Standing

I've been working a bit on my standing pedaling lately. It's kind of a long story, but I want to try standing more over short climbs and see if it doesn't help my overall speed.

Interestingly, almost as soon as I started working on this again, my left knee started feeling just a little off and my IT band has been tighter again. This is the same knee I injured this Spring. I had also been working on standing pedaling at that time. (On the other hand, I've also ridden 9.5 hours over the past 5 days, so that may have something to do with it.)

From a number of different articles and talking to different people, I understand that proper standing technique is to keep the back straight/arched (not rounded) and hips over the pedals. I doubt that I consistently do this, at least not the back straight part. The articles suggest that, if your back is rounded, you don't effectively use the muscles in the hips and glutes, and you end up recruiting other muscles, like the IT band. Which, in my case, I know can lead to the knee issue.