Ergonomic Bicycle Seats | Comfortable bike seats

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Ergonomic Bicycle Seats

Regular bike seats damage your privates by putting stress on them. The best solution is a recliner bike, like that shown at right. Your webmaster has ridden a recliner for years and swears by it. It's like riding a lounge chair with wheels. I've done a couple of decent-sized bike tours and had no soreness at all, even though I did no training beforehand.

If you don't want to get a whole new bike, you can get an ergonomic bike seat. These seats consist of two separate pads to make sure you're sitting on your butt and nothing else. Here' are three that I found. I haven't tried any of these yet so I can't comment on them.

Easy Seat, $48

Spongy Wonder, $117

Spiderflex, $122

Note that legendary bike expert Sheldon Brown doesn't approve of these new-fangled seats. His reasons are:

The lack of a nose sacrifices side-to-side control.
The pads must be angled downward, which tends to make the rider slide forward. This is liable to lead to hand/wrist/neck problems as the rider braces on the handlebar to keep from sliding forward off the seat.
If the pads are not angled downward, they tend to cut off circulation to the thighs, and to interfere with the thigh muscles.

I'm skeptical of these criticisms. Placing too much stress on the hands and neck could be a problem if you keep your handlebars too low like many Americans, but I'm guessing that if the handlebars are at a reasonable height (i.e., so you can sit up instead of bending over) then it should be fine.

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