Originally Posted by
six30nine
....The first thing I noticed in the pic you posted is that your saddle looks like it's tilted forward. If so, you might try leveling it or even tilting the nose up slightly. If you feel like your sliding forward, it might be causing you to try and compensate by pushing back on the bars, placing more pressure on your hands/wrists and increasing the strain on your back.
Not all of us are built the same. For example I need to tilt my own saddles at least as much as he shows or the horn puts a huge amount of pressure in the area that cuts off the blood to the naughty bits. I just keep altering the tip until I can feel most of my weight on the sit bones of my pelvis and the saddles end up with a pronounced nose down tilt. For folks like me a flat saddle isn't an option.
Back to THE Donald;
It may be that you used a chart that was intended for the new "three sizes fits all" style of radically sloped top tube road frames. But if you used such a chart then you should have stuck with that style of frame. If you had then your bars would not be so far below your saddle.
One of my road bikes is a Redline single speed 925 model. I was a bit shocked to check it just now and find that it's a 21.5 inch size from center to top just like your bike. The difference being that my bike has a more sloping top tube so the steering head tube is quite high and the bike was also put together with what appears to be more spacers under the stem. Again as a comparison for you to measure the flat horizontal Effective Top Tube length on my bike from the center of the head tube in line with the center of the top tube weld to the center of where the horizontal line intersects the seat post is 23 3/8 inchs. Check your bike for this and let us know what you find for your own measurement.
As I said before I'm the same height at you are. I just measured a couple of my bikes and the distance from the nose of my saddles to the center of the bars for my road bikes where they fit into the stem is 20 inches in all three cases. The bars on these three bikes are either drop bars like yours or bullhorn bars that are ridden with the same sort of reach as riding drop bars up on the hoods so they pretty much match up. To compare upper bodies for length between us I wear 34 inch inseam pants with my 6' 1" height so factor that into your own measurement when you check this out. With this all in mind go measure the distance from the nose of your saddle to the center of the bars where they fit in the stem and get back to us.
Oddly enough I never went out of my way to match these three bikes like this. But after fine tuning the saddle position over the pedals and then altering the reach with various stems they all ended up matching to within an 1/8 inch once I found my comfort point. Also all three bikes have the bars where they pass through the stem even with or up to one inch below the saddle. This is very much in line with the touring bike style I was describing earlier. This setup provides for a very comfortable riding position for a non racer while still allowing for effectively leaning forward aggresively to beat against a strong headwind or for those occasional fun sprints. But as some of us mentioned it may still be a little too aggresive for a new or returning rider. I know that when I started out I sure would not have been comfortable on the bikes that I enjoy now.
Who knows, the camera perspective of your picture may be playing tricks on us too. It may be that with a little bit of parts swapping you can get this thing to fit you decently. Start by measuring the stuff I gave you so we can compare. Also if you can try to get a more square on shot of the bike with the camera in line with and perpendicular in both planes to the middle of the main triangle so you have the flatest possible perspective of the bike that would help as well.