Originally Posted by
slowandsteady
Numb hands has nothing do with hand strength or even handlebars for that matter. Strengthening your muscles will not help nerve inflammation which is what that numbness is. You have too much weight on your hands. That can be corrected.
Move your seat back. Yes, move it back. It makes sense and here is why.
Stand in front of a mirror sideways. Now bend over. What happens? Your rear end moves backward to counter balance your torso. If you bend over but don't move your rear end rearward you fall over on your face.
Well if you are on a bike and you don't move your rear end rearward to compensate for bending over, that pressure of falling forward ends up on your hands. Just a cm move rearward of the seat often has a dramatic effect. You should almost be able to lift your hands off of the bars without falling forward. There should be very light pressure on the bars.
That is also why you can move to a bike with handlebars that are actually higher than your old bike but if the seat if too far forward on the new bike you will have greater pressure on your hands.
10 Wheels, you might be discarding some of the best advice in this thread.
Hand numbness has nothing to do with strength, you can have the strongest arms and hands in the world and still get numbness if your nerves are pinched. The key is removing pressure from your hands by any means possible, and backing the seat up might just be the key to it.
I didn't believe it myself for a long time, but what slowandsteady is saying comes directly from Sheldon Brown I believe. I kept scooting my seat forward cause I thought that I was leaning too far forward and moving the seat up would get me more upright. My hand numbness got worse and I started getting back pain during intense climbs.
Then I found that bit up there, and I moved my seat back on the order of about four inches or more (yeah, I had it all the way forward by that point trying to fix the problem). It felt completely unnatural at first, but I found that my back pain was gone, and any time I was pedaling my hands were only just resting on the bars, they weren't supporting any weight. My legs and core were doing all the work but it didn't really feel like it. Numbness gone.
It's not a cure-all everyone, building core strength helps a lot too. Sure worked well in my case though. Wish I'd known to go back from the start.
.
.
.