Originally Posted by
JuiceWillis
I asked and got the "breathe better" answer lol. No real explanation and I never had trouble breathing anyways, 38cm bars FTW?
From what little research I've done it was the Italians in the 60s or so that started the wide bar trend. Tradition kept it going and we got the 'wide as your shoulders' and 'breathes better' explanations. Whilst I've yet to ask my bio-mech eng friends, apparently the actual shoulder joint itself doesn't vary too much between people. How far the humerus protrudes and musculature may be vastly different but a few thousand years of evolution has kept a couple key joints pretty constant.
For reference the c-c joint distance is roughly 37.5cm-39cm on average. I use 40cm on my road bike, currently going from 42 to 38 for mass starts, and have 34s on the way for sprints.