So I took delivery of my Ragley Big Al 2 (Size large = 18inch frame) yesterday, very nice bike it is too. I'm 6:2ft - 189cm and 87kg, my normal bike is a Giant Anthem X29er (large - 20inch frame). So I took the Ragley for a 6 mile road spin and all felt great, fit seems spot on and reach perfect, then woke up at 2am with real real pain in both shoulder joints, kind of deep in the shoulder socket type pain. Everytime I rolled over it woke me up again. The reach on the Ragley seems almost the same as the Anthem and feels fine size wise, 6:2ft puts me on a large according to the Ragley site. The only thing that's a big change is the Anthem has 670mm bars and the Ragley is 800mm. It's got to be some sort of fit issue that can be resolved right ? I'm thinking of slowly cutting the bars down is stages to get to near 700mm ? The Ragley saddle position is lower than the Anthem's too.
Generally very fit and never had this before, it's really painful still, all other parts (arms, back etc) are fine.
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That's a big leap in bar width. But 670 is quite narrow. Some sort of managed bar width increase up to whatever width you want might be better instead of a chop to 700. Maybe ride with everything shoved inboard a bit and slowly increase width or get some cheap/ secondhand bars to experiment with?
See if the pain gets better over the next couple of days, you might just have used muscles you haven't used before.
Most people ride 750+ bars these days, i picked up a pair of 680mm bars in the garage the other day and they felt comically narrow.
When you say the saddle position is lower, is that relative to the BB, ground or Bars? It should be the same relative to the BB all things (crank length, pedal type etc) being equal.
he pain gets better over the next couple of days, you might just have used muscles you haven’t used before.
This, you might just have DOMs, simiiar to if youd gone to the gym and done some squats and deadlifts then the next day cant walk.
Although the new bars are wider, are they the same height as your old ones? You're not hunched over more?
As above, the wider bars will have you using your shoulders a lot more rather than forearms, so it's probably DOMS (Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness).
Have a sit on both bikes and see how it differs in feel.
Thanks for the replies, the DOM's sounds like the likely cause. The front end of the Ragley is higher than the Anthem (Ragley = 140mm fork, Anthem = 100mm). I will follow the advice and see if it slowly goes away, if not I will experiment with bar length & pitch. Is it correct that reducing the bar length will slightly reduce the overall reach ? The saddle lower comment relates to height from the ground, the BB on both bikes are the same height. Just seemed strange why it's only shoulder pain, arms, neck & back are all fine today.