 So welcome back to the 31st edition of the RCA Training Tips Show where today, I'm joined once again by the expert bike fitter, Neil Stambry, who's been fitting road cyclists for 10 years in conjunction with being a sports physiotherapist. In today's video, Neil provides some guidelines on how to select the right handlebar, which includes width and reach with some of Neil's preferred handlebar designs. As this video today rounds out, the final critical touch point in terms of bike fitting in the series of Neil Stambry videos. Next week, Neil is going to provide a complete overview of how to set yourself up on the bike if you were to do it from home and we'll be able to reference independent cleat position, saddle height, saddle fore and aft and handlebar videos as supplementary pieces. So stay tuned for that and also stay tuned for quite a big announcement I have regarding the channel in 2021 and Neil's involvement. But quickly before we get into this piece, I just wanted to shout out Jack Roo, who make the RCA cycling kit. Video is sponsored by Jack Roo. However, I do earn a small commission on any referrals that come via the channel. So if you're a team, club, bunch of mates and you're looking to get some custom kit made up, have a think about Jack Roo. Reason being, personally, as we watch an RCA member roll some turns here in the RCA kit, I searched for over 12 months to find a supplier that was great quality at a reasonable price and Jack Roo certainly ticked those boxes adding their amazing two week turnaround times, free custom design process, no minimum orders and a team store, meaning individuals can order their gear independently and have it delivered direct to their door. It's those things combined that put Jack Roo ahead of any other custom cycling apparel manufacturer that I've ever personally worked with. If you're keen to explore them in more depth, I'll put some details below. Let's get into the video. Yeah, mate. Yes, this is a little bit more of a simple topic. People make a massive deal of this one sometimes. Some of my riders are like, well, should I go with a 38 or a 40? Will it make a big difference? If you're at one extreme end of the physiological range, it'll make a pretty big difference. There are people with shoulders that are so broad that a 44 or 46 centimeter bar is still too narrow for them. There are also lots of people with shoulders that are so narrow that a 38 or even a 36 centimeter bar is still questionable. But for the vast majority of us who are of normal size, like I'm relatively slim in the shoulders, you're a bit broader than me, we're in the median of this bell curve. And for us, it's relatively straightforward. So we'll talk about just drop bars. We won't talk about funky stuff, Jones bars like we were speaking about before and that kind of oddball stuff, flat bars, et cetera. We'll restrict this to drop bar ride bikes. There was a trend back in the day which probably started, the trend started, I would guess the first shallow drop short reach bars really started to become mainstream, probably 15 years ago, sometime early 2000s or something like that, where there was a shift in the design of drop bars. Maybe it was even in the late 90s. They used to have a much wider reach. So if you took an imaginary center point of this tube to an imaginary center point of that tube, that dimension used to be quite a lot larger. So the drop section would protrude out a lot further forward away from the rider. So increase the reach. Yeah. So if your hand was on there versus in the drop, the relative distance that you would have to project your arms and torso out was much larger than it is now. Similarly, the drops were much wider. They had a large reach and a big gap to them so that the drop section here was 20, 30 mil lower than they tend to be these days. So there are still wide reach big drop bars out there that you can buy, but they're very, on a modern road bike, like no modern road bike really comes with them anymore. The trend has been towards shallow drop short reach bars. The ergonomics, I would argue, generally better for these for the majority of people. Although there are the oddball people that prefer those crazy old Colnago bars with a huge drop and the old tiny little campag hood that's placed way down and they cocked their wrist right down to get to it and they love it and they go, oh, this feels great. So there are people that prefer that, but they're rare, they're rare. Like the hoods have gotten much better. The shape of them, they smack into the palm of your hand and spread the load much better than those tiny old school hoods. And they match up with bars of this design much more closely these days. And you gotta remember this is a whole system. It's a bar and a hood, right? So the hoods are designed to go with the bars. If you truck a modern hood on an old school, wide gate bar, they don't go too well. The hand angles are all wrong. So the trend has been towards shallow drop short reach bars with a much larger pad for the palm of your hand which is formed mostly by the hood now. There's very little contact of the hand, maybe just a small section of this eminence of the hand here on the outside of the bar when your hand's actually on there. And of course the top. So talking about it within that realm, most of your modern bikes will have a reach of somewhere between 75 and 90 millimeters and the drops will vary a little bit. Now, if you've got, let's say you've got really large hands, it might be worth considering a wider drop bar, I'm sorry, bar with a deeper drop because your hand, you know, it's gotta conform in here to the shape of the drop. If you've got a relatively small hand, no problem with a tight bend in the radius of the bar there. Got a huge hand. It just doesn't feel good when you're there. So you might wanna go with a wider drop bar. That's something to consider. The size of the rider's hand. This one I've just noticed, as you said, Cam, I think it has got a bit of a bend in it. So the eagle-eyed viewers might notice that that's a bit bent. So we'll disregard that. I think you've dropped it on its side. Crushed it, yeah. Well done. So a relatively normal hand size, go with a short reach shallow drop bar. Width, we're talking about width now. So if you are a relatively narrow-shouldered person, let's like most ladies are much narrower in the shoulders. Most ladies feel generally better unless they're really big and broad-shouldered. Most ladies feel better with a 36, 38, sometimes a 40 centimeter bar. I run a 38 because I'm quite narrow-shouldered. Easy test, you know, the old hold the drops, extend the arms. If your arms are parallel or they're slightly splayed at the hands, you can see mine are slightly splayed with this 40 centimeter bar, you're in the ballpark. If there's a big splay, there might be a little bit too wide. Going too wide on the bars will have less consequences than going too narrow. So if you're one size too big, yes, you will be more of a windsock, you know, you'd be slightly less aerodynamic when you're on them because your hands are wider apart. And the wind that's hitting your arms is, you know, is slowing you down slightly more than if they were narrow, but you'll have less trouble. You generally won't, it's hard to tar everyone with the same brush here, but you generally won't get pain or trouble with your hands or your shoulders if the bars are one size too big. If they're too narrow though, it can create a situation where you're squeezing in. So if your hands, if your arms are parallel to each other, you'll probably get away. If they get away with it, if they're starting to get to the point where they're actually converging when your hands are in the drops, there might be a little bit too narrow. So the extremes you get big trouble. You get a huge broad-shouldered guy with 36 centimetre bars. He may have trouble with it. Although every year I meet guys that are big and they have hyperextensible elbows or they have an elbow with a valgus angle on it. So my elbow, you know, is relatively straight. My arm is relatively straight, but a lot of people, they straighten their elbow and it bends, it cocks off to the side, right? And it's often found in hyper-flexible people. And those people, their elbows sit in so no matter how broad-shouldered they are, they often prefer a really narrow bar. So check that out as well. If you're really nice and straight, it's a bit easier. If you're bent, if you've got a decent valgus angle, you may want to go down a size. It might feel slightly better. And yeah, every year I get big broad-shouldered guys who love their 36 centimetre bars because they've got hyper-flexible or valgus-shaped elbows, yeah. So take that one into account as well. It's a really easy thing to check. Just look at your arm, right? So you want to see that slight taper outwards of the arms when you're in the drops or a square situation where they're basically parallel to each other. And so that kind of covers you for the two big things which are the width of the bar and the gap and the reach, you know, the shape of the dropped section. If, to get a little bit into slightly more detail with that, if you've got a person, when they go from the hood to the drop, if they go a lot longer in their torso, I didn't word that well. Let's say that you've got a person who's really hyper-flexible. When they're there, compared to when they go down there, their torso lengthens a lot. They have a big ability to change their pelvic angle and roll forward. They may prefer a wider gap to the bar. Yeah, because as they go, as they transition from the hood to the dropped position, their head goes down and forward a long way. If you're right on the limit of your drop and you don't roll your pelvis any further forward, or when you go into the drops, you will prefer a shallow reach bar because your torso, your effective torso length is not gonna change as much. That's a really tricky thing to judge yourself. Yeah, but it's one of those little minutiae things that can make being in the drops just a little bit better. Yeah. So aim for a width, which keeps your arms relatively parallel to each other or slightly skewed wider. If in doubt, go one size wider. Okay. Because you'll have less trouble. If you sort of think you might deal with some forties, but 42s look best, stick with the 42s, yeah. And if you've got those, you know, one of my old uni professors used to call them knock-kneed elbows. If you're knock-kneed, you have what we call a valgus angle or a cue angle in your knees, where your knees touch each other and your feet are apart when you're standing. Same thing with your elbows. If you've got that, you may wanna try a really narrow bar no matter how broad-shouldered you are. That's one of those oddball things that can skew it. And yeah, most of them anyway on a modern road bike, they're gonna be shallow, reach, short, sorry, shallow, drop, short reach. And so you're not gonna have a lot of choice. Overlays top sections are another thing we didn't talk about. I love ovalized bars, but some people prefer round ones. I would say the majority of people prefer ovalized. It's just a nicer, bigger pad area for the palm of your hand to sit on when you're on the tops. I would say probably 80% of people, if you give them an ovalized bar, they'll probably prefer it to a round bar on the top. Yeah, a lot of aero bars these days as well. Yeah, yeah, I quite like them. The big, wide, flat section on the top. If you can get one of them to suit you, like the aero fly-style thing from Specialized I think makes the aero fly. They're really nice to rest your hand on. It's like a tabletop, you know? And you don't grip it, you tend to just rest on it, which can be quite nice. Comes at a cost though. Yes. Yeah. I think my favorite budget bar of all time has got to be the 3T. It used to be called an Ergonova, and now, and then it was called an Ernova, and now it's called a, oh, the name escapes me, but it's the 3T ovalized one, which is alloyed to $100 or so for the bar, really good design bar. You know, it suits a huge variety of people, yeah. Something like that, but almost all of them are so similar to each other now in terms of the reach and the drop and stuff that it can be hard to tell much difference between them, unless they're really at one end of the spectrum in terms of the drop or the reach, yeah. Most of them are shaped like this these days. For good reason too, you know, that they suit a much wider variety of people than the old school, you know, big gate bars did, yeah. So yeah, that's not a terribly difficult topic, but there's a lot of scope within that, you know. You don't be afraid to experiment with it and try your mate's bars on his bike, which are one size wider and, you know, it's a relatively cheap thing to change. So, you know, it can be one of those things if you're getting some frontal shoulder discomfort and you're not sure where to track it down to and your hands are a bit close, well, you try a wider bar. That's really one of the things you'll look for is that frontal shoulder unpleasantness in the rider. If the bar is too narrow, it can be a sign that they need to go wider. If it's too wide, they will very rarely get a pain from it. So it could be hard to judge. Yeah, yeah.