Originally Posted by
Iride01
Even if you were going from 38 cm bars to 44 cm bars, it will not significantly change your reach. If you are sitting at a desk right now, put your hands on the edge of the desk and straighten you arms. Note your body position, then move your hands either way a few cm. That's what the change will be. Not much.
As long as the reach and drop of the bars is the same, your reach will for all practical and anything on the significant side of the mathematical will be the same.
You do have me a little on the sweep back, but I still think that will be insignificant too. I'll have to look since I've never had drops with a sweep on them. Maybe it'll give us more minutiae to argue. <grin>
What narrower to wider will do for you is make your body more stable against the swaying motion of the bike as you pedal and the bumps you encounter. For me that's a bad thing, makes my arms and shoulders hurt more because they don't share as much swaying force with the rest of my body. So I prefer narrower bars than what I'd normally be recommended.
Like saddles, its a personal preference thing. Use what works for you.
thanks. Yeah. I think I’ll just have to play around with some different bars and stem length as well shuffling of spacers on my stem. The size 42 definitely felt too narrow. And the shallower drop was nice. Zipp has a drop at with a 70mm reach which seems like it might fit my needs. I would likely put a 100mm stem on for that. More moderate flare but for me flare is not critical. I’ve tried different degrees of flare and just never felt like I preferred one over the other. Anything under 4 hours I can usually adjust to whatever but for some of my longer events I want to be more comfortable in the drops.