Wingspan Handjive Part 2

A few weeks ago I chewed up seven minutes of your reading time with some speculative musing about handlebar width. None of the gripping issues the world is facing were solved, pun intended, but the conversations that followed in the comments were informed and enlightening. This week, I want to step further into the speculative by talking about drop bars, and in particular, wrist orientation. But first, for those of you already rolling your eyes, let me make one thing clear: I do not in any way endorse drop bars as a superior, or even equal, alternative to flats for riding off-road. What I want to do here is figure out why flat/rise bars are so convincingly better for most mountain bikers.

Throwing the wayback machine into a gear-crunching reverse, to the 1980s, there was a solid contingent of riders rolling around on WTB Dirt Drop handlebars. Charlie Cunningham started out by rebending some Cinelli 64s until he arrived at the shape he wanted, which Steve Potts then convinced Nitto to produce for Specialized as the RM-2, known colloquially as the Dirt Drop (This bar shape in and of itself was not a revolution; you can see very similar bends and positions ridden at the turn of the 20th century by riders ranging from Major Taylor to Maurice Garin). Riders with enough money and a solid reserve of patience would pair these bars with a matching WTB LD stem, originally conceived by Ibis’ Scot Nicol. The riding position with this setup differed from both regular flat/rise mountain bike handlebars and road bars. The tops were narrow, there was a massive 45 degrees of flare, and the ends of the bars canted outward. Combined with the tall, short reach stem, the idea behind this design was to place the riders hands in one position – in the drops – for optimum control. The outward flare of the drops put wrists at a comfortable angle, and the height of the bars along with the short reach of the stem meant the rider’s mass was not much different than what you’d experience in a regular aggressive flat bar cockpit.

Bear in mind this was at a time when mountain bikes were predominantly rigid and the “idea” of mountain biking was a lot more closely aligned with some variation of “much faster hiking”, decades before the phrase “whip off” entered our vernacular. Nevertheless, there were (and still are) plenty of very talented riders who emphatically defended the Dirt-Drop setup as the way to go. And, for a while this alt-hand position hung in there, even spawning some creative derivations like Bridgestone’s Mustache bar. For some interesting dives into the anatomical and hypothetical advantages from the perspective of 1991, there’s a reprint over on The Radavist of a piece Mike Varley wrote back then in Mountain And City Biking magazine. There’s some commentary in there about the advantages of being locked into a riding position that is advantageous for the wrists and putting the rider in a place of solid control. Bookmark that for later.

Time did what time does, however, and drop bars ultimately did not prevail as the cockpit of choice in mountain biking. Front suspension did a lot to alleviate the wrist position bugaboos that plagued some riders, and flat bars evolved. They got lighter, then got wider, and the once fashionable racer’s crouch gave way to more upright riding positions until we finally arrived at the modern short stem, 750ish or so wide, generously bent handlebar setup of today. Most of us are fine with this.

Now, let’s introduce rotator cuff injuries to the conversation.

Twelve or so years ago, I tore a pair of the muscles on my left rotator cuff while trying to reef a heavy cooler from surprisingly high-friction truck bed somewhere up close to shoulder height. Two years later I fucked up my right rotator cuff when a sneaky Dobermann took a cheater line while racing me around the meadow and cleaned out my crf150’s front wheel. It should be known that crf150s are the leading cause of hard to explain injuries among men over the age of 45. The Dobermann was unharmed. Aside from no longer really being able to lift either of my arms above my head, my right shoulder began to dislocate on rough downhills, which was, ummm… disconcerting. So, I diligently trudged off to physical therapy for about a year and exercised things back into something resembling working order.

One of the biggest takeaways during that year of rubber band and Bodyblade exercises was how poorly designed the human shoulder is. Like, it’s a socket, but just barely. It’s really held in place by four tiny muscles – the supraspinatus, infraspinatus, teres minor and subscapularis. Their job is to control the placement and motion of the humerus in relation to the scapula as it rotates and gets pulled in various directions by a bunch of much bigger muscles. While this arrangement provides an impressive range of motion, it’s also kind of a disaster waiting to happen. Aaaanyway, my physical therapist had me doing a lot of exercises to strengthen what was left, shoring up around the tears basically, and he also talked a lot about the traditional yogi’s lotus position. “See how the palms are facing upward? That’s how you should envision living. Namaste, dude!”

In my case, he was explaining that I also suffered from a very common thing in my right shoulder called a subcoracoid impingement; where the subscapularis gets pinched under this bony crook at the front of the shoulder called the coracoid process and then everything hurts like bejeezus except for the stuff that goes completely numb. In my case, mindfully rotating my shoulders outward, palms up, was part of the process of relieving that impingement. Namaste, dude! Also, in my case, rotating my shoulders inward, palms down, like when gripping a handlebar, well, that would be aggravating said impingement. Bummer, dude!

Namaste, dude works great for relieving shoulder nerve impingements, and is okay at pulling, but really sucks for any kind of pushing. Pushing, it turns out, is kind of important when it comes to controlling a mountain bike. So, I began to think about options during this phase of my shoulder recovery. If Namaste, dude was great for the shoulder, and Bummer, dude was the worst possible position, would the halfway point, hand rotated halfway between Namaste and Bummer – let’s call it Handshake – be an acceptable enough rotation outward from the impingement to be workable? And, would I be able to find a position that gave me the same relative level of control and comfort when riding techy stuff that I am used to with my existing flat bar setup?

But then the shoulder exercises paid off and I forgot about it. Because, like most of us, I am VERY used to my flat/rise bar riding position.

You can feel the shoulder rotation I am talking about pretty easily. Place your right hand forward about where you’d grip a handlebar, palm facing down. Place your left hand on the front of your right shoulder and then rotate your right hand outward through Handshake until you are palm up. Namaste, dude. There’ll be some motion detectable in your deltoid as your arm rotates. Depending how well I am keeping up with my exercises, there’s also some detectable popping and clicking in both my shoulders as I do this. But, most of the time, they work well enough for riding.

Now, thanks to gravel bikes re-opening a line of conversation that had been quiet for decades, along with the allegiance of the drop bar faithful, it appears that drop bar mountain bikes are having a moment again. So, let’s bring up that bookmark. The idea, back in the late ‘80s, behind drop bar control was to get the rider in a position that alleviated wrist impacts and offered a similar level of control. It was based around one position, not four or five.

One position. This is, I suspect, a large part of why most of us prefer our rise bars. We know where our hands are. We have paid our dues. We have spent our 10,000 hours. Our hand position is innately wired into our proprioceptive sense of space, along with our brake lever positions. And this is something we can feel in our sleep. By not having multiple positions to think about, we ride from a single, memorized, fully attuned stance. Trying to make sense of a bike that has four or five positions for control at any moment can be anything from moderately confusing to absolutely terrifying, depending on rider position, terrain, and timing.

Additionally, there are some benefits to the elbows out stance that palms down handlebar grabbing offers. We can move our bikes more from side to side in this position while also being able to bend our arms from fully outstretched to fully compressed. If we go to a traditional 90-degree, full Handshake, drop bar position, we can arguably achieve more fore-aft arm body mobility while getting the same full extension to full compression range of motion, but we lose some of that side to side mobility. Buuuut, as we start to flare the bars somewhere between Handshake and palms down, our elbows move outward and our stance potentially becomes more laterally mobile.

So, here’s what I am wondering about now, me and my bum shoulders… Is my sense of alienation when riding drop bars off road biomechanical, or is it a matter of familiarity? If I spend enough time getting my riding position dialed so that my “normal” riding stance on drop bars is very close to my riser bar stance – where everything is about the same except for the angle that my wrists are rotated – will I be as comfortable riding proper off-road stuff on drop bars as I am on flat bars?

I’ve spent a ton of time on drop bars racing cyclocross and doing inappropriate things on ‘cross and gravel bikes, and I have absolutely not felt as comfortable as I do on my mountain bike. But there are a ton of factors at work there. Skinny tires, rigid bikes, much lower, more aggressive bar position, incredibly scary head tube angles. What if I were to slap some new flared drop bars on a modern mountain bike, with modern geometry and big tires and a proper fork, but maybe dial back the reach a bit, or a lot, and raise the tops of the whole getup so that my position in the hooks (not on the hoods; fuck that, for so many reasons) is about the same as what I am used to? And then, what if I gave it enough time to realign some neural pathways?

Given my experience with pattern behaviors and, umm, addictive things, it takes about 90 days before our neural pathways adapt to a change in habit. Whether we are talking about biting fingernails, doomscrolling, or the feel of a cigarette between our fingers, there are little tracks in our grey matter that need about three months to stop tingling.

Three months. That is how long I will be riding sandy arroyos and dodging cactus down in Baja this winter. So what the heck, let’s experiment. I’ve got a bike with me. A steel hardtail with a 66-degree head angle and a 100mm fork, and a slightly shorter than normal top tube. It has drop bars, a bit wider than the old Dirt Drops and a little bit less flared. I have a fistful of stems to play around with. Here goes nothing.