I was reading the thread about Bjorns real agessive position and Dan’s comments on their “group ride”, and how Bjorn was just hammering up a 4% hill.
How much do you use your aero bars and your upper body while on the aero position?
Call me a newbie, but I barely put pressure or pull on the aero bars. I mainly just let the hands rest on the handles while my arms rest on the pads and try to do all the work with my lower body and my pedal stroke.
Am I supposed to use my upper body more?
Some people grab lower on the aero bars and pull up with each pedal stroke to help power up a hill similar to when climbing up a monster hill on the hoods. I can only do it on rolling hills where I know I’m gonna get a downhill soon, but some people are powerful enough to get up some decent size hills like that.
But how about on the flats? Do you still pull on the aero bars??
It depends on the effort…if I’m really cranking out on a 30-60 minute TT effort, I’ll be jamming hard on the bars…lengthen that out to, say, a 1/2 IM effort and I’ll still be jamming hard at times…but trying to stay more relaxed as much as possible…at the IM distance…you don’t want to be honking hard on the bars…that probably means you are going to hard and you certainly aren’t relaxed.
And usually it isn’t so much pulling upward as it is pulling backward, at least for me…
As far as I’m concerned…if you are doing a sprint tri type effort and you AREN’T honking hard on your aerobars…you probably aren’t going hard enough.
Interesting!! I try to stay as relaxed as possible with my upper body and just focus on the circular motion of the stroke and hammer that way.
BTW, thaks for the clarification about pulling back, not pulling up!!
I’ve noted that my P2K actually climbs reasonably well to a certain gradient as long as I can stay on the aero bars. Once the grade gets too steep and then have to sit up it’s then a dog in comparison to my road bike on steep climbs. As the gradient gets steeper I’ll tend to pull on the aero bars. In contrast if on the road bike I remain seated and slide back a bit with a relaxed grip on the brake hoods.