MOUNTAIN BIKE HANDLEBAR FORMULA | The Body to Bar ratio

One of the biggest nonsense dispensed by the

bike

industry and the media is the idea that the width provided should be related to the type of riding you're doing, that cross-country racers should have narrow bars on the wide bar, I firmly believe. that your

handlebar

s should fit your

body

so you would have an alex sized bar or a lease sized bar or a jimmy sized bar and you would use the same width bar on all your

bike

s. Hello YouTube, welcome back to the channel. The snow is falling. Outside, I like these days because we can come in and talk about how to prepare our bikes for the next season and a big problem is

handlebar

width.

How wide are your handlebars? Well, we did a survey on the channel, we had more than a thousand. people answer this survey thirty percent of people didn't know how wide their bars are this is a great video for you it's not just about feel but how your biomechanics integrate with this machine there is a reality to what will work better for your

body

and let's get into that, we have lee de lee likes bikes, he's back, he has a lot of ideas about handlebar width, most of which I totally agree with, we've all had a story of go from narrow bars to wider ones. bars, if you've been in the sport for a while, I never went as wide as the 800, but you went all the way, yeah, I went all the way, so when I started in 1988 I was running. xc and dh in those days my handlebars were 20 inches wide, but then just by physiology and temperament I became a gravity racer, a friend of mine was a world cup downhill guy, we borrowed his bike one day 24 and then 26 and 28 and then we switched to millimeters somewhere along the line and I followed it until I got to 800.

I know it's silly, I'm going to admit this is like that, you like the feel, it just seems rougher, but It is one thing that the width. The bars made me accelerate the destruction on my shoulders, rotting was unbearable like hot paint. I met these guys here in town at Rivo Physical Therapy. They put little sensors on your muscles and you have a screen that shows which muscles are working. right right and they had me move back and forth with like a pair of imaginary handlebars and it was obvious that in a narrow width all the good muscles were working, the good muscles were like the lats and like the lower back muscles like The width. it gets wider, the work shifts to your upper traps up here and then the movement pattern becomes dysfunctional.

You're looking for a compromise between the five things you're asking your bars to do. The first is pulling force, the second is pushing force, the third. it's the range of motion the greatest possible range of motion the fourth is the health of your joints and finally you're looking for some stability the optimal push width is wider than the optimal pulling weight you know you can pull really well from here oh yeah hundreds of pounds, yes, but you don't want your bars like that, no, so you're going to find a middle ground exactly and it'll be fun to take Alex on the road, what we'll do is catch him. working a little on different widths and we'll experiment with narrower and wider, yes, and you'll be able to share your feelings, yes, and then we'll like to see where you end up, oh yes, really, now you know why I'm so strong.

Oh my god, he always wonders why I'm so fucking strong. He had never asked me that once, if you ever get into one of these machines, you will know that a 30 degree garage at number 12 is not a suffocation, there is no good way out here. 850 Yeah, that's 850, which is crazy, so where do you feel in your body? I feel like a little twinge right here, that's a warning sign, if you feel twinges in your joints, that's not a start, stop what you're doing. I'm kind of rotating my shoulder, yeah, joint, yeah, I'm going to try to focus on keeping my shoulder blades together and it still hurts, like when I realize, that hurts pretty bad and by the way, like you at 850, it's like a shorter person. at 800. it's very clear that I could actually hurt myself even on this I feel like I could hurt myself on the gravel road doing barbell exercises this watch totally feels good pulling the effort is more on my shoulders yeah here so when I'm getting tight, yeah, it's like halfway up your back, that's where we want it.

Let's have Alex do a set of 20 as hard as he can to close his eyes. It's okay, he lets your body do what he wants and we do. I'm going to secretly measure where his hands end, okay, leave your hands where they are, oh, leave me there, did you lose it? No, I didn't, 680, man, 680. And 680, which is almost 27 inches today, 680 is considered narrow, fair to say. that biomechanically so you can work is a good width good for work okay you've proven your point but we both know I'm not going to run 680 so how can I calculate the actual width of the bar I'm going to use?

I give them a multiplier to help them find the ideal bar width. Take your height and centimeters and multiply it by 4.40. I measure 172.5 centimeters by 4.40, which puts me at 760 millimeters. This would be the maximum recommended bar width if you want. Narrow totally cool many advantages to being narrower when you get wider you start to activate small muscles and there is a chance you will get hurt. I choose to have my body run closer to 740. Totally cool, we just ran the numbers for my height using calculus and it comes to 770. I ran 775 once for a week and then it went back down.

I ran 760. I don't know if you're going to like this. The closest thing to science I saw is push. try like you thought it's partly my fault so you do a pushup and that tells you the width sorry all of you who have my old books that's all we knew at the time that's crazy that's not the width of your bar man That's your pushup, let me ask you something about the shoulder. Do you think the width you came up with maybe you had to compromise in a way that I don't and maybe some people don't?

That is beautiful. question in general, the messier your shoulders are, the narrower you should go, but the guide I'm giving you is great for everyone. There is an amazing video with Blake Sampson putting on very tight bars. It works, but he's yelling about how. nervous, he is very nervous, so what do we mean by small nervous corrections in the bars that create big corrections in the front wheel? So nervous here you can be a little more careless you have a little more influence and the small corrections barely do anything for the front wheel move the grips here moving my fingers the same amount and the front wheel moves really so nervous it's nervousness .

What I want to encourage you to think about is whether or not your grips are out here. optimized for pulling and not optimized for the health of your shoulders and you can move them in just a few millimeters it won't make your bike feel too jittery it's very easy to change the width of the bar without changing the width of the bar oh thank you can just move the controls, the average hand width is 90 millimeters, most of these have most of these grips are 130 millimeters, so 40 millimeters of adjustment, so we do this in my classes all the time, We will only move the controls if you have a person. rides on the new width and you can see it's faster better or better and then once they like it they cut the bar when I cut bars I use an angle grinder I don't know what the bars are cut with I cut my bars at the shop of bikes for the bike shop I guarantee if you buy one of these it will make your life better, it goes through this bar in seconds, I calculate the width I'm cutting to and then I take a piece of tape and wrap the tape around it so it joins on the other side because it's a pain when you make an angled cut on the bars you can fix it but sometimes you're chasing like a flat end on each one it's like cutting your hair it ends up looking like that there are people who can jump like a bunny , suddenly a lot of people say I couldn't jump like a bunny and now I can jump like a bunny we have jumps we have jumps on the curves jumping so check out some of the other videos if you like those share them with other people yeah the more subscribers we have, the more eyes we will have, the more interesting things we will be able to do, people are starting to reach out to offer bikes, offer tests, offer parts and that is starting to happen and it is all because of you guys watching and sharing it, I really appreciate it, great, thanks guys, yes, see you next time at Joya Bike.