chico1st

My wrists often hurt after I ride my bike, I assume my handle bars are messed up somehow. I use drop bars on a roady. what should I do to fix this?

daven1986

perhaps you are putting too much weight on your wrists? Are you riding in the drops or on the hoods or tops?

You are the opposite to me, my wrists hurt when using flat bars and road bars are comfortable!

CCrew

Get fitted properly to the bike more than likely. The reach isn't right or you're in a position where you're putting too much weight on your hands.

-R

Randochap

Raise your bars?

You need to have a proper bike fit. See a good LBS.

Duellist

Could be your seat is tilted too far and you're sliding forward with your weight on your arms? That happened to me, and I straightened it out-- no more pain.

Nightshade

Bottom line.......no matter what you do or how you adjust your bike your
wrist will stop huting when........you get your weight off them.

You also might ask your doctor about carpel tunnel syndrom to see if that's
the underlaying problem.

MichaelW

Check your overall riding position. Read up on bike fitting at peter white.com
Once you have an overall position which is OK for you, check your hand, arm and shoulders. You should ride relaxed, not tensed, and flexed, not locked. Make sure your wrists adopt a neutral angle. Ride on the brake hoods for normal cruising and position the hoods for you, up and down the bars and also in rotation. You can alter the shape of the hoods by packing bits of inner tube under the rubber.

JanMM

Time to start looking into those recombinant bicycles.

Big_e

+1. Twice I've had my wrists hurt, once on a mtb and once on a beach cruiser. Both times it was the seat tilted slightly forward too much. I was unconciously holding myself up to keep from sliding off and placing too much weight on my wrists.
Ernest

mcgreivey

I'm probably not adding much here, but... yeah, the basic explanation is too much weight on your hands. The solution could be some combination of: (A) a shorter stem, to shorten your reach, (B) higher stem, for slightly more upright riding position, (C) thicker, padded bar tape, (D) changing some habits (moving your hand position around on the bars during your ride, stretching), (E) adjusting the nose of your seat upwards a tad, so you don't slide forward onto your hands so much, (F) moving your seat forward a bit on its rails.

It's hard to know exactly which of these apply in your case, but try the free ones first (adjustments, habit changes). If those don't work, move on to those that might cost a few bucks. A new (or used) stem is pretty cheap. Bar tape is cheap. a bike fitting can be free or cheap, depending on where you go.

Well,... free or cheap? Depends. They may want to sell you stuff like a stem, or other parts, or they may want to sell you a new bike.

duffer1960

You might want to move the seat back a bit, and then you'll probably also need to shorten or raise the stem. Moving the seat back allows your torso to be more supported by the pedaling force, unweighting your arms and wrists.

mcgreivey

Actually, it depends, but moving your seat forward--if it results in you being more upright--will tend to shift the weight to your butt. Moving your seatc back--if it stretches you out more--will tend to force you to lean on your hands to support your upper body weight. At the extreme, you can see what I mean. If you moved the handlebars toward you so they were right by your stomach (on some weird freakish super-short-tube bike, I guess), you would be totally upright, with no weight on the bars. If you had a freakish super-long-top-tube bike, and you moved the bars away from you so far that you had to lift your butt off the seat to ride, you can see that you'd have no weight on your butt at all, and the a lot of weight on your hands.

But if you make other adjustments to counteract these factors, it could be reversed, I suppose, to some extent.

SweetLou

Moving the saddle forward will put more weight on your hands, not less. If the stem is not changed, by moving the saddle forward, you will also move the center of gravity forward. Think of the cycling position as a squat. The farther back you sit, the more pressure on your butt. The farther forward the center of gravity the more pressure on the hands. Try it, squat in front of a wall. Now, lean forward. As your butt goes forward, you will either fall or need to place your hands on the wall for support. If you move your butt backwards, you will either fall or need to grab onto the doorknob to prevent you from falling.

The only way to get less pressure off of the hands while moving the saddle forward would be to bring the handlebars back far enough to bring the center of gravity rear of where you initially had it.

tornado60

I am no expert, but have had this problem. I found that as so many others have said it was too much weight on my wrists. I ride on the tops of the bars (hood). My non expert advice: sit on the bike as is now. Try to determine what is pushing your wieght on your wrists. In my case the bars needed to come up, and the seat down.

JanMM

Don't move the seat up or down based on anything other than your legs.

DieselDan

Saddle angle determines body weight distribution. Angle the nose up, maybe to level, to take weight support off the wrists.

Is there an echo in here????

mcgreivey

...re an echo in here?

fordfasterr

flip the stem up... move the spacers around to raise the stem, tilt the bar up a bit may help... go to the LBS and let them figure it out for you . lol

AndrewP

Do some exercises to develop the stomach muscles.

Longfemur

Well, we certainly wouldn't want you to jump ship over to the flat bar side - but the problem and the solution is the same for both:

- adopt a proper position on your bike that doesn't put too much of your weight on your hands.

This might not be the position that you feel the most power from, but it will be the position that allows you to actually ride for miles in reasonable comfort: saddle height and setback in such a way that you end up with less weight on your hands, and more of a forward push on the pedals. For most people, this will be at or behind the knee-over-pedal setback. With proper setback, your saddle will probably have to be a half to one centimeter lower than the usually recommended "LeMond" method for setting saddle height (but it really depends on your legs).

Handlebars exceptionally low will cause more weight on your hands, but it's a lot more influenced by saddle setback.