MOUNTAIN BIKE HANDLEBAR FORMULA - The Body to Bar ratio

One of the greater pieces of BS that the bike industry and the bike media dispenses is this idea that bar width should be related to the kind of riding you're doing. That cross-country racers should have narrow bars, downhillers should have wide bars. I believe firmly that your handlebars should be scaled to your body. So you have an Alex size bar or a Lee size bar or a Jimmy size bar and you would use the same width bar on all your bikes. Hey YouTube, welcome back to the channel. The snow is coming down outside. I kind of like these days because we get to come inside and talk about prepping our bikes for the season to come. And a big, big deal is handlebar width. How wide are your handlebars? Well, we did a poll on the channel. We had over a thousand people take this poll. 30% of folks didn't know how wide their bars are. This is a great video for you. It's not just about feel, it's about how your biomechanics integrate with this machine. There's a reality to what is going to work best for your body and we're going to dig into that. We got Lee from Lee Likes Bikes. He's back. He's got a lot of ideas about handlebar width, most of which I totally agree with. We've all had history with going from narrow bars to wider bars if you've been in the sport for any amount of time. I didn't ever go as wide as the 800s, but you took the whole ride all the way. Yeah, I went all the way. So when I started in 1988, I was racing XC and DH back in those days. My handlebars were 20 inches wide. But then just because of 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 all the way out to 800. I know it's silly, but I'm going to admit this, like riding like this. You like the feeling. It just seems more badass. But like one thing that the wide bars did to me is it hastened the destruction on my shoulders. Riding was excruciating, like white hot pain. I met these guys here in town at Revo Physiotherapy. They put little sensors on your muscles and you have a screen and it shows which muscles are working, right? And they had me moving back and forth with like a pair of imaginary handlebars. And it was obvious that at a narrow width, all of the good muscles were working. Good muscles being like your lats and like the muscles lower in your back. As the width 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 that you're asking your bars to do. The first is pulling strength. The second is pushing strength. The third is range of motion, as much range of motion as possible. The fourth is your joint health. And finally, you're looking for some stability. The optimal pushing width is wider than the optimal pulling width. You know that you can pull really great from right here. Oh yeah, like hundreds of pounds. Yeah. But you don't want your bars like this. So you're going to look for somewhere in between. Exactly. And it'd be fun to get Alex on the rip row. What we'll do is we'll get him doing some work at different widths and we'll experiment with narrower, wider. Yeah. And you can share your feelings. Yeah. And then we'll like see where you end up. Oh yeah, for real. Now you know why I'm so strong. Oh my god. He's always wondered why I'm so freaking strong. I've never wondered that once. If you ever get on one of these machines, you'll know that a 30 degree garage at number 12 is no joke. No. Okay, way out here, 850. Yeah, that's 850, which is crazy. So where do you feel it in your body? I feel like a little twinge right in here. That's a warning sign. If you feel twinges in your joints, that's a non-starter. Stop what you're doing. It feels like I'm somehow rotating my shoulder. Yes. Joint. Yes. I'm going to try to focus on keeping my shoulder blades together and it still hurts. Like when I realize that hurts a fair amount. A lot. And by the way, like you on 850s is like a shorter person on 800s. It's really clear that I could hurt myself actually. Even on this, I feel like I could hurt myself on the rip row doing exercises with bars this wide. Totally. It feels fine pulling. The effort's more up in my shoulders. Yes. In here. When I'm pulling narrower. Yeah, it's like all the way down, halfway down your back. That's what we wanted. Let's have Alex do a set of 20 as hard as he can. Close your eyes. Okay. Let your body do whatever it wants to do, and we're going to secretly measure where his hands end up. All right, leave your hands where they are. Leave them where they are. No, I didn't. Did you move it? No, I didn't. 680, buddy. 680. And 680 being almost 27 inches. Today, 680 is considered narrow. It's fair to say that biomechanically for you to do work, it's a good width. Good for work. All right, Lee, you've proved your point, but we both know I'm not going to run 680. So how do I figure out an actual bar width? We give you guys a multiplier to help you find your ideal bar width. Take your height in centimeters and multiply it by 4.40. Simple. I'm 172.5 centimeters tall times 4.40 puts me at 760 millimeters. This would be your maximum recommended bar width. If you want to go narrower, totally cool. Lots of advantages to narrower. When you go wider, you start to turn on small muscles and there's a chance you'll hurt yourself. I choose for my body to run closer to 740. Totally cool. We just ran the numbers on my height using the calculation and it comes to 770. I've run 775 once for a week and then went back down. I run 760. I don't know if you're going to like this. The closest thing to science I saw is the push-up test. That's partly my fault. So you do a push-up and that tells you the width. I am sorry. All you guys who have my old books, that's all we knew at the time. That's craziness. That is not your bar width, man. That is your push-up width. Let me ask something just about the shoulder thing. Do you think that the width that you came up with, maybe you had to compromise in a way that I don't and maybe some people don't? That's a beautiful question. In general, the more messed up your shoulders are, the narrower you need to go. But the guidance I'm giving you is cool for everybody. There's an amazing video with Blake Sampson putting on really narrow bars. It works. But he's screaming about how twitchy it is. So twitchy. So what do we mean by twitchy? Small corrections in the bars creating big corrections in your front wheel. So twitchy. Out here, you can be a little bit more sloppy. You have a little bit more leverage and small corrections barely do anything to the front wheel. Move the grips in here. Moving my fingers the same amount and the front wheel's really moving. So twitchy. That's twitchiness. What I want to encourage you guys to think about is if your grips are out here and they're not optimized for pull and they're not optimized for your shoulder health and you could move them in just a few millimeters, it's not going to make your bike feel super twitchy. It's really easy to change your bar width without changing your bar width. Oh, thank you. You can just move your controls. The median hand width is 90 millimeters. Most of these grips are 130 millimeters. That's 40 millimeters of adjustment. So we do this in my classes all the time. We'll just move the controls in, have the person ride at the new width and you can tell it's faster, better, better. And then once they like it, then they cut the bar. When I cut bars, I use an angle grinder. I don't know what you cut bars with. I cut my bars at the bike shop. With a bike shop. I guarantee you if you get one of these, it's going to make your life better. It goes through this bar in seconds. I figure out the width that I'm cutting to and then take a piece of tape and wrap the tape around so that it meets on the other side because it's a bummer when you get an angled cut on your bars. You can fix it, but then you're sometimes chasing a flat end on each side. It's like giving yourself a haircut. You end up looking like this. There are people who can bunny hop all of a sudden. Many people saying, I couldn't bunny hop and now I can bunny hop. We've got hops. We've got cornering. Jumping. We've got jumping. So check out some of the other videos. If you like those, share them with other people. The more subscribers we get, the more eyeballs we get, the more interesting stuff we can do. People start to reach out, offer bikes, offer tests, offer parts, and that's starting to happen. It's all because of you guys watching and sharing. Really appreciate it. Very cool. Thanks, you guys. We'll see you next time on Joy of Bike.