bike fitting Archives - Endurance Nerd

Mountain Bike Handlebar Position: Getting the right bar sweep and reach

So if you’ve read my previous article on bar position you’re familiar with the position you’d like your arms to be in during easy pedaling — basically your elbows should be pointing to roughly the 7-8 o’clock position (for the left arm) and the 4-5 o’clock position for the right from your perspective as the rider.

The question is then, how do we make sure we can assume this position? If our bike fit isn’t correct we won’t be able to force ourselves into this position and maintain it for any length of time.

The first thing we need to ensure is that our bar reach is set properly. This is generally a lot easier on a mountain bike than a road bike because mountain bikes lend themselves to a shorter more upright posture on the bike. There is a bit of the subjective in this as well. I know for myself, I prefer to have a little longer bar position on a cross-country-style mountain bike – one with 4 inches or less of travel – and a little shorter position on my 6 inch travel bike so that I can manipulate it a bit more aggressively on the technical terrain that this particular bike excels at.

Once the reach is settled we come to the most important factor to attaining the proper arm position: the amount of bar sweep.

What is bar sweep? It is the amount the bar bends back towards you. You have probably seen bars that have rise built into them – that’s when the bar bends upward to raise the hand grip position. The bend to increase sweep happens in a different plane to bend the bar back towards the rider so the hand grips are no longer pointing directly out to the sides, they’re pointing slightly back towards the rider.

Most modern bars have some sweep built into them — roughly 3-10 degrees exists on most bars these days. But others bend aggressively to 20, 30, or even 45 degrees of sweep like the Answer 20/20, an H-Bar, or Seven Tiberius (among many others).

Why would you want the bar to bend back toward you like this? Simple. It allows the wrists to sit in a more neutral position, it allows the elbows to drop down to the 7 o’clock/5 o’clock position which gets the lat muscles involved and relaxes our shoulder posture.

This will lead to long periods of very stable and comfortable upper body positioning on your mountain bike.

Some mountain bikers are proponents of low-sweep bars only and feel that bars with more sweep are an anathema to mountain bike handling. I can understand this in a number of riding situations. A very aggressive amount of sweep — say 30°-45° — might not feel like the most stable position if you’re riding a lot of steep and/or technical terrain. That said, there are many serious mountain bikers that tackle all levels of trails and prefer bars with more than 20° of sweep.

I have read an article or two online that says swept bars put you in “unathletic” that will “hurt your bike handling.” It’s important to remember that the internet allows anyone to present an opinion like this as fact even without any supporting evidence or background in biomechanics.

To roundly state that bars with sweep will hurt your bike handling is silly. It certainly can be true in some circumstances, but by no means is this information applicable to all (or even most) riders. I get it — outlandish blanket statements get more of a response online. It’s not nearly as traffic-friendly or sexy to always inject reality and logic into statements.

To call the elbows-in posture “unathletic” is just uninformed. Never mind that you have better engagement of the latissimus muscle and therefore better spinal stability, but you also get more supple posture in your scapulae and cervical spine, and a more neutral (and less strained) wrist position. All of these have more resemblance to the “ready” position we use in other sports, as well as the posture we assume when we lift weights, do push-ups or execute agility drills.

To be clear, I’m not calling straight bars bad. You can still assume a relaxed, elbows-in posture on a straighter bar, but it’s a heck of lot more difficult and the bar will tend to draw you toward the elbows-out stance. Also, elbows-out isn’t always bad — in fact there are times on steep and/or technical terrain where it will be of benefit to assume this posture. But to have this posture all the time isn’t necessary and could cause problems because it it relies on passive stability through the upper body (you can read more about this on my previous post on this topic).

Some people respond poorly to the extreme bends seen in some of the swept handlebars, and if a bar doesn’t work for you that’s okay.

A safe rule of thumb is that as the sweep increases so should the amount of easy cross-country riding you do. So if you are riding on aggressive terrain you will likely find a bar with more moderate sweep angles (in the 5-15 degree range) more to your liking because although the added sweep is very neutral and “relieving” on easy and moderate terrain, a straighter bar provides more of what I call passive resistance to some of the more extreme inputs that come through the handlebars on aggressive trails. Having the hands and wrists closer to the more traditional mountain bike handlebar position may make you feel more powerful and in-control. The passive resistance we see in a straighter bar comes from a locked (or close-packed) wrist position, a straighter elbow and an elevated shoulder blade and glenohumeral joint — all are relying on a skeletally-locked posture but come with a price of potentially increased risk of joint irritation (in the wrists, elbows, shoulder and neck) and soft tissue strain.

So experiment a little and figure out what works best for you depending on your preferred type of riding and what your body is telling you. You might find that a bar with a few degrees more or less of sweep will work for you.

Mountain Bike Handlebar Position : Solving Problems of the wrist, hands, shoulders and neck.

So you’re on the trail, maybe hiking, running or on a mountain bike yourself, and up ahead you see another mountain biker heading your way. Picture what they usually look like in your mind’s eye.

Chances are it might look like this (terrain not withstanding):

Or perhaps closer to this (although this is on the road, I know):

What I want you to pay special attention to is the posture of the rider’s arms. Notice how it has that typical strong-looking mountain bike handlebar position: Hands wide, arms spread.

There’s one thing wrong with this position however…..look at the elbows. They’re pointing out, right? Each is pointing away from the center-line of the body. Now this is a strong position and we frequently need to assume it when we corner aggressively or are tackling a difficult section of terrain. But when we’re pedaling easily along, as these riders are (and the many you will encounter on the trail yourself), this shouldn’t be our default position.

Why? Because it’s not a very ergonomic position when you’re sitting. It doesn’t make good use of our muscular and skeletal system for sustained endurance-type riding. However, if you’re riding on aggressive terrain all the time and you have no aches or pains in your upper body then a straighter bar may be just fine. If you have some neck, shoulder, wrist or hand discomfort though, you’ll want to keep reading.

Looking more in depth at the posture: From the rider’s perspective their elbows are pointing to the 9 o’clock (for the left arm) and the 3 o’clock (for the right arm) positions. Basically both elbows are pointing out to their respective sides. This posture in the seated riding position will cause the latissimus dorsi (lats) to disengage somewhat while the pecs and shoulder internal rotators do more work. We also assume an internally rotated shoulder position, which helps to straighten our elbows and reduces the suppleness of the arm. Finally it puts our wrists into an “ulnarly deviated” position which locks out the wrist joint and causes more large and small vibratory forces to act through the arm. This posture can feel like it provides more stability in tricky situations because it relies on passive skeletal support rather than muscular control — which can be great for short periods but may cause problems when used long term.

Mountain Bike Handlebar Position: the proper starting point

So what’s the proper mountain bike handlebar position? Going back to the view of the arms from the rider’s perspective…..having the elbows pointing to roughly the 7-8 o’clock position for the left arm and about the 4-5 o’clock position for the right when seated pedaling is going to offer the most benefit.

This dropped elbow posture allows the lats to engage, and they are not only large muscles that do an excellent job of stabilizing the shoulders (they are large shoulder extensors after all), but they also attach to the lumbar spine providing stability to the low back and therefore the pelvis. So when they engage, often saddle problems begin to diminish.

This dropped elbow posture also allows the elbows to remain slightly more flexed and makes the entire arm more supple so we absorb more bumps and vibrations through the elbow rather than having it transmitted all the way up to the shoulders and neck. The wrist sees benefit as well since it has the chance to maintain a neutral position, which can remove a little pressure from the small carpal bones (and the nerves/tissue surrounding them) in the wrist.

In the next article I’ll talk about some ways you can achieve this with your own mountain bike handlebar position. I’ll go over some of the ideas that I use with my bike fitting clients, like proper handlebar sweep and reach.

A comfortable saddle – in less than 350 words

Even if your bike feels pretty good but your saddle isn’t level or nearly level then your fit is wrong.

Step 1, level your saddle.

At this point, if you feel like your legs are reaching, then lower your saddle about 5 mm.

Now you’re ready to address your bar position. Your pelvis’ preferred posture, its mobility and the mobility of your lumbar spine and hamstrings are what will determine your bar reach and height — even more so then your torso length and arm reach measurement will. If we don’t match the bar position to the posture where your pelvis is most stable then your saddle will be uncomfortable.

If you still don’t have a comfortable saddle, there’s a good chance that your bar position needs to be shorter and/or higher. This is not a certainty, but just highly likely. An easy way to test this is to put on a stem that has a much higher rise than your current stem. If the stem were a bit shorter too that would be helpful as well. If your saddle pressure eases, then you have your answer. If not, then your saddle discomfort is coming from a different source.

Most likely suspects?

Saddle fore-aft isn’t balanced. The saddle should be far enough back to facilitate with pushing you back and keeping you stable on the saddle. If your hips are behind your feet then every pedal stroke when you push down is producing a counter-force that pushes you up off the saddle a little (unloading force – good) and back on the saddle (keeps your pelvis from sliding forward – also good)
It’s just the wrong saddle — poorly matched to your anatomy. This happens a lot less often then most people think. Generally the saddle type isn’t the primary cause of discomfort.
There is some more remote cause, like perhaps your cleat position, or you have a rotational imbalance through your torso that’s going to cause shearing across the saddle as you pedal.

Of course, there’s potentially a lot more complexity involved, but this should get you started.

Bike Fit Saddle Pressure Technology

3D Saddle Pressure Mapping is a newer technology that, in my opinion, has changed the accepted knowledge of what’s possible in bike fitting much as infrared motion capture did a decade ago.
It’s capabilities are vast enough to really shed light on the black box that was rider-saddle interaction:

exactly how much pressure is being exerted on all aspects of the saddle
- this measurement is quantitative and we have the ability to change the unit of measure (psi, mmHg, mbar, kPa, N/cm^2, among others)
a rendering of the magnitude and direction of movement of the pelvis
the system can also track the movement of the left and right sit bone as well as the pubic bone individually
data is automatically analyzed to determine the number of mm^2 of saddle being contacted as well as how much loading the different quadrants of the saddle are experiencing (i.e. how much more is the right-rear portion of the saddle being loaded versus the left-rear? is the nose of the saddle being loaded more than the rear half?)

Having all this information is a game-changer because prior to its inception we had to visually assess how the rider was interacting with their saddle, and rely on inferred information from the infrared motion capture data, and the client’s subjective notes on how they thought they were sitting on it. We could make some good educated guesses about what was going on between butt and saddle, but it was far from perfect.

Now we can see exactly what’s going on. There is very little guess-work.

To illustrate further how powerful this system can be, I had a client in the last week or two that I might not have been able to help before I started using this system:

Some cyclists really struggle with their seats. Despite having a complete bike fit and testing numerous saddles, I have a handful of clients that struggle even when everything else has been optimized to the best of our abilities.

As you might imagine these clients will often be open to less traditional solutions. Some newer saddle companies, like ISM and Cobb Cycling, have some alternative-styled saddles that they market heavily to women and invariably some clients are interested in exploring these options and for good reason — these are good saddles and occasionally they can help solve a recalcitrant problem that other, more traditionally-shaped saddles could not. The problem with these saddles is that they need to be set up very differently than a standard saddle and even when set up properly they can be feast or famine – they might cause things to be much worse or they might be shangri-la and very tiny adjustments of the saddle are occasionally the difference.

In most situations when they do work, I can usually get the person to have one spot on the saddle where they feel really good. This might seem like the normal way things should go — of course there’s one “good” spot….you only sit on one part of a saddle, right? Well, actually, in many circumstances most asymptomatic riders on traditional saddles can sit slightly differently on the saddle depending on the conditions — how tired they are, whether they’re on the tops, the hoods, or the drops or perhaps depending on if they’re climbing a steep pitch. All these variations and more put you on a slightly different portion of the saddle. We’re talking about millimeters of difference, but as I repeat to my clients “millimeters matter.”

The difficulty with the ISMs and Cobbs is that although they might solve a saddle nightmare that no other traditional saddle has been able to, we might only be able to eke out one good spot on it. (Interestingly, I have many asymptomatic riders on these saddles that have no such issues and can sit in 3 or more positions on them without difficulty. Unfortunately but not surprisingly, it seems that those who struggle with saddles have less leeway on even the saddle that does work for them.)

My recent client, was one such cyclist, it appeared. She struggled with a couple traditional saddles and each time we used the pressure mapping I could see that the location of the pressure changed but often the “point of maximum pressure” was relatively unchanged. More importantly she was still uncomfortable.

Finally, we began to see some good results with an ISM Prologue saddle — it is a split-nosed saddle with a higher rating of cushioning on it and a slightly longer, narrower shape. After two or three tweaks to the saddle’s fore/aft and tilt posture (and these were small changes of less than a degree of tilt each time and a millimeter or two fore/aft adjustment) the point of maximum pressure began to dissipate and this mirrored her subjective sensations about how she was contacting the saddle.

What’s more is that based on the angle of her pelvis and the width of her main contact points we could determine with some accuracy exactly what anatomical part of her pelvis was contacting the seat. From here I was able to coach her, again via the pressure monitoring and another tiny saddle adjustment, onto a slightly different portion of her pelvis that I figured she would also potentially find comfortable. Over the course of a week we tested both of these positions and found the second to be even more comfortable than the first. The first still allowed her to ride for multiple hours with only minimal discomfort and no numbness, which was a huge improvement over the 20-30 minutes and then severe irritation she was getting before, but the second position afforded her a nearly “invisible saddle”.

Because I was able to make use of objective loading data to inform my decisions and also to educate my client (and allow her to correlate with her own subjective sensations) we were able to take her from severely irritated and uncomfortable in any position to completely happy in two different setups. This is the best example of what benefits can be had when we have access to great objective information.

Mountain Bike Handlebar Position: the proper starting point

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