Handlebar tweak to completely change your mountain bike

hey folks I'm John from bike fit advisor a little bit ago I did a video about how to relax the upper body on your road bike through just a simple change in the wrist position and handlebar position and I got a number of questions asking and what can be done or if there's something applicable it can be done for mountain bikes and there is so we're going to talk about that today so not surprisingly the Road version it started with a change in wrist position and the mountain bike version is going to be similar and what the mountain bike version hinges on is the amount of bar sweep that that the handlebar has and when we're talking about handlebars there's a number of dimensions we have the width of the bar which is end to end we have the rise of the bar which is how much the bar you know comes up or how much it rises and then we have the sweep of the bar which is how much the bar bends back towards the rider and it's measured in number of degrees you can see what this bar is I lift it up this way you can kind of see how the bar would Bend back towards me when I orient it this way and this is incidentally this is about 15 degrees of sweep now most bars come off the shelf like when you buy a new bike most bikes are gonna have Varna that's from three to ten degrees of sweet but there are many varieties that are fifteen degrees there's seventeen into the 20s 40s even to the 50s with a more extreme version now I'm not here to tell you that more is always better that you absolutely need to have more sweep in your handlebar but if you're struggling on the mountain bike this might be a real simple and relatively cheap Avenue to take to improve your your comfort the bar do this well when we're on a straight bar one that has little to no sweep in it the risks are going to be put into a slightly radially deviated position for one which is this position here where we're hand is angled towards the radius on the forearm and there what this will then do is it will push the elbows out and the shoulders up into this very sort of strong looking stamp on the bike and many times you'll see riders coming down the road or coming down the trail and they will they will be in this posture with this this really this really awkward elbows out sort of look to them at times now this elbow is out position can be actually be a very stable position in some instances when we're in very technical terrain or some very tricky cornering and things like that however it can work against us through a lot of the rest of our ride so what happens when we go from a straight bar to one with more sweep so now the hands are going to be out of plane with one another and this allows the wrists to relax and allows the elbows to drop down so they're now pointed behind the rider or down towards the ground a little bit more which then allows the rider to lower their shoulders and actually to engage the lap muscles underneath the arms and the the lat muscles are important because they actually have an attachment to the lumbar spine and so they can help provide better stability to the spine and into the pelvis as we sit on the saddle and it does go back as the road version does it goes back to what position it puts the shoulder blades in as well because as the elbows drop down and the shoulders drop down with them the shoulder blades drop down and come back in and or as we say retract a little bit into a slightly more stable position for the upper back so there's a lot of these bars out there let me know in the comments below what your experience is with them did you scrap your swept bar for a straighter version or vice versa are you struggling with are you struggling with upper-body issues on the bike I've even had clients where they were struggling with saddle issues and this was a really good up in the right direction so let me know your thoughts below and again I appreciate all the support that's been coming in the last few weeks please check out my other videos and subscribe if if you haven't already and I'll see you on the next video thanks

Channel: Bike Fit Adviser

Views: 348,930

Rating: 4.8607202 out of 5

Keywords: bike fit, bike fitting, cycling, bicycle, mountain bike, mtn bike

Id: elPVFfhkfrE

Length: 4min 12sec (252 seconds)

Published: Wed May 31 2017