Endura develops new shorts for Team Movistar

Team Movistar’s Columbia Climber Nairo Quintana signing jerseys before his shorts fitting with Endura

The day before the 2014 Giro kicked-off in Belfast we took some time to catch-up with Team Movistar’s star rider Nairo Quintana, courtesy of Official Partner Endura.  The Colombian climbing expert took a few minutes out of his last minute race prep to undergo a custom fitting session for Endura’s new FS260-Pro SL Bibshorts.

This latest bit of bling kit usees an innovative fitting system developed with cycle product customization experts gebioMized®.  The new shorts offer a choice of three different widths of pad insert and two different leg lengths.  The system seeks to deliver an optimal body match that enables unnecessary excess padding to be removed – leading to greater comfort in the saddle.

Recent years have seen great advances in affordable customised kit.  Individually shaped insoles for cycling shoes have been around for a while and are now commonplace.  The personalisation of shorts is a natural progression following the recent introduction of customised saddles.

The process involves the rider sitting on his bike on a turbo trainer – fitted with a special saddle cover linked via a cable to a pc.  The saddle cover includes over 250 pressure sensors, each recording several readings per second, to build-up a pressure map of the areas where the rider’s body comes in to contact with the saddle.  The rider simple adopts their regular riding position – first on the top of the bars, then on the drops.  The whole process takes less than ten minutes and by the end the pc software will have enough information in the form of a “heatmap” to make an accurate recommendation of the optimum pad size for the rider’s body shape.

The exact same system is available for anyone to discover their optimum shorts insert size via the bikefit process at Cyclefit in London.  The shorts come with recommendations also based on which saddle you might prefer.  Once you know your prefered pad size the RRP of the shorts is competitive at under £90.

Match your pad to saddle with this table which is included on pack. 

Small, Medium and Large pad inserts are colour coded.

  Quintana examines the three different pad sizes available each with their precision contoured shape.

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