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  • The short answer is yes, a bit, and that is built into my 'pulling up force', but it doesn't have as much effect as it feels like it should.

    When you stand up out of the saddle all your weight goes on one foot on one side of the bike and unbalances the bike. If you didn't have your hands on the handle bars this would cause the bike to fall over to the side that you're pushing on. You then need to put an opposing push/pull on the handle bars to stop it falling over. Thats why getting out of the saddle on a fixie skidder with cut down handle bars is much harder because you don't have much lever arm on the handle bars. This doesn't happen when you're sat in the saddle because the out of balance force goes up the seat tube and the seat pushes against your arse cheek/ inner thigh and balances. So a lot of the yanking that we tend to do when we're out of the saddle grinding up a hill is purely to keep the bike upright but a bit of this does go into helping you push harder.

    Rather than extreme yanking on the handle bars you can reduce the ammount you need to pull by leaning the bike away from the foot you're pushing with to try and keep your weight over the wheels as you transition from foot to foot. Although you still need to work fairly hard with your upper body to shift the bike from one side to the other as you're leaning it in the opposite direction to the way it wants to go.

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