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  2. I am 6ft 1”. Quite broad. Was reading some interviews with Adam Hansen and Chris Hoy on the subject. For year I’ve been riding 42cm, at the beginning of this year I went 38cm. Now I am using 36cm! They do feel great.

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  3. Like most of us not being a professional, I have been riding road bikes for over 40 years and in this time you learn a lot. I had been riding with a handlebar width of 420. On ordering a new Aero carbon set at 420 and on receiving them I fitted them and I was happy with the way they looked and felt. Now on long rides of 240 km I found that I had shoulder problems, but I put that down to having ridden a marathon of a ride.

    However, after fitting these new bars and riding over distances of 100 km, I found that they were more comfortable than the old ones. So thinking that it had to do with the Aero type bars, I thought that I had found a reason why I had shoulder pain. That was until I found out that the bars had been sent to me in the wrong size, they were in fact 440 wide. So this was a surprise to me and it was obvious that because I had listened to a Professional bike dealer, I had been riding "Bike Marathons" with the wrong width bars. So 440 is now my new width. So although I haven't ridden in a bike marathon since, it is obvious that I had been riding with bars that were too narrow for me.

    So my opinion is that bars and width has to do with a personal touch, the same as with bike fit and saddle type. Sure Professional bike dealers speak a lot of sense, they have a good experience but, at the end of the day, one should not take their word as law, take their word as a bench mark to start you off on fine tuning your bike to your own personal comfort.

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  5. Adam Hensen said "okay let's try the smallest; thirty-eights" um I ride 38's because I'm a fully grown adult male who's the size of a little girl so 38s are appropriately sized if not a tad big for me, and in the process of finding bars I seen some manufacturers offering 36s so NO Adam, your wrong 38s are not the smallest, and they make junior road bikes for kids that go even smaller so there Mr. So Wrong! Lol idk maybe he meant smallest commonly available or allowed in the UCI rules idk because I live in America so we have the USAC as our rep to the UCI but they suck and we have other national er simi-national trying to go national governing bodies to chose if we aren't trying to go international so I race under OBRA rule which fall under NABRA rules, and with any luck the ACA will re-detach from the USAC and join the NABRA to replace the USAC and then I would be racing under UCI rules but as it stands I'm riding under a bike race governing body the has nothing to do with the UCI thus I wouldn't know UCI rules on bars… obviously drops for everyone except TT, CX, MTB, and BMX also no sharp edges, no open bar ends, those are all obvious, but width restrictions if they exist are beyond me… for NABRA crits there's no rule saying how wide or narrow you can go, I'm guessing UCI is the same.

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  7. som said some years ago about breathing and bar width, none of them mentioned the topic. 
    converging arms decrease movement of rib cage, thus inhibits respiration..
    I ride 40s, I feel the bike is quicker, tighter and better lookin -)

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  23. I have 46 cm (center-center) bars. Really wish there was more offered in that width. All i do is climb mountain slopes, so aero isn't a important as comfort. I'd rather be comfortable for the 45 minute climb than be aero for the 15 minute descent.

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  26. I am an average size rider and i run 38cm bullhorn bars on my fixed gear bike. Once you have gotten used to the feeling of sprinting out of the saddle on these, it's as comfortable and powerful as anything. The only problem i see is when your bikes gets thrown off line as your tires slip over a wet manhole cover in the road or even riding offroad it's a tiny bit harder to control.
    I might just be imagining it, but they feel very fast as well. When i go back to my roadbike now, it feels unnecessarily wide.

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  36. Your shoulders won’t change width with your handlebar. No valid reason to use a bar that’s any narrower than the width of your shoulders. 44cm shoulder measurement with 44cm handlebar = same drag and manouverability as 44cm shoulders with 36cm handlebar. Bars should be the same width as your shoulder measurement is c-c. BTW, LeMond rode one size wider on his road bikes. He said it made deep breathing on long climbs easier, and provided better handling while descending and sprinting.

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  38. They're queuing up to chat JC.. good job.. nice to hear the honesty coming out about the relationship of bar and shoulder width too.. there's not a lot to gain from really narrow bars and you compromise on handling if you go narrower..

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