today on bite fit tuesdays five tips for setting up your handlebars we need chris
come on bring him in
someone's broken him so first
this is the first bite for tuesdays we've filmed quite a while there's going to be mistakes
so the first thing we need to consider when looking at front ends is handlebar width now they
range anywhere between 36 centimeters all the way up to if you're really stupid 50 centimeters what
if you're actually that wide nobody's that wide and the i mean the 50 centimeter is quite common
in sort of gravel circles because you need more control for off-road i disagree anyway uh they
come in two centimeter increments typically uh there are some brands like for example canyons
uh in in-house handlebars coming 39 centimeters but they typically come in 36 38 40 42 44 um you
used quite often 46 centimeters and like i say the the real outliers are quite often in in a size 50.
what we're looking to do with this is to match the handlebar width to the shoulder width these
are too small for me they might be about the right size for you though so the the way of doing this
is we're going to measure uh across a skeletal landmark in the shoulder so this is the chromium
process distal part of the scapula and we're measuring across that and we're looking to
match the shoulder width to the handlebar width the reason for this is that it when
the handlebar width is excessive tends to result in the rider's need to roll the wrists like so
this is a primary cause for things like numb has also tends to render the uh more difficult brake
levers and uh it just results in also neck and shoulder tension and i say numb hands
so the next measure to think of when particularly considering handlebars is the reach it's worth
noting that not all handlebars measure the same some handlebars will have a 70 millimeter ridge
which is actually quite short and they go all the way up to sort of 120 125 millimeters
when we say reach we're talking about the distance between where the control is located
and the center of the bore of the handlebar it's essentially it's uh it's it's a measure of how
far away the shifter is going to be from the stem clamp all right now the reason to consider this
is that we see quite a lot of people here with coming through here with long reach handlebars
and very very short stems the point i'm making is that by fitting a handlebar with a shorter reach
it can be a very good way of reducing the overall reach to the handlebars and the controls for the
ride so it's a very good way of reducing the the overall length of the bicycle uh this particular
handlebars is a dana rhm which is like what's what i quite like it tends to be my go-to handlebar um
either that or an nv for looking at carbon we're sort of measuring from the bar bore to the center
line of this point here uh like i said there are lots of different reaches but one thing i would
say is that uh certain manufacturers suggest a certain reach i don't know how they measure them
because they come out significantly longer i won't name them because that's a bit unfair the takeaway
here is to really take into consideration what the reach of the handlebar is most manufacturers
tend to state it on their website and i tend to recommend going with a shorter reach handlebar
on the grounds that it tends to render longer stems and let's face it who doesn't want that
that feeds us straight into handlebar rotation now i use this as a means of offsetting handlebar
reach now there's a really great way of doing this to make to offset the reach the handlebar as much
as possible the way i tend to do it is try and get and just to be clear this doesn't work with
every single shape handlebar but it does with most i want to get the hat at the end of the handlebar
at 90 degrees with the ground all right so we're looking to get this bubble level what that allows
you to do is to get you then set the control based on your personal preference and what that does is
it offsets the reach to prove my point here when in bite fitting when we measure reach we measure
from the back of the control to the nose of the saddle because it's the most consistent
means of measuring how the human interacts with the bicycle and with my setup recommendation
the reach on this position is 70 centimeters if you do it with the handlebar set up poorly
it's 71.5 so we've taken the point of the moral of the story here is that we've reduced the reach of
the bicycle by 15 mil without even changing the component it's a really cost-effective
way of reducing reach and certainly something that's worth considering when you're setting up
your handlebars this sort of feeds us into again the next part of it is your control
location there's a certain element of personal preference involved here what i tend to recommend
is that you don't have the shifter perpendicular to the ground the reason for that is because what
it's going to do is it's going to start resulting in you rolling the wrist like this and what that
does is creates tension up through the arms into the neck and the shoulders and it can cause neck
and shoulder issues okay uh so i tend to i'll have add a little bit of elevation to them so
that as you present your hand to the shifter it sits there nice and comfortably all right
uh it enables you to reach the brake levers easily on both the the the hoods and on the
drops what we're seeing more recently is a trend to the side c is a trend for uh the shifters to
be running like so i mean i if you want to do this to your bike go ahead i personally
feel like it's being carried out to uh reduce the width of the controls which can be improved with
a narrower bar i'm not going to talk about any aerodynamic gains because a i haven't tested it
and b i think anybody who is testing it probably isn't testing consistently against a narrower bar
for example but and you know the shifter isn't really intended to be mounted like this by the
manufacturers but like i say i don't really see any harm in it so if you want to do it just to
match up with the cool kids go ahead i don't think you're gonna make any gains though
i mean let's just say the grand tour pro that works with me doesn't believe in it either so
so our final tip is that you the reach to the brake levers can be adjusted on almost all modern
shifters now this is something that isn't necessary is less important when you've optimized
the handlebar width because if the handlebar is too wide you end up reaching around the handlebar
together with brake levers particularly so it's a particularly common problem for women who
tend to possess narrower shoulders as a result the bar width or excessive bar width
is usually more of a problem now if you don't want to buy a new pair of
handlebars straight away because you want to come to your local friendly bike fitter
then you can actually adjust the brake lever so that it sits close to the handlebar now the way we
do it on this particular shimano this is a shimano claris lever pull the lever off and you can see mr
mr cade is going to video us as we wind this in you can see that the lever gets closer and closer
to the bar which makes it easier for little hands to grasp now it's worth noting that not all brands
of lever are adjusted in this way sometimes it's up in here the best way of finding out
how you go about adjusting it is if you type in the shifter type that you have and it'll be
typically written on the brake lever or it'll be written at the top here and then just right right
google reach adjustment for that particular brake lever and you'll tend to find like a tech document
particularly from shimano on on how you go about doing it we'll probably find some um some forum
on how to do it or a youtube video or a youtube video on how to do it have we done a video on that
no we probably should we probably should we could link to our should we go should we get all of the
all of the shifters on the planet apart from the the new 105 which you can't adjust you can't just
reach on at all anyway really so there you have it that's how you optimize your cockpit that marks
the end of today's episode of bikefit tuesdays we're filming a bachelor video today so stay tuned
subscribe to this channel for more and we will continue to make them if you have any questions
related to bike fit or the topics we covered today put them in the comment section down below and i'm
sure james will do his best to answer them if you want to book a fit with james or one of his staff
head into the description down below there'll be a link to the bicycle website and you can
do that they're based in richmond in london thank you for watching and see you guys soon
you