Why do bike seats hurt so bad?
This afternoon I logged into Twitter to discover this tweet from Geargals:
My first thought was “Oh, oh… Here we go again!”. Last year we both bought road bikes and had a brutal time finding seats we liked. I back read through the tweets to see what started the conversation today and came across this tweet from Rick Vosper which linked to this article. While I don’t necessarily agree these saddles are the answer, it does make some very valid points about anatomy and why so many bike riders experience pain.
Being a mountain biker, I wasn’t expecting to experience so much pain when switching over to road biking. I was used to spending a lot of time on my bike, but what I didn’t take into account was the fact that mountain bikers don’t actually sit on their seats for nearly as long as a road cyclist does and the body position is way different when they do. This was something that clicked when I tried my mountain bike seat on my road bike. After all, the seat worked well on my mountain bike so you would think it would work on my road bike too… WRONG!
This started my quest to find the perfect seat. I can’t remember how many seats I ended up trying out and I felt like Goldilocks looking for something that was “just right”. I found one seat that I loved! Only to be in so much pain on my sit bones 30 minutes into my ride that I couldn’t even sit anymore. I read blog posts, forums, gear reviews, etc only to have them all say that it takes hundreds of miles before any seat feels comfortable. Really?? This is not something anyone wants to hear and I believe it’s something that turns many off from cycling as a sport. I did end up finding a seat that I could live with after a conversation with my LBS, which was backed up by another LBS with a female employee who used the seat as well. The seat I ended up choosing for myself is the Selle Italia Lady Gel Flow. I’m not going to say that the seat ended all my woes and was absolutely perfect, because it wasn’t. I had given up. However, I’ve discovered something over the past year…
They were right. Every single post I’d read about needing more miles on the bike was absolutely true. It wasn’t what I wanted to hear when I was experiencing such agony from my bike seat, but it’s undeniable. Want to know what else helped? A proper bike fit, and you can’t do this in just one session. You need to ride the bike after each fitting to tweak it until it’s right. Just when I was about to completely give up and accept that the seat was always going to hurt, I took out my multi-tool and adjusted my seat one last time. I lowered the nose just one turn of the screw. That was it and that was all it took for everything to fit just right. Who knew??
This doesn’t get around having to try several bike seats though. How your seat fits is very individual and only you will know what works for you. I was lucky to have a bike shop that let me demo the seats for free and the other bike shops promised a full refund within 60 days of purchase, which I also took advantage of.
I also found this blog post on 3 Steps to Saddle Comfort. It’s spot on.
Well, we have different experiences with this one - more time on the seat just increases discomfort for me. I just trade seats a lot now so that I can spread out the pain.
Pretty much any bike shop carries 40,000 Terry Butterfly seats and then maybe one or two others for women. Not much else in the way of variety for women to try out. Men’s bike seats are total implements of torture for the most part, at least for me.
I agree that men’s seats aren’t the answer for us! Tried one and that was enough for me… The shops here have a good selection of women’s seats so I’m starting to think that I have really lucked out with the LBS here.
The #1 thing that made the biggest difference for me was getting a proper bike fit done.
I don’t presume to tell women what works for them, of course. But my experience with Dr. Roger Minkow during my time at Specialized suggests there’s a wide variation among women’s anatomies (MUCH more so than amongst men’s), and an equally wide variation among “best-for-me” solutions. Some women do indeed do well on “men’s” saddles; many do not. I don’t believe Specialized ever published the study, though, possibly because the results weren’t very conclusive.
This suggests that the problem isn’t that bike companies “just don’t get it;” it’s that there’s a wide range of solutions and what works for one woman may or may not work for the next.
mtnbikinggirl’s comment is right on the money, though: do the bike fit first, then start your search for the right saddle.
That confuses me, Rick - surely the bike fit would have to be adjusted for each new saddle? I have a few saddles that are different heights, etc. And if I change pedals all is different as well. Running to the bike shop for a fitting every time I try something new isn’t going to happen, realistically.
I think that focusing so much on bike fittings can’t be a good solution, because hardly anyone can afford a $100 (minimum) bike fitting every time they change a component. I also think that traditional bike fitting guidelines don’t apply to everyone (for instance, so many people have told me that XC handlebars should be the same height or lower than the seat, and I hate having them that low).
Granted, I don’t know what the solution is, but there has to be a way to make better saddles for women. I think the industry might want to think out of the box on this one, though I do concede that I’m not a bike seat designer. It just seems that modified men’s saddles aren’t the way to go, and that’s pretty much what we’re getting.
Right, Jill. The idea is that if you’ve tried a bunch of saddles and they’re all painful, it’s at least somewhat likely the source of the problem is not the saddle itself, but how your riding position puts you in contact with it and how you weight is distributed once it’s there.
Once the position is in the right neighborhood, it’s relatively easy to swap out saddles and make the necessary adjustments for tilt, position, and height. But if the source of the problem is that your top tube is too long for your torso- one of the “classic” problems many women encounter- there’s no saddle in the world that’s going to solve the problem.
This is one reason I recommend you talk with someone who has a lot of experience fitting bikes for women. Sara (currently at Sidi) did all the original biomechanics/frame geometry work for the Specialized Designs For Women bikes using the gold standard of ergonomics, the PopleSoft database (same one used by for the Herman Miller Aeron chair, Boeing, Porsche, Volvo, etc etc). She (and another female colleague) also worked directly with Roger Minkow on the D4W saddles project. I got to help them on some minor parts of the work, and one thing we learned is that fitting women is harder than fitting men, both because you ladies come in a wider variety of overall shapes and sizes to start with, and because the parts of you that encounter the saddle are about a zillion times more complex than ours.
Hope this helps.
Right, Jill. The idea is that if you’ve tried a bunch of saddles and they’re all painful, it’s at least somewhat likely the source of the problem is not the saddle itself, but how your riding position puts you in contact with it and how you weight is distributed once it’s there.
Once the position is in the right neighborhood, it’s relatively easy to swap out saddles and make the necessary adjustments for tilt, position, and height. But if the source of the problem is that your top tube is too long for your torso- one of the “classic” problems many women encounter- there’s no saddle in the world that’s going to solve the problem.
This is one reason I recommend you talk with someone who has a lot of experience fitting bikes for women (not me). Sara (currently at Sidi) did all the original biomechanics/frame geometry work for the Specialized Designs For Women bikes using the gold standard of ergonomics, the PopleSoft database (same one used by for the Herman Miller Aeron chair, Boeing, Porsche, Volvo, etc etc). She (and another female colleague) also worked directly with Roger Minkow on the D4W saddles project. I got to help them on some minor parts of the work, and one thing we learned is that fitting women is harder than fitting men, both because you ladies come in a wider variety of overall shapes and sizes to start with, and because the parts of you that encounter the saddle are about a zillion times more complex than ours.
Hope this helps.
Uncomfortable saddles really are a pain in the butt excuse the pun.
After I made the switch from mountain biking to road I also neglected to take this into consideration and found myself having to road test a number of saddles after a few weeks of riding.
My local bike shop helped alot with picking and choosing the right seat and letting me test a few out.