Picking bike seats: choosing a style, a shape and pitfalls along the way
I mention frequently to my clients, who are wondering if they need a new saddle in order to be comfortable and properly fitted, that most of the time the saddle itself is not the culprit for bike fit and saddle issues. Most of the time the fault lies with the rest of the fit. That said, settling on a certain style or shape and picking bike seats properly is still important because there's no denying that some riders will have no luck with some saddle types that other cyclists will swear by. There will always be saddles that don't work for some cyclists.
For this reason I never get too precious about saddles. Often I will have a client that is married to a particular saddle and they'll have this model on all their bikes. There's nothing wrong with this. When you find something that works for you, stick with it. That saddle works for that client. Great.However when clients come in with a new saddle that a friend, or worse yet, a bike shop recommended ("this saddle is the best", "it'll completely solve your problems") is the sticking point. There is not only no guarantee that a saddle that's perfect for one rider will be perfect for another, there is a much greater probablility that it will in fact be very "not perfect" for them. This is why you can't be too precious with saddles.I get asked all the time "what's the best saddle?" or "who makes the best saddles?" and there's really no answer to that. There's no silver bullet solution.
How to choose?
A starting point for a saddle recommendation is very difficult, especially a true out-of-the-blue guess. Information is our friend.What type of information is useful?What type of riding is being done? How experienced is the rider? How aggressively are they riding? Are they a big and tall person? Short and petite? Have they ever ridden other saddles? Were these saddles good, bad or neutral? (By the way, depending on how it's defined, "neutral" can be "good". The more invisible a saddle is, the better)
Answers to any or all of these questions can go a long way toward helping us narrow our choices down.Most of us have our first saddle selected for us, in that it comes as stock equipment on the bike we purchase. If this is the case there is no harm in leaving the stock saddle on there to test. It's already part of the package and you've paid for it -- at the very worst, if you ride it for a while and decide you hate it (assuming the rest of your bike fit is in good order of course) you can always swap it out later and it's done something very important for you:It's provided you with a reference point and some basic information. From this we can narrow the scope down further.
There are devices out there that measure sit bone width and are intended to provide riders with an accurate assessment of what saddle width they should get. These devices - lovingly named ass-o-meters - in my experience have limited usefulness first because they are only shedding light on one measurement - width. There are many other factors like durometer (softness), taper, slope, and length that are also critical. The main reason they don't work as well as advertised is because the test position needs to mimic the riding position -- the torso and pelvic angles, and the amount of uniliateral (one-sided) hip flexion. Why unilateral? Because we don't pedal by flexing both hips and once - we have one hip flexed and the other at the opposite end of the cycle in relative extension -- this factors into how the pelvis moves and therefore weights the saddle.It would be equally useless to assess what type of shoe or orthotic someone needed for walking by testing them with ground force plate devices. But instead of having them walk in their normal gait pattern over the force plates, we had them do a standing two-legged broad jump from one plate to the next. That wouldn't really tell us much about how they're foot or lower leg acts when they walk.
Make Your own Ass-o-meter
Knowing your sit bone width isn't going to make your decision for you, but it is a place to start. You can measure this on your own, and it requires no expensive equipment. All you need is a few pounds of sand, a large baking pan (with sides that are 2-3" high), and some water. You can buy sand at your local home center - usually 20# is just a couple bucks. Simply pack the baking pan with sand and sprinkle with water so that it's damp, which should make it pack a little more firmly. When you press your hand into it, it should hold your hand print. Set the baking pan on a chair, and with tights on, gently sit on the sand and lean your torso over to about the angle that you ride in. Carefully stand up and inspect your impression -- you may need to do this a couple times to get a good impression. Once you have your impression, you can eyeball the two lowest points -- those are going to be where your pelvis contacts your saddle the most. Measure the width and there you go. You can get a little more accurate by dropping a loose ball bearing or small bead into each side -- they will naturally settle at the lowest point and they will provide a good visual reference from which you can measure.
Some of the hard and fast rules are wrong
Women don't always need wider (and softer) and men don't always need narrower. Often I see a male rider come in with a 135 mm saddle and a woman come in with a 155 mm version. Both are very uncomfortable on their saddle. The key factor - that the man is 6'3" and the woman is 5'4" - was overlooked. But this is what frequently happens when we apply rules too broadly. A tall man (or woman) is more likely to have a wider pelvis and need a slightly wider saddle because they're just bigger. And a shorter woman may in fact need a narrower saddle. Can small women have wider pelvic postures than men? Of course, but just because you're a woman does not necessarily mean you have to have a wider seat.When we look at anthropometric data of western cultures we find that men's and women's sit bone widths are just not that different from one another. Women range from 110 mm - 150 mm, while men are 100 mm - 140 mm. There is actually overlap between the genders from 110-140 mm. There's significantly more variability within each gender than there is between genders.Long story short: really no such thing as a gender specific saddle.
Nuts and Bolts: Picking bike seats
Starting with what might be called a traditional saddle shape is likely your best bet. In the best circumstances you wouldn't have to purchase the saddle, you could just demo a couple until you found a reasonable match. That's how I approach it in my Studio - that way they don't have to spend $150 on a "guess" and hope it's exactly the right one.Let's say you can't do that though. To make it even harder, let's also say you don't have any friends with random saddles lying around for you to borrow -- you have to take an educated guess and just order one.You could use history as your guide, of course, so if there was a saddle that you've used before and it worked okay, you could gravitate toward one shaped and built like that.But let's assume we don't have that either - can we make a guess on a saddle with no prior information on the rider or fancy equipment to measure? Yes, we can, but it should be clear that this is by no means a reliable way to choose. If averaged over all riders (some riders accommodate to many saddles well, others may struggle to find one or two tha they like) I would guess this approach would be successful less than 30% of the time. (Success = the rider having few to no saddle issues and generally can ride on it for a few hours at a time).What this is really getting at: Are there some basic rules we can filter saddles through that give us a greater than average likelihood of finding a successful one? Yes, but as you might suspect, they still have to be taken with a healthy grain of salt.I like to start with a traditional shape, with lots of flat sitting surface, and as little cushion as we can get away with. I'm indifferent about cutout models...my experience with saddle pressure technology and the emerging research suggest that they don't really make a difference to loading sensitive tissues.
- Begin with a traditional saddle (no split-rail or split-nose designs)
- Pick saddles with lots of flat sitting surface
- Less padding is necessary the more aggressively you ride
- Pushing on the pedals more unweights the body more and aggressive riding and racing demands that the rider stand more often
- If you sit a lot and ride more leisurely you'll want to gravitate toward something with a little more cushion.
- More padding isn't better. The softer the durometer of the material in the saddle, the more instability your pelvis will experience and the further you will sink into it, increasing the chance you're going to weight or pinch sensitive tissues.
What about width? If you did the sand test and got your sit bone width, you can use that to narrow the field down further, but like any measurement, I wouldn't get too precious with that information either.Why? Because sit bone width will vary depending on what position your torso is in. The more aggressive your position the narrower the sitting surface of your pelvis. If you over- or under-estimate how far you lean forward during the sand test by even a small amount, you can have a significantly skewed measurement.
In even moderately aggressive road bike positions, we don't actually sit on the sit bones (ischial tuberosities). We only sit on these when we're nearly upright with our posture. Most cyclists sit on the ischial rami, and these get narrower as they progress up toward the pubic bone.In the next article I'm going to talk about the saddles that specificly require you to sit more aggressively on your bike on this narrower ischial rami section of the pelvis. A number of companies now make versions like this, with ISM being one of the first to do so. More then....