that might well trigger an injury. Deflating your tyres on rough terrain is, in my personal experience, more about comfort than traction. There’s big difference between cruising on good asphalt and having your bike and body shaken to bits on a rough descent, and softer tyres can take the edge off it.
Secondly – and I don’t want to state the obvious – as time goes by, bits of your body start to wear out as well as bits of your bike.
There are plenty of tales of people realising – often under painful circumstances – that their joints and muscles can no longer quite do what they used to! We have to pay attention to these incidents, because they’re a sign of things to come if we don’t do things differently. The annoying thing is that these occurrences are hard to predict.
Without wanting to confuse subjective experience with general advice, I personally find upper body strength training seems to help correct the imbalance that comes from a lot of cycling and not much else. This might be something to consider if you’re concerned about back injuries while cycle touring.
And I recently wrote an answer to a slightly different question that might also be relevant. It was about reducing wrist and neck pain while riding on bumpy roads, but it would be applicable to back pain too, as what we’re really talking about is cushioning repetitive impacts on the body while riding.
Finally, as for recumbent bikes being less safe, in my experience this is mostly a visual effect and a consequence of diamond-framed bicycles being normalised. Looked at objectively, the act of balancing any bicycle alongside high-velocity multi-ton metal boxes with only a polystyrene hat for safety seems inherently questionable – hence, perhaps, the rise of off-road bikepacking.
Having said that, I did post a four-part account of my first recumbent bike tour which touches on this subject and might be of interest.
Hope this helps!
This is part of my “No Stupid Questions” series, in which readers write in with questions about cycle touring or bikepacking and I attempt to answer them. Check out more recent posts in the series or ask one of your own.
Something to add?