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Numb and beaten up hands bothering you while you are in the middle of an important ride? Those tingles are caused due to a lot of reasons: cold vibrations, too much weight, poor ergonomics; pretty much anything your bike gets wrong hurts your hand first.
It usually starts with a tingle in your pinkie finger and soon, your entire hand seems resigned to the numbness while you are left squirming for the remaining ride, trying to get the feeling back. To understand the prevention methods comprehensively, we first need to bend our mind around the causes.
Like the bundle of nerves stretched all across your body, your hands have hem too. When a nerve becomes pinched, it results into numbness. Riding puts pressure on your wrist and palms, causing the stress to interfere with the way nerves go around doing their job.
Another consideration may be the environment. If it's chilly outside, your hands feel it first. The only way to sidestep this problem is to nullify the cause.
We bring to you some tips and tricks to inculcate in your biking schedule to make sure your limbs never go to sleep again.
Ways to stand up to the cold
1. Gloves to the rescue: Heated gloves can easily be donned on and camouflaged with your other heated garments (jackets, vests, etc). The only drawback it leads to is, it should be paired with other 'heated' garments and calls for heavy wiring on your bike.
2. Heated grips are in: Heated grips do all they promise to, keep your hands nice and warm. They can cause a minor hassle in the installation process but once installed, you don't need to worry about 'em no more! Unexpected cold weather won't frail you anymore, because you will have heated palms just with the flick of a switch. However, it proves to be unsuitable in extreme cold as the top of your hands remain out of contact with the heat; best paired with deflectors in this scenario to keep your hands toasty!
3. Bark busters/Bark muffs: Block the devil (wind) itself and you're set to roar off. These simple, static, bolt-in solutions will keep the winds off your hands and dramatically reduce wind-chill!
Handling the weight on your hands:
1. Raise the bar: Bar risers, Heli-bars, or any other similar raised clip-on solutions are not fuss fix for this pesky problem.
2. Adjusting the stock: Experimentation with angles and rotation of stock clips until you find the most comfortable position to rest your hands in will surprise you in the simplicity of solutions that sometime cater to flaming problems.
Fix 'em up now!
1. Let your knees do all the work: Take the weight off your hands, grip the tank with your knees. Feel the difference, instantly!
2. Aye Macarena: Shake your hands like you're in Spain, doing the Macarena on a table top. Do this quickly while you're stopped out and you will feel the blood moving in, scaring the numbness away.
3. Tape it off: Duct tape your palms with multiple layers; this reduces the sudden vibrations while temporarily fixing some comfort issues.
Tingles are in the past now! Congratulations, now nobody can stop you from having a perfect ride experience. Happy Riding.
