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High sweep bars

Slim

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Details, please, in the form of how these high sweep bars affect reach. I took a spin on another brand with more sweep, but they brought my hands back further than I prefer.

My wonky left hand/wrist really wants more sweep. These days, I find myself riding around half the time with that hand wrapped loosely around the end of the bar.

Bring back bar ends!

As a Bikefitter and certified ‘tinkerer’ I am always interested in this topic.
I have a few short replies to your questions/statements and we should certainly discuss more!

Many bars (like the 20/20 bar that @Jersey Skier uses) compensate a bit by offsetting the entire bar to the front, or by only starting the sweep further out to the ends. So reach reduction is often less than you might think. Still, if it is there, it is easy enough to compensate with a longer stem if needed.

For many (smaller) people, the big sweep might actually be required to get the reach to the grips short enough, now that even size S bikes are becoming super long.

Bar sweep is personal, but I find it strange that 8 degrees seems to be the standard. In my experience, about 80% of mtb riders do best between 8-20 degrees, with 10-12 being a safe bet for almost everyone.

NSMB.com is a good resource, with reviews and discussions of several higher sweep bars.

The ’Joy of bike’ YouTube channel has some great videos about Bikefit, including bar sweep.


Besides the Answer 20/20 bar, other brands that offer bars with 11 degree and more sweep are Salsa, Syntace and SQLab.

As you almost certainly know, bar ends are not a good idea on modern, wide, mtb bars: they would hook and catch on stuff all the time and you would need even wider bars to keep your normal grip width. More importantly, the position of bar ends on wide bars would lead to very awkward arm/shoulder positioning.

However, there is a better solution to have your cake and eat it too: Bar-ins.
By putting the bar ends on the inside of you grips and levers you:

  • Don’t have to worry about catching them on stuff
  • end up with a great, ergonomic position, like a road biker on their hoods: slightly longer than your flat bar position, shoulder width apart and wrists vertical.
Dig out an old pair of bar ends, or by some cheap ones off Amazon, and give it a try. Nothing to loose.


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Tom K.

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@Slim, back in my racing days, SQ Lab set me up with a couple pair of their Inner Bar Ends. I don't remember what it was, but something about them bugged me. Maybe rubbing the "skier's bumps" on my thumbs, but the memory is vague.

Moving away from sweep for the moment, I recently tried a pair of One Up Components carbon bars that have flex engineered into them, sort of like many short-travel mtbs are doing on the chainstay or seatstay to get away from using a rear pivot.

Holy moly, they are the real deal. At the end of a rough-ish four hour ride, I realized I wasn't tensing up for sharp-edged bumps at all, and evening hand/wrist/finger fatigue was nearly absent.

My wife, on the other hand, rode down the trail half a mile and stopped. When I stopped behind her wondering what was up, she just said "get over here, I want to kiss you".

 
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TS
Slim

Slim

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@Tom K. I had one client buy the SQlab inner bar ends. That experience matched yours.
They are very shaped and sculpted, forcing the hand into the wrong position and the shaped ridges rubbed on her hands. We ended up flipping them upside down, so they curved forward and down. Much better that way.

But, having seen that, I do not recommend them anymore. Especially when you can get old/cheap regular bar ends for (nearly) free.

If you are liking that Oneup bar, you probably want to stick with that, rather than trying a higher sweep version (I really wish they would make that!), so all the more reason to try some bar-ins to give the wrists a different (more neutral) angle for part of the time.

As my ergonomics professor said in his first lecture: ’sitting well means being able to change the way you sit’. This was talking about office chairs and truck seats, but the same applies to bikes: no matter how dialed the position is, it is still not good to hold it for hours on end.
 

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