About a 10 year process for me to arrive at my current state. ;)

And no, having my hands high is not the purpose of my position. Like you I think there is more in play here for getting one comfortable, aero, and powerful.

for the sake of argument I might swap on a flatter position to see if I can hold the same posture and what the differences might look like.

edit: mental lapse on what year we're in.

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I'm holding the OP to the title of the thread: At the end of reading this, I want a definitive 'hands high' answer

So far, this is reading a lot like "... so if you look into your heart, it turns out that the answer to high hands was with you, all along."

it depends on how you get 'em high...

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Eric Reid AeroFit | Instagram Portfolio
Aerodynamic Retul Bike Fitting

“You are experiencing the criminal coverup of a foreign backed fascist hostile takeover of a mafia shakedown of an authoritarian religious slow motion coup. Persuade people to vote for Democracy.”

Even people who have been fit in the high hands position and that's their prefered position, unless they are racing on the velodrome, will need to make the decision do I lose time at yaw or do I find a position that is faster and could be more or less comfy. Well around 80% of them will need to make some decision(s).

I don't worry about the fit process or philosophy nor do I care about the fitter's process or philosophy. My job is to find the most speed/reduce drag for someone and quantify that.

We just approach this from different ends. Your job as a fitter is to positioning them my job is to tweak that to make it fast(er). That's why people need to be pretty dialed in before heading to the tunnel

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Brian Stover USAT LII
Accelerate3 Coaching
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Was just sending Brian a text and read again what he had said in terms to his 85/15. Snippet:

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Damn it! :)

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Formerly TriBrad02

You guys can still run in the 35+ That is if you want to keep me company for a few more years. ;)

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A few years back I crashed at something like 30+ mph riding with a stack hands position. I believe I hit a pot hole or crack that I somehow didn't see. Was down sliding on the road with what felt like no warning. After that I stopped riding stacked hands. YMMV.

Anyone ever have the ends close enough together their hands are in a clapping shape vs rounded punch shape? Gripping with thumbs around the bar.

My shifters have about 3/4” between them

Mine are probably close enough together to do that, but I prefer the slighlty higher hand position holding the shifters in the pinky gap with the two hands forming a sort of ball shape (probably not the best shape for aero). I'm not really sure how you would get a confident grip with the clapping hand shape. I do shift from high hands to lower hands by changing my grip from that pinky in the shifters to full hand below the shifters. But that is primarily a control decision and not a speed/aero decision.

Maybe we need a little aero cone to go over our fists :)

Mine aren't quite 3/4" but they're as close as I can get them while still running my Garmin where I like it. I hold my shifters pretty much how Joe is describing. Here are some shots of the current bike setup as well as my somewhat modified stack hands (I am now doing a little more of right over left then what I have below).

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On the ski tip distance, I like mine pretty close.



I ended up with the stem angle all the way down after taking this pic and riding it once or twice, but you get the idea..........I'm the $250 Felt DA TT bike guy..........not the fanciest basebar/extension setup. I custom mounted some generic Profile clip ons to the old HED basebar since I thought the old HED clamp was horrid and couldn't find one anyway.


Only thing I don't like is the amount of "minimum insertion" I've got on the skis is right on the line, meaning I'd like them to feel a bit more secure.


I steer with my elbows on the pads anyway, not my skis.

which UK time trial scene pads are those?

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Eric Reid AeroFit | Instagram Portfolio
Aerodynamic Retul Bike Fitting

“You are experiencing the criminal coverup of a foreign backed fascist hostile takeover of a mafia shakedown of an authoritarian religious slow motion coup. Persuade people to vote for Democracy.”

Those are Alden-Carbon's new cups. Glen modeled and produced those cups earlier this year.

As you can see I am running them with very little padding, the support is that good. With custom width and drilling you can fit almost any setup you want. Some have brought up the issue that they wouldn't want to spend 5 hours on them, but I've done over three on multiple days around Minneapolis with no ill effects. At some point Glen plans to design/print up some inserts to fill the space, but they're not a must IMO.

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What bar is that?

Felt's Bayonet 3 Devox

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Threads (and pics) like this are why this forum needs a like button...

I keep my hands like this too. I have the plug in on my Speed Concept and have the extensions rotated a bit to get them close. I had to tap new holes in my cup mount so they would touch, also cut off all the excess and it looks clean.

I wish I didn't dump my Flickr account or I would post up some pics.

I tried out the flatter hands position today.....static shots don't do this justice so I put together a video.



I did my best to snag two similar screen shots and measure if there was any difference in shoulder/back/helmet height.

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2 things...…………

1st, that is not really what I would call high hands. It looks to be barely higher than uci legal.

2nd, part of back drop appears to be due to lower elbow point and further forward(both very slight). you need to equate those if trying to make that comparison

Here are what I was referring to as high and low. you can note in my high, that head is actually higher due to helmet hitting arms

Yeah, I would say you're right on that, but my 2 counter points are:

• Those are 15º cups and my arms are angled up at that same inclination.
• I'm going off memory here, because I still haven't put it back, but I believe it is something like 13cm rise from the bottom of the pad to the tops of the shifters.

Agreed. That's why I said that very thing here (quoted below if you don't want to click and read through).

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I attached a couple photos above. you can note in my top image that my arms look a lot steeper than the extensions, but ext are at 15 deg. the rise of ext chosen make a big impact as well, along with how you hold them

I'd say our arm angles look pretty damn identical and they should, as they are both 15º; however, our hands look different, because we have different extensions. I am reaching with my fingers to grip the shifters where you look to have a much more natural hold. Where you are gaining your angle by angling extensions up with flat pads/cups I am gaining mine by using a rise-type extension and angled cups. Two different approaches with a very similar result.

Also, I am almost back together and measured the extension rise at 118mm rise from the lowest point on the cup. Not sure what UCI is doing these days, but it doesn't matter much to me as I am afoul of total length and saddle setback. :P


ETA: fwiw, if I held my extensions in the same manner you are my hands would be significantly higher than they currently are. That would probably look more like British Time Trial Boys, but I think they're inclined (pun intended) to run something like 20º.

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you appear to be correct on that

I am holding di2 shifters with bottom 2 fingers, in all my runs(you can see how middle finger sticks out further :). as I look at my data, drag increases along each step as I go from 0,5,10,15 deg ext angle with a total hit of almost 10w

also as angle increases, hands get more in way of aero helmet shape, so drag increase might be related to that

also, for me, 0 deg is way more comfy on the road than 10 deg, never tried 15 on road, but did substantial time at 10

Wow! That's a big hit for sure. Since angle up doesn't equate to more comfort or the ability to hold a better position then for sure it's a bad move in that case. I am going to go out on a limb here and say that regardless of speed if one is able to hold the same position with level hands then you're apt to be faster in that config.

What I found during my brief experiment was that leveling my arms felt like my shoulders rotated forward and this made it almost impossible for me to keep my head down and rotate it back so that I can see up the road. When I raised my hands it felt like my shoulders rolled back and allowed me to rotate my head around so I could peer up the road. That was my big takeaway today. Another issue I felt, and this could be the pad design, is that it was a lot more work to shrug my shoulders in towards my ears. If you watched the video you can see I struggled to even try to get into a good position, let alone hold one.

Now, can I train a flat hand hold to be comfortable, powerful, and aero? Probably. But my current setup has allowed me to basically fall into a nice position that I can produce power in.

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