Thread #9

Back in 2004 prior to having any real rider positioning experience in the tunnel here in San Diego, thread #9 (we're at around 2500 threads these days) on the BTR forum dealt with the topic of elbow width.

Pretty interesting to read my perspective of 5 years ago - boy, that's an eye opener for me to be sure!! This stuff isn't always as "easy" as folks would like to make it seem.

Anyway, the images in BTR thread #9 didn't make it over during the site migration I did last year, but here's an interesting frontal area look at upper arm aerodynamics as mentioned in the BTR thread:



the numbers below the images are frontal area in m^2. All sorts of things are changing between images as I reached out, huh?! It would be interesting to see what might have happened if I had controlled for elbow width and hand elevation relative to my elbow when taking those pictures.

I reckon a vertical humerus would have turned out relatively worse than it did when I took those pics 5 years ago.

So, if you look at your position and you notice that you have a vertical or near vertical humerus/upper arm, you might want to consider tweaking your reach and drop in order to explore how things change with your upper arm geometry from an aerodynamic perspective.

Pics like I took back in 2004 can be insightful...but so can a full length mirror!

-k