Beginner's Hand pain.

[quixoticgeek]

Went out on a 46k ride on my newly completed drop bar frankenbike. This is the longest ride (2:38) I've ever done on a drop bar bike, having ridden my Brompton almost exclusively for a decade. Despite having a bike fit, and setting up to those measurements, I notice pain and discomfort in my palm (by the thumb, from the hoods), and lower wrist. Is this just a case of me not being used to the new position, or is this something I should be aware of as indicative of a bigger issue?

J

[T42]

You might have set the shifters too high.  I did this a few years back and got exactly the symptoms you describe, with an added dose of tendinitis one wrist.

[chrisbainbridge]

Difficult to say without more information.

How old are you?
Were you wearing gloves?
Were your elbows straight?
what position are your wrists?
Were you gripping the handlebars with your hands?

A photo head on and side on whilst riding your bike would be helpful.

[quixoticgeek]

Difficult to say without more information.

How old are you?

Mid thirties... give or take...

Were you wearing gloves?

Yes. It's November in Noord Holland...

Were your elbows straight?

Initially yes, locked out. I think this may have been a slight beginner mistake. Things are better when I don't lock them out.

what position are your wrists?

angled slightly down from the angle of the arm, ever so slightly, maybe 5°.

Were you gripping the handlebars with your hands?

I was riding on the hoods, gripping them to use the brakes mainly.

A photo head on and side on whilst riding your bike would be helpful.

I don't have such photos (hard to take on my own).

I can do you one of the bike:



Is there anything obvious about how the hoods/bars are set up, that may be indicative?

J

[chrisbainbridge]

Many gloves are too small in the first web space and stress the basal joint of the thumb. So I would certainly look at your gloves. I suspect it is an easy area to save money!

Locking your elbows will inevitably lead to internal rotation of the arms, elevation of the shoulders with extension of the wrist. This puts your weight on the wrong place and leads to pain.

[mrcharly-YHT]

I think your hoods are too high. That creates a couple of problems; one is that there is then a big reach from the drops to the brake levers. The other is that it is forcing your wrists into a cocked back position.

Since you have the hood bands on top of the tape, it should be easy to move the hoods down a bit.

[LittleWheelsandBig]

The bars haven't been taped yet - even easier.

[quixoticgeek]

The bars haven't been taped yet - even easier.

yeah, I wasn't sure the exact position of the shifters, so wanted to wait til I got that sorted to tape them...

J

[LittleWheelsandBig]

I do the same thing.

For what little it is worth (i.e. nothing), I'd roll the handlebars down a shade (drops pointing to the seatpost clamp or suchlike), possibly flip the stem (leave the spacers where they are) and then think about moving the levers up or down a bit. My opinion isn't worth anything though, mostly because none of us have seen how you actually sit on the bike.

[Ham]

It sounds as if you are relatively new to drop bar riding (?), which suggests that you are likely to be relatively tense, so it would be very difficult to read too much into your early results.

1st question - how have you chosen the stem length? (courtesy of road.cc, evaluated against my experience) there is an easy way to estimate whether you have it right. With your hands on the hoods, look down. If the bar obscures the front hub, you've got it about right. If not, it may well need adjusting. At least, the direction fore or aft of the hub may indicate the direction of travel.

As others have said, you can't begin to trim if your riding position is wrong. The thing that is a little surprising is that you have had a bike fit. surprising as there is no way a drop bar should be less comfortable than a flat bar, even granted you weren't in an optimum position. The very flexibility of the riding position should have sorted that out, IMO. Was the bike fit from a recommended fitter?

[Bolt]

Hmmm, your post suggests that you had a bike fit on a different bike and you've transposed those measurements to the new bike?  It appears that with bars set higher that your saddle you've specified a relaxed more upright riding style and this is causing the tendency for your arms to rest in the locked position.  I'd take Ham's advice in checking the stem length assuming the saddle fore/aft position is correct or ideally get the bike fitter to check you over on the new bike.

That said adjusting to drops may take some time and you will eventually learn to feel the difference between slight discomfort and something more serious.  Did the pain occur straight away, did it remain constant or escalate, did you experience numbness or loss of dexterity afterwards?  Escalating discomfort and post ride symptoms do need addressing but general niggles do sometimes come and go.

[Ian H]

If you were in the same position for the entire ride you might expect some discomfort. 

[zigzag]

looks a bit uncomfortable - i would flip the stem, rotate the handlebars down a bit so that the ends are almost parallel to the ground, and slide the levers up so that their tops make 3-5degree angle with the floor.
with the current setup it looks like handlebars are getting in a way of your natural position (although without seeing someone riding it's hard to tell).

[Samuel D]

The position of the bars and hoods look within the reasonable range to me. Every cyclist positions them slightly differently by accident or design. The bars are on the high side but I presume you intended that.

More surprising is the saddle position: rather forward on the rails for a small frame and a seatpost with minimal layback. A forward saddle throws weight onto the hands. Sliding it back reduces weight on the hands, typically reducing all forms of hand discomfort. If you’re a strong racing cyclist, you will push the pedals so hard that there won’t be much weight left for the hands to carry (and even a weak cyclist will have to pull up on the bars when sprinting). But for long-distance, moderate-speed cycling, a forward saddle leads to the discomfort that people try to cure with thick bar tape, gel pads, gloves, etc.

Bike fitters sometimes don’t understand this critical weight-distribution stuff. They prefer to talk about esoteric, vaguely defined concepts like pedalling dynamics. So the fact that you have had a bike fit doesn’t prove your position is right.

Page 10, Saddle Setback. (PDF)

[quixoticgeek]

The position of the bars and hoods look within the reasonable range to me. Every cyclist positions them slightly differently by accident or design. The bars are on the high side but I presume you intended that.

More surprising is the saddle position: rather forward on the rails for a small frame and a seatpost with minimal layback. A forward saddle throws weight onto the hands. Sliding it back reduces weight on the hands, typically reducing all forms of hand discomfort. If you’re a strong racing cyclist, you will push the pedals so hard that there won’t be much weight left for the hands to carry (and even a weak cyclist will have to pull up on the bars when sprinting). But for long-distance, moderate-speed cycling, a forward saddle leads to the discomfort that people try to cure with thick bar tape, gel pads, gloves, etc.

It's a small saddle (Specialised riva IIRC), and the seat post is a 25mm set back (Ritchie Comp 2 350mm[1])

If I adjust the saddle what sort of level of increments should I be thinking, 10mm at a time? 5mm? 20mm?

Bike fitters sometimes don’t understand this critical weight-distribution stuff. They prefer to talk about esoteric, vaguely defined concepts like pedalling dynamics. So the fact that you have had a bike fit doesn’t prove your position is right.

Page 10, Saddle Setback. (PDF)

Weight distribution is a problem as I have an over abundance of weight currently (Tho going down as I cycle more...).

J

[1] http://www.chainreactioncycles.com/nl/en/ritchey-comp-2-bolt-seatpost/rp-prod112146

[Samuel D]

I tried to look up the geometry for the frame. If the seat tube angle is 72.5 degrees, that is unusually slack (i.e. good) for a small frame. Your position may therefore not be as far forward as it appeared to me based on seatpost type and saddle clamp position on the rails. Small frames are often as steep as 74 degrees, which is steeper than anything ridden by Eddy Merckx or Chris Boardman or [insert almost any successful racer]. You can imagine how likely that is to work for someone pushing the pedals perhaps one-third as hard, and therefore bearing much more weight on the hands.

That said, your saddle would still be too far forward for me (and many long-distance (i.e. slow) cyclists whether they recognise the problem or not). If you mark your current position so you can return to it, you may as well try a large adjustment to prove to yourself whether weight on the hands is or isn’t the problem. At least 10 or 15 mm. You’ll need to lower the saddle by a small amount when sliding it back, to keep the bottom bracket-to-saddle distance the same. I’ll leave the trigonometry of that in your capable hands.

I find I need to ride a new position for hundreds of kilometres before I can judge whether the change was for better or worse. A quick spin is misleading in that all change initially feels bad.

Fiddle with the handlebar and hood angles if you think that would help, but there’s no correct position and – egregious errors aside – someone else’s opinion on that is not particularly useful, if you ask me. With less weight on the hands, the bar position (including height and reach) becomes less important anyway, the reductio ad absurdum being hands-free riding where the bars can be anywhere you like or non-existent.

[Brucey]

I'm assuming that you would have been OK on your Brompton for a similar length of time and that you have perhaps transposed the position across so that some part of the bars (the tops ?) on the new bike are at the same reach as some part (the grips?) of the Brompton handlebars.

If so that means the reach to the hoods is probably  quite a  bit longer than you are used to, and if the saddle is in the same place (or forwards, effectively, if it is a small (short) saddle and you have measured to the nose) then you will probably have too much weight on your hands.

If you are going to increase the reach (and lean over a bit more and become a tad more aerodynamic) then it makes sense to shift the saddle backwards on the rails a bit; that way you will still be 'balanced' over the pedals.

[If this seems confusing, think of a skier; when they are stood upright their bum is over their heels (more or less) but when they are in a racing crouch it is a fair bit further back than that, which leaves their net CoG over the same part of the skis as before.]

Pedalling in a lower position (if that is what you are aiming for) is different to pedalling in an upright position; in particular the way your back and glutes contribute to the force on the pedals is very different and this takes some getting used to.

A others have said it is impossible to guide you further without seeing you on the bike(s) but I wouldn't be at all surprised (assuming that you plan is to ride on the hoods mostly, which not everyone does) if you end up with the saddle a bit further back and with a slightly shorter stem too.

cheers

[quixoticgeek]

Having done 300k to be sure it wasn't just beginner pangs, I'm now in a position of having a lot of pain in my elbows.

I'm gonna reread the suggestions on here a few times to fully understand the suggestion, then have a fettle. Need to get on top of this, my legs are not limiting me, my arms are...

J

[quixoticgeek]

I set up a camera on a tripod and with some careful abuse of the self timer, have managed to get some photos of the handlebars of the bike with me holding them.











Does this provide enough of an idea to provide some useful feedback? The first photos are the position I had the bars at. I then loosened of the bolts on the stem, and rotated the bars until I had the hoods in a comfy position, which is where the latter photos end up. I've ridden this a few days this week and it seems more comfortable. I'll only know after I've done another few hundred km.

J

[Ham]

There will be people along who know what they are talking about soon, but to me, the originals look just wrong. I've always viewed the hoods as a straight extension of the tops, imagine as if they were bull bars with the curves providing extra drop. The angle of the bars and the stem wouldn't suit me, I prefer horizontal rather than angled up, but that starts to become a measure of personal preference.

If it feels better you are  on the way to making it better.

[Blodwyn Pig]

Its always a difficult transition between flats and drops. With flats ,one has all the controls to hand in the one position, whereas once changed to drops everything is different. I think the mistake most people make here is to assume that riding on the hoods all the time is correct. Behind the hoods, there is another 3-4" of useable depth. Personally I find that setting the bike up with top of bars lower than saddle, and having a natural Hand position on the ramps, that way, when cruising ,the tops ( flat straight bit) is used, and when honking, or going faster, then the hoods are used, and then the ramps offer middle ground.
Without stating the obvious, with flat bars,all the controls are at the closest point, whereas with drops, the controls are at the furthest point, made worse now with sti type shifters, so one FEELS like they NEED to be on top of the controls 24/7.

[LittleWheelsandBig]

Make sure your position also allows you to use the drops comfortably. There is no point carrying them around if they are unusable.

[Brucey]

riding the bike is different from just sitting on the bike because the pedalling forces unweight your hands. But even so, the photos you have posted mostly show the same thing, which is that your elbows are pretty straight. If they are like this and you have any weight on your arms, discomfort is guaranteed.

An interesting experiment is to move the saddle back 1cm at the same time as fitting a 1cm shorter stem. This should unweight your arms whilst keeping everything else about the same as it was. I know that this sort of thing can make a huge difference to me.

cheers

[Sergeant Pluck]

I’m no expert but I have done my share of position-fiddling. To me, the combination of sliding the saddle forward, swinging the bars up towards you, and elbow pain (arms too straight too much of the time) suggests you are stretching out over the bike more than your body wants.

Would suggest:
- shorter stem
- use some of that extra steerer length to raise the stem
- saddle a bit more forward on the rails
- when the saddle goes forward on the rails, you need to compensate by raising the saddle

Then you should be able to rotate the bars to a better position, i.e. with the tops more or less level with the brake levers roughly as they are now, a continuation of the tops.

[quixoticgeek]

I’m no expert but I have done my share of position-fiddling. To me, the combination of sliding the saddle forward, swinging the bars up towards you, and elbow pain (arms too straight too much of the time) suggests you are stretching out over the bike more than your body wants.

Would suggest:
- shorter stem
- use some of that extra steerer length to raise the stem
- saddle a bit more forward on the rails
- when the saddle goes forward on the rails, you need to compensate by raising the saddle

Then you should be able to rotate the bars to a better position, i.e. with the tops more or less level with the brake levers roughly as they are now, a continuation of the tops.

Excellent, I've now got one reply saying move the saddle back, and another saying move it forward...

J