The SQ Lab 410 2.0 Innerbarends are a great addition to your handlebar architecture if you ride any distance further than the woods for a few laps, and back. However, they may be aesthetically challenging to some, and they don’t play well in the gap between the grip and certain brake levers, which could compromise your brake and gear levers’ position, meaning you’ll have to mount the Inner Bar Ends even further inner…
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SQlab 410 2.0 Innerbarends – Technical Details
SQlab can offer you four inner bar ends with three plastic models and one carbon model. The new 410 2.0 Innerbarends have the bulbous design of the previous 411 model, but the shape has been improved for a more comfortable grip and greater comfort on longer rides by filling in the hollowed out underside.
The SQlab 410 2.0 Innerbarends are made of fibre composite plastic (FRP) and weigh 108g for the pair with the little blue inserts.
They come with a small blue shim inside the clamp. When these are removed, the bar-ends integrate perfectly with the SQlab 711 and 7OX grips, which makes everything look a bit neater. But the bar ends (I feel anxious calling them bar ends when they sit inside the grips, but we’ll have to keep going with that, I’m afraid) will work with any handlebar grip.
The clamp is 18mm wide, so some control adjustment inwards could be required and might be a compromise to your braking and shifting needs, especially if you have small hands. Although there’s nothing to say you can’t mount them inside all your handlebar hardware, they do offer better ergonomics sat next to the grip, as you can use the brake and gear levers when in that position.
They are a tight fit on the bar, so you might feel that the supplied assembly paste won’t be required, and they don’t need to be cranked to the bar (SQlab suggests 3Nm) as you’re not going to be hauling on them up a climb in the same way as a set of proper end-of-the-bar bar-ends.
The 410 2.0 Innerbarends extend about 65mm out from the front of the bar, which gives your bike a moose-horn look and the forward part is gently angled towards the stem for ergonomics, and they rise sharply at the end for your palm to nestle in and to prevent your hand from bouncing off. The underside is moulded to snugly fit your wrapped-around index and middle fingers.
SQlab 410 2.0 Innerbarends – Performance
The ever widening of handlebars over the years has been a good thing in terms of control when you’re pointing a bike down hills and threading through the woods but if your style of mountain biking involves a lot of long days, long distance, extended sections of riding non technical terrain or into a day of headwinds then that wide armed stance can be a definitive hinderance. Enter the SQ Lab 410 2.0 Innerbarends, a stubby, ergonomic bar-end that fits inside your grips to offer a different hand position for when you don’t need all the outspread arms, pointy elbows, control of your postcodes apart grips, and because of this, they already have a strong fan base in the endurance and bikepacking community. And that’s because they work.
I’ve always rested my palms on the grips, draped my hands over the brake levers, moved my hands inwards on the bars and even gripped them either side of the stem for the easier off-road bits and boring draggy climb sections to change position, relax my hands, ease my arms and sneak in a little bit of aero when riding with hands out akimbo on the grips makes you a fleshy wall to pedal into the wind so having the SQlab 410 2.0 Innerbarends there to hold onto felt a natural and obvious progression. The position of the inner bar-ends on a wide modern handlebar also puts them in about the same place as your bar ends would have been on your fashionably yet scary narrow 90’s bars, so if you’re of a certain vintage, they’ll feel instantly familiar.
It took a few rides to find the perfect angle for the Innerbarends, and for me, that was with the flat section a few degrees up from horizontal. This is about the same angle as the hoods on my drop-bar bike, which is no surprise, as their position isn’t too dissimilar to where your hands would be on the hoods of a road bike. Thanks, muscle memory. The shape of the bar-ends is very similar to a mini road bike brake hood, comfortably ergonomic with a flat top and sculptured underside that’s the perfect shape for a pair of fingers to grip around.
It didn’t take long before I was using the inner bar-ends at every opportunity whenever the trail got easy enough to not need full hands-around-grips control, and I found there was a selection of ways to grip them depending on terrain. Holding the 410 2.0 Innerbarends as intended as a mini extension gave the greatest control and was also the most solid position to use when putting an effort in along a technically undemanding track or battling into the wind and tucking your elbows in to minimise your frontal area. But resting my palms on the grips with thumbs wrapped around the base of the Innerbarends also worked for long draggy climbs, and poking the SQlabs in between index and middle finger was also a favoured place when cruising along and just wanting a different and more relaxing hand position.
You can still easily operate the shift levers when you’re on the Innerbarends and reach the brake levers with the ends of your fingers, so there’s still reasonable control when you’re using them, not “haul on the levers for a sudden stop from speed” but easily adjustable in line with the terrain you’ll be travelling over when using the SQlab Innerbarends.
There are definite benefits to being able to use different hand positions over the duration of a long ride rather than having your arms in a wide, flat-barred position all the time. Tucking onto the Innerbarends relieves tension in your shoulders, relaxes your whole upper body and forearms and being able to continually swap around spreads the muscle usage around, making you less tired overall. And if you’re properly chunking out the miles with intent, then the wind-cheating advantage of having your hands closer together and elbows out the wind has noticeable speed and effort-saving benefits. SQlab has some figures on this, claiming that using the product saves you 14 watts. I don’t have access to that kind of data, but I will say that it does make things easier and headwinds home easier to cope with.
If you like to cover any sort of distance on your mountain bike, then the SQ Lab 410 2.0 Innerbarends are absolutely worth it. Having somewhere different to put your hands and alternating between a variety of positions definitely contributes to long-term comfort and eases muscle strain, plus the tangible aero effect of having your arms tucked in a bit rather than spreadeagled catching the wind more than makes up for any kooky looks. You could even see the Innerbarends as a statement of intent.
SQlab 410 2.0 Inner Bar Ends – Verdict
There’s not much like this around, but you could easily replicate the look with some “proper” bar ends tucked inside your grips. A quick Google throws up a few Temu and AliExpress inner bar end versions for a quarter of the price, so that might be worth a tentative look if you wanted to try them for proof of concept before upgrading to something with a little more provenance. Profile Design does a Stubby bar end that could replicate the position, but it is just a straight tube without any hand-shaped ergonomics, as are the Tioga Power Stud bar ends. Similar but different are the Togs Thumb Grips, which are a small plastic horn with a rubber tip that fits alongside your grip. It’s thin, so it takes up minimal handlebar real estate and hooking your thumbs around them gives an alternative hand position as well as giving leverage when climbing. They’re far more useful than their diminutive size might suggest.
The SQ Lab 410 2.0 Inner Bar Ends are a Marmite product in that you’ll either get what they’re about or you won’t. If you need to jump into a truck to get to the top of a hill or spend time in the air, then you probably won’t, but if you spend all your time yomping across hills and mountains on your bike, then you will. Their all-day/all-week ride comfort benefits and headwind-cheating capabilities will be immediately attractive to many riders. They could be seen as aesthetically inelegant, although, as a lot of mountain bike cockpits are a mess of levers, pulleys and cables these days, it might not be so much of an issue to many.
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