Climbing: riding on the tops vs riding on the brake hoods

On Jul 27, 6:36 am, "Mike Jacoubowsky"
wrote:
I believe that stem height has gone down in the last decade so that
riding on the hoods now is almost like riding in the drops was before.
In particular, Indurain used to climb in the drops! Also, if you look
at riders in the 70's they did all their racing in the drops, some of
them with their forearms parallel to the ground, elbows bent at 90
degrees. Sean Kelly rode this way and when he was on the handlebar
tops near the stem he was almost sitting up straight.

In the 70s we raced in the drops more for two reasons.

#1: You were closer to the gear shifters. It was a very easy thing to drop
your hand down to the shift lever when you were in the drops.

#2: The brakes weren't nearly as good then as they are now, so you needed a
death grip to slow down, and you just couldn't get that much braking power
from the tops of the hoods.

STI/Ergo shifting changed things dramatically. All of a sudden you were
spending a lot more time out on the hoods, because that's where you shifted
from. So bars with large forward reaches, popular back in the day, caused
problems because you got too stretched out from all that time in the hoods,
and if you shortened the stem to make the reach better, the "tops" of the
bar were too close. It took a bit for people to realize that a shorter
forward reach fixed things nicely.

Stems height can safely be lowered now because we're not spending extended
periods of time in the drops anymore, so we can adopt a more-aggressive
position (in the drops) than we could before.

--Mike Jacoubowsky
Chain Reaction Bicycleswww.ChainReaction.com
Redwood City & Los Altos, CA USA

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On Jul 26, 8:52 pm, hizark21 wrote:
Climbing: riding on the tops vs riding on the brake hoods

I have noticed that most climber since the mid 90's tend to climb
seated with their hands on hoods.Personally I prefer climbing on the
tops since this a more relaxed position. Climbing seated on the hoods
put's more strain on my wrists. The one advantage of the hoods is
that you can brake faster. In the end I suppose it's a matter of
climbing style.

I believe that stem height has gone down in the last decade so that
riding on the hoods now is almost like riding in the drops was before.
In particular, Indurain used to climb in the drops! Also, if you look
at riders in the 70's they did all their racing in the drops, some of
them with their forearms parallel to the ground, elbows bent at 90
degrees. Sean Kelly rode this way and when he was on the handlebar
tops near the stem he was almost sitting up straight.

-ilan

OK, but can you explain this video: http://media.crossfit.com/cf-video/C...ansitions2.mov
The guy has a pretty large saddle to stem drop, but he's totally
sitting up anyway when on the brake hoods. Stem too short? Bike size
too small? A triathlon bike without aerobars?

-ilan