I've been trying different bar roll setups recently. I've settled on a couple of positions, only a notch away from each other (oneup alloy bars), but they impact handling to a surprising degree.
I prefer the more rolled back position, making the bike feeling more stable and steering a bit more natural, except maybe tight flat turns. However, in this position i get significant thumb pain on long steep tracks, where the roll doesn't match my hand position well, so the outside of my palm feels lose, and my weight goes through my thumbs when braking. The 'looseness' on the bars makes my feel like the risk of blowing a hand off on a big compression is higher, though it's not happened.
Rolling forwards a little fixes this and my hands are more comfortable, but it seems to make the bike feel more twitchy especially in rough steep sections.
Any ideas on what's occuring? Bike is an S5 2022 Stumpjumper Evo. Bars are fairly high but not extreme. I tried a 50mm set of bars and that was too high, so went back to 35mm rise. Essentially worked out what the limit the bars where it felt too high and walked back from there. Pretty happy with bar width too at 770mm. Any wider and my wrists kink, and my local tracks are pretty tight for trees. But wider bars should stabilise the front?
I was also thinking of trying the angleset cups on the bike to go -1 degree, or possibly consider stem length? Any ideas would be great.
Rolling the bar forward also does the same thing as increasing your stem length. Rolling it back decreases it. The more rise your bars have, the more it changes for the same change in roll angle compared to low rise.
Pick your bar roll for comfort, then change your stem length to suit the handling.
This is correct. Also throwing it out there that adjusting bar roll will also change your grip height, so to get the same grip position in space with a different bar roll you may need to add or remove a headset spacer.
That said, I think having the bar angle match your hand position is about 1000x more important than having exactly the same grip position on an x/y plane. You can get used to having your bars +3mm higher or farther away pretty easily, but if your thumbs hurt on long descents that's a hard deal breaker.
Ergonomics for reducing pain > exactly "optimal" grip position for handling.
Since it sounds like you are speaking from thumb issue experience… for you, did you find thumb pain was due to too much or too little backsweep?
Been tinkering a bit but can’t get the thumbs to calm down.
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