[Closed] Short reach and narrow bars are back!

Yeah, but they didn't include the Grim Doughnut.

That's quite a change in direction from their usual writings. Probably bound to happen sooner or later.

So 750 is "astoundingly narrow"? Where were these people 5-10 years ago? It's rather convenient when a bike actually fits down the trail.

Still significantly wider than my bars!! Surely width should be related to shoulder width anyway

I am going to try narrower bars, I think 780-800mm ones may have been more useful when I was on shorter bikes - and be surplus to requirements now.

Longer frames have been a godsend for me though, and I've no intention of going shorter again. Whatever ze Germans tell me.

750mm is narrow? WTAF?

750mm is narrow? WTAF?

Do you even enduro bro?

this article couldn’t have come at a better time!

i want a new bike and i’ll show this to my wife (who is the only employed person in the house) as evidence that i must have a new bike.

though without reading it,  i have no idea what they consider short.

I love to hate enduro mag

I rather like Enduro Mag but if they want to stir up a reaction to ‘you need a bigger rear than front disk’, ‘those wide bars and the long reach we’ve been championing are all wrong’, etc they really need comments under their articles Pinkbike style.  With a bit of effort they could take me back to the good old days of Zapata Espinoza’s editorials in Mountain Bike Mag

I've never run more than 700mm on any bike and i've been on a mountain bike for circa 30 years now!

I’ve never run more than 700mm

Have you tried wider and settled on <=700mm or just never tried?

Oh yeah had wider factory fitted, but never got on with them.

My current bike is retro 26er so no need for wider on the gentle single track I'm riding at the moment

Well for wide bar fashionistas I guess it’s easy to chop them down a bit to get back on trend!

I’m ahead of the game and cutting down my grips. 90 mm is all anyone needs.
Narrower grips mean your bars are wider whatever the width.

I’m so on trend I put some bar ends on the HT (that’ll be in the next edition) 👍

Just in case nobody's already said it.

750mm is narrow? WTAF?

Been happy at 760mm for the best part of four years 740 prior to that.

As for short reach (not too short of course) it's better for wheels off the ground jibby type riders. If you just want to steamroller local bridleways/rocky tech at speed, the longer big wheel bikes are better.

Hasn't it always been so with jump orientated riders sizing down!

I definitely don't think longer bikes are a bad thing in the main.

However... having had a few scary offs riding the pretty poorly tended bridleways and natural trails round here I keep looking at my wide bars rather accusingly after they clobber a trunk.or branch. I honestly don't remember that happening back in the day.

Next Spring the hacksaw is definitely coming out. Long bikes, fine, low, fine, slack, great.... But I'm starting to think I fell for the fashion of wide bars rather too easily.

Been happy at 760mm for the best part of four years 740 prior to that.

As for short reach (not too short of course) it’s better for wheels off the ground jibby type riders. If you just want to steamroller local bridleways/rocky tech at speed, the longer big wheel bikes are better.

Hasn’t it always been so with jump orientated riders sizing down!

Yep!

"On top of that, the agile handling of compact bikes is usually more fun”

Yep, that is what I found. I had a slack hardtail with wide bars and while it was more stable down a fast rough descent, the rest of the time it was crap. As There are only 2 descents where I live the bike was sold after 2 months.

There is a trail at Woburn where I’ve got incrementally slower as my bars have widened. I’m not going back under 700mm but I won’t be going over 780 again.

It wouldn't hurt if there was a little irony or self awareness of how daft the about turn is.

Rocking 760mm bars / 70mm stem on my XC bike. Any wider / shorter just feels weird.

@tomaso exactly, that is what grates a little. A complete u-turn ! Done by narrow bars so you can get round quicker and have more fun!

I love to hate enduro mag. They seem to to sip so hard from the German kool aid keg.

I remember a couple of years ago they supposedly did an exhaustive dropper post test, and came back concluding that the Reverb was still the king as it was the most reliable of them all... When I questioned them, they said from a sample size of something like 23, they hadn’t had a single Reverb failure!

I concluded that they never actually rode the ****ing bikes and merely took pictures of them and banged on about whatever was “on trend” right now to stimulate sales and click throughs...

Don’t get me wrong, I still think a well working Reverb still has the nicest action of all the droppers, but having broken 9 myself, I finally switched over to Fox Transfers before killing my 10th and haven’t looked back..

It wouldn’t hurt if there was a little irony or self awareness

Feels naughty to perpetuate national stereotypes, but absolutely yes.

I concluded that they never actually rode the **** bikes and merely took pictures of them and banged on about whatever was “on trend” right now to stimulate sales and click throughs…

I guess they only rode bikes for a short review period, and therefore missed out on the joy most Reverb owners had of their posts going wrong in various fun ways after about a year.

Generally their UK-based reviewers are fairly good, but the German ones do seem a bit unengaging and I find them harder to relate to my own riding.

I’ve never had bars over 760mm wide and, for what I do, I reckon they’d be more hindrance than help.
Mind you, I’m still riding a pair of Liteville 301 Mk10’s (and still thoroughly enjoying them ) so I’m hardly a judge of what’s cutting edge technology, am I....

I never bought into the long reach trend, and despite broad shoulders I cut down bars to 760, 770.
Bike mags praising modern geometry but at the same time ramming their saddles as forward as possible. How long before we have 90° seat tubes.

710 on my XC bike, cut down from 720. I'm 5.11 and reasonably broad. Narrow bars (and somewhat longer stem) really help me climb, so I've made the bars as narrow and the stem as long as I can without comrpomising DH. 70mm stem was slightly better descending, but not that much. But it's plenty better climbing.

Bike mags praising modern geometry but at the same time ramming their saddles as forward as possible.

???

Saddles are rammed forward to get a steeper effective seat angle. Which is part of the "modern geometry" thing.

I think the reality is that there is no one bike that is fastest on all styles of track, some will bikes will be fast on one type of track but slower on another.

That enduro mtb mag is notorious for declaring things in a very black and white psuedo science way when the truth is shades of grey.

Bike mags praising modern geometry but at the same time ramming their saddles as forward as possible. How long before we have 90° seat tubes.

That's because you need the 'reach' when stood, but not when sat.

Go for a ride on a 'modern geometry' bike, and it makes sense.

My point was if the geometry is so great you wouldn't need to have your saddle at its limit. Hence the new trend of going steeper with the seat tube.
My bike is 2019 geometry, I've just stayed medium when most are going large.

Gotcha now.

I'm mainly riding 2017 or 2018 frames, but I've sized up to get a bit more reach and rammed the saddles forward to pretend they have steeper seat angles.

Works for me and they were about 1/3 the price of the 2020 frames.