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I am off to the best start in years, 1000 miles in so far. But, I have had an achy wrist for a month now and it is getting worse. I don’t have much weight on it while riding, I am either going up where my weight is on the seat, or down where I am standing. I think it’s related to the rough downhillimpacts. The handlebars on my new bike are based on the 35mm standard and I cut them back to 750mm.
Has anyone else had issues with their wrists on the new handlebar std? Would going to 31.8 be a little less stiff?
If you keep doing it you'll go blind 🙂
Either strengthen it more, lay off it a bit or swap hand...
Taken a knock at some point? Is the position still good with your controls?
Are your forks working properly?
Is it both wrists
Edited / deleted. More content to add... but as someone with feeble wrists i felt is was more deserving of a longer answer (to follow)
I doubt the different in flex between a 31.8 and 35mm bar will be the factor, it may be more to do with the sweep and / or some other weakness.
FWIW I've had some intermittent pain on my right wrist but have been experimenting with bar and brake position and found that tilting the bars further forward so the ends are more upswept and rotating brake levers down has helped ease the discomfort.
Last time I had wrist pain I was convinced it was rsi had all the fancy gubbins for my pc etc. Turns out it was my forks set with too much compression (to stop them diving) and shit skinny grips. I got some fat bonty grips with locking ring only on the inside and a proper weight spring for the forks. No more pain.
If the sore wrists are a pattern of injury then it will only get worse unless you get to the bottom of it. You've started a thread asking "Is it the bars?"; this is impossible to determine definitively because we know so little. I'd look very broadly at your setup and try and work systematically looking for problem areas.
I don't know where you ride, what you ride and how fast / hard you ride except for the mention of "rough downhill impacts". Is this a hardtail or full suss? What travel? What typical trails? Are you aggressive (for want of a better term)?
Regardless of those questions there's a bunch of stuff that makes a difference:
1. wrist angle from rolling your bar back/forward
2. brake lever flatness / single finger setup / brake reach
3. reach and stack - if you're running a too short stem (for fashion reasons) on a too short bike it can really send you out of position and might end up at the wrists
After all of that you have setup and there is a wealth of misguiding information floating around. It isn't necessarily badly intentioned information but it can be that one person's solution doesn't apply across the board. I'll stick to generalisations to explain why I don't think a 35mm bar is the problem.
Bars do have a feel; that is certain but they are at the end of a chain of connectivity between you and the dirt. Tyres and suspension all come before the bars and, crucially, they have a significant (damped) deformation built in as a principal part of their design; bars do not. Yes, bars deform under load. Yes, Spank pump a bar full of foam and tell you it has damping. Everybody knows carbon is a wunder material with natural damping, whatever that means. But bars are just bars; they're not very clever devices.
So key to a smooth ride is the combination of tyres and suspension setup and then on top of that if you are grabbing huge handfuls of brake with twisted up wrists while nailing Alpine sized verticals over braking bump strewn trails, you will have a recipe for wrist trouble.
My riding at the moment is on alpine sized verticals over braking bump strewn trails. I have weak wrists - they've been problematic since 2002 and I've learned to live with them. I've also worked extremely hard on my setup to enable to me to keep riding the way I want to ride. The key turning point in my story was when I realised that the changes I'd been making to make my suspension softer had actually aggravated my wrists more than ever. With soft setups I had two problems:
1. Bottoming out (or just sitting deep in the travel) on steep terrain
2. My rebound set too slow for the soft spring so a tendency to pack down if speeds picked up
In particular that second characteristic would mean I'd be afraid of speed picking up and I'd hang up hard on the brakes a lot which killed my wrists / gave me arm pump pretty quickly.
So without knowing too much about your situation I'd just encourage to say that wrists take a hammering in this sport but even feeble wrists can be accommodated with sensitive setup choices. So more information please and there may be some ideas for your setup.
But I don't think the bars being 35mm diameter are the problem.
Thanks all. I ride a bronson v2 with 150mm suspension front and back, my riding style is really race to the bottom as fast as you can, but I focus on being smooth rather than just running over everything. So I weight/unweigh my bike as I go over roots, rocks, etc and I tend to scrub just enough speed to make a corner, rarely do I grab a fistful of brake.
Was hoping the solution would be easy, but will experiment with my setup. Most I have already done, brakes are setup for a neutral position wrist, width and stem feel right as I don’t put much weight through my hands. I do tend to prefer a higher stack, which I would think would help.
I do ride elbows out when descending, and when I do so I find the bars have too much backsweep as I find only my thumb and two first fingers have any real contact. That said, the bar only has 6 or 7 degree backsweep so it is relatively industry std. I use ODI Ruffian grips which are thin, maybe I could experiment with a thicker grip, but I have small hands. My suspension was set with the help of shockwiz, so its a lttle stiff but not overly harsh. I do have a debonair air shaft upgrade that I was going to install that may help.
Tried something like:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Sports-Support-Bandage-Neoprene-Everyday/dp/B018T7KD2U
?
Handlebar: worth trying to "tune" there...
Wider handlebar and try 31.8 indeed.
It might not be the same thing but I used to get terrible arm pump, would ruin rides at BPW within a couple of runs down. I tried different grips etc etc and eventually found the cause which was far too much rebound damping. I now run only enough that the bike isn't just pogoing off everything and no more and my arms are way better now
"My suspension was set with the help of shockwiz"
This is quite possibly the problem here. I've got lots of Shockwiz experience and it is more guidelines than law. Potentially everything about your setup needs to be questioned. FWIW, I get wrist survival for full on days in the Alps basing around a custom Shockwiz profile of Firm-Active with zero spacers in a 2016 170mm Rockshox Lyrik.
The other thing is that you need to keep on top of the lube in the lowers staying on the foam rings. Again, with full on days in the Alps I am doing this once a week. If you know you have lube in the lowers but it has likely drained to the bottom of the lower legs (not up at the foam rings) quick simple way is to...
1. remove the front brake lever at the bar so it can move with the fork lowers
2. remove air pressure from the fork (for safety)
3. invert the bike
4. start as though you are removing the fork lowers... (loosen bolts etc.) but don't pull the lowers all the way off the stanchions. Get to the point sliding the lowers off the stanchions where they *just* disengage from the bushings but the seals are still fully engaged with the stanchions; they'll flop a few degrees. This is all you need to do to get the oil back up to the foam rings. Wait a few seconds then reassemble