Originally Posted by here and there
Good job on the illustrations. This would have been useful when I was trying to decide on albatross bars or north road bars last year.
As I wrote in this thread, I've been struggling to get comfortable on ANY handlebar. I'm a good candidate for a recumbent, but it isn't a practicle solution for my needs right now. Anyways, I put trekking bars back on the bike and while they offer a lot of hand positions I found I needed to use those positions to keep my hands from falling asleep. So I put the north road bars back on and switched to a zero setback seatpost which put me in an almost upright position. I still have enough of a bend in my spine that I don't get back pain (which happens if I'm bolt upright), and the shoulder/fore arm pain I was having previously with the north bars was not an issue.
I rode a old 3-speed owned by my uncle (very comfortable, BTW). It had more or less NR bars. One thing I noticed was the position of the seat in relation to the bars was as if my positioning was "inside" the bars instead of reaching out with my back sloped with drop bars. So, I don't have alot of experience with NR bars but it seems to me if your back is sloped like in a drop bar setup but you are actually using NR bars or the like this could cause some discomfort?