Alternate to Straight Handlebars?

[OakLeaf]

There are lots of different bends and widths available. Flattish bars I think are among the easier ones to compare off the bike.

What I would do (what I'll be doing with my motard bike) is pay close attention to where your hands are on your existing bars and what you don't like about that position. Are your wrists angled inward, outward, up, down? Do you feel like your hands are too far apart or too close together? Then have a friend take some measurements on your existing bars - distance between your wrists, angle of your wrists, distance between the center of the bars and the where you sit on your saddle, height of the center of the bars in relation to where you sit on your saddle.

Armed with that information you should be able to go into a bike shop that stocks a lot of different bars, hold them out in front of you in approximately the position they'd be when you're on the bike (depending on your existing configuration you may even be able to balance them on top of your existing stem), and see how you like the angles of your wrists, elbows and shoulders there.


You may still wind up putting a different type of bars on your bike, but the solution may be simpler than you think.

[goride]

Oakleaf, thanks. It just seems to me that a road position for my hands (palms facing one another) is more comfortable than palms down, but I never thought about the various measurements. It could well be that the bar is too wide or too narrow, too close to me or too far away. That is something that I should consider. I might be making more of this than I need to.

[Melalvai]

I use a trekking bar. I was having real problems in my wrist and worse, tingling in my arms. The nice thing about trekking bar is the part that curves around in front is a lot closer to me than the straight handlebar is, and it is more toward my center, so my arms aren't pointed out at angles but are directly in line with my shoulders. That is much more comfortable.

My bar is angled up a fair bit in front so it is even closer to me.

I spend much of the time with my hands positioned on the brake levers & shifters, but on flat stretches (not so many of those around here) where I'm not constantly shifting, I like to stretch my hands out flat on the curves of the bar.

It's an odd looking thing but I really like it.

[divingbiker]

I have the same problem with my wrists with flat bars, and albatross bars on my commuting bike have solved the problem.