- Now, if you're new to triathlon, or indeed an old hand,
you could well be doing most of your riding out on the roads
on a road bike like one of these,
but be interested in the notion of a triathlon
or time-trial specific bike.
However the thought of splashing out all that cash
on an extra bike simply to go a little bit faster seems,
well a little bit extravagant doesn't it?
But fear not, because for a fraction of that cost
and a good deal of the benefits of one
of those triathlon or TT bikes,
with a set of these aero clip-on bars,
you too could be getting comfortable and aero
out on your road bike.
So, today, I'm going to talk through how to install
a set of these clip-on aero bars onto your road bike
so you can get faster out on the roads.
(dramatic music)
So, first things first,
you've decided to add these clip-on bars
onto your handlebars, but you need to figure out
if those handlebars are compatible for the clips-ons,
so, what you need to do is have a look at your own handlebar
and see if you've got space either side of the stem,
ideally you need about two fingers width
or two to three centimeters either side of your stem
to allow those aero clip-on bars to be clamped on.
Do be mindful,
because a lot of handlebars taper off quite soon
either side of that stem, as you can see here,
these handlebars are a lot narrower once you get past
that two to three centimeters,
so you need to just check and make sure that there is
the space for those clip-on bars.
Or alternatively, you can have a look at your handlebars
because they often have a handy guideline,
like these spare ones I have here, show just there
that past that point it's not safe to add your clip-ons.
And on that note of clamping aero bars onto your handlebars,
if your bike has carbon handlebars, just be careful,
because carbon has a tendency not to like to be clamped
and often these types of handlebars actually need
to be reinforced to cope
with aero bars being clamped onto them,
so the best thing to do is to check with the manufacturer
of the handlebar in the first instance,
or even just pop down to your local bike shop and ask them,
"Can I add clip-on bars onto these handlebars?"
(soft music)
So, once we've figured out what our own bike
and handlebars set-up requires,
it's time for us to be able to start clipping on
our aero bars onto the handlebar,
now for this I've opted for a two-piece extension set-up,
as opposed to one-piece alternatives,
just 'cause I think they offer more adjustability
and comfort, reach and so on, but I will touch
a little bit more on that later in the video.
And, as you can see, I've already started
with clipping one of my extensions onto the handlebar,
just 'cause the process is a little bit fiddly,
and in terms of that process,
what we need to do is firstly unbolt the clamp from
the back of the extension,
take that underneath the handlebar,
pop the rest of the extension on top
and then tighten those bolts up,
but not too tight because you want to be able
to have some movement in the clip-on once
it's on the handlebar,
so that you've got some maneuverability once you're trying
to dial in that position.
Now, it is worth noting
that since we're clamping metal onto metal,
it's worth adding a couple layers of electrical tape
onto your handlebars, just so that, in the future,
if you want to take those clip-on bars back off
you don't want any scratches left on your handlebars.
(soft music)
So, as you can see, I've got my second extension added on
to the handlebars now,
but I want to touch on the adjustability
that I did just talk about a bit before,
because these extensions have a ton of adjustability
and that is because of a single bolt
that just sits here under the arm rest,
and if I undo that, suddenly I've got rotation
and I've got extra length backwards and forwards too,
which just adds a whole spectrum of extra adjustability
to these clip-on bars, and as a final note,
you've actually got a really handy guideline
which you can see here on the aero extension,
which just means you can be really specific,
to the millimeter even, with your reach.
(soft music)
(bicycle wheels whirring)
So once we've got the general position set up,
the next stage to get comfortable
and really dial in this position with the clip-on bars,
is to set up the indoor trainer like I've done here.
Now, if you remember, I didn't tighten up the bolts fully
on these clip-ons, and that was for a reason,
so that once I'm on the bike just now
I can just slowly tilt them up or push them down to try
and figure out the right position
that I want them to be sitting in,
once I'm happy with that I can tighten them up.
Now as a rough rule of thumb for this positioning,
I was always told to try and have my upper arms
roughly tracking the fork leg of the bike,
and my forearms would be parallel to the floor.
And in terms of getting this position set up
it's really good if you've got a friend
who can help you with this, taking a photo or,
ideally, a little video, so you can have a look
and really get it set up properly.
(soft music)
Now, the arm rests, or arm pads as they're sometimes called,
can be moved around a lot on these clip-on bars too,
sometimes you might find that,
say, your knees are catching on them when you're cycling
so you can move them forwards, or, in fact also,
if there's too much reach they can be pulled back too.
All you have to do is simply pull away the velcro pad
and then that reveals the bolts that are underneath,
now, I personally, when I'm setting up clip-on bars,
like to leave them in, what I call, a neutral position,
which is usually having the bolt sitting in the middle
of the options as you can see here.
There's also, usually, a width adjustment factor
to clip-on bars too,
which is just underneath, in here on the extension,
and I like to have them sitting middle as well,
so that just keeps everything quite neutral.
If, of course,
you feel that you want to be more stretched out,
you can push the pads forward,
and similarly if you feel you are too stretched out
then you just pull them back as well.
(soft music)
So the whole point of us adding these clip-on extensions
is to try and be more aerodynamic,
and the common school of thought is,
the lower the better when trying to achieve that,
but of course, our positions are all a little bit different
and we might not all want to have
the absolute lowest position that comes with these clip-ons,
so, there is the possibility, with a lot of them,
to change the height that your arm rest sits at
and that's by adding in these sorts of stack raisers.
Now, as I've got them sitting at the moment
this arm rest is as low down to the handlebar as it can be,
but if I added in this block, which is 30 mils,
that would just sit in there, raise the arm rest up
and that would take it to an intermediate height,
and I could, of course, add in an even higher raiser
to bring that up yet further as well.
(soft music)
Right, so now that I've got my position nice and dialed in
with these new clip-on bars added to the bike,
there's just a couple other factors worth paying attention
to for improving the overall position.
The first of those is the saddle,
because when we're in aero bars
and we're down on that position in the bike
our hip angle is naturally altered relative
to the bottom bracket,
so to counter this we can move the saddle forward
a little bit and that just helps with our general position
when we're down in the aero bars,
and it is worth noting, and I certainly feel,
that whenever I am in that position
I generally find myself shunting forward
on the saddle anyway.
Now, the other point I was going to talk about is
the aerodynamics that we're trying to improve
when we're on the bike,
and the lower is generally the better,
so if we can bring our handlebar down just a little bit
then that could help our position quite a lot,
so it's worth having a look at your stem height,
and seeing if there's any spacers that sit below your stem,
now I know this is a more aerodynamic looking frameset,
so I would actually just have to take these spacers away
to drop the stem,
but on a regular road bike you could take those spacers away
and then pop them above the stem
and start playing around with your position
to see how it feels when you're out on the road.
Right then, I am pretty happy with this set-up
that these extensions have added to my road bike,
I'm more comfy,
I'm most certainly more aerodynamic than I was beforehand,
and the beauty of it is they have essentially transformed
this road bike into something pretty similar
to a TT equivalent, and as I said at the outset,
for a fraction of the cost of a whole new bike.
If you too have opted for changing your road bike
with some sort of set-up like this, please drop those
in the comments below, I'd love to hear about it.
If you've enjoyed this video please hit
that thumb-up button, find the globe onscreen
to get all the other videos on our channel,
and if you want to see another video about doing things
at a fraction of the cost that Mark did about
a DIY home disc wheel, you can find that there.