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Outside Magazine, September 2004
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Bodywork: Bicycle Seats
You May Be Seated
A new test for bike saddles promises to protect you from getting numb or falling limp. Go nuts!

By Roy Furchgott


Bicycle Seats
(Dan Winters)
I'M STANDING IN THE COOL, eerily quiet laboratory of Frank Sommer, a professor of urology at Germany's University of Cologne Medical Center. I've dropped my bike shorts around my knees so that a lab tech can swab my penis with cleanser. Why? Because he's going to attach an electrode, and he needs a clean surface. I'm here to try out Sommer's bike-seat test, the first in the world that measures blood circulation through a man's penile arteries—the major blood pathways that run out of the pelvis and to the penis—while he's riding a bicycle.

The technician fumbles with my privates like it's no big deal.

It is to me. As I do during a hernia check, I gaze straight ahead as if nothing were happening. The lab guy glues a plastic collar to the tip of my appendage and secures it with surgical tape. Now comes the electrode, which screws into the collar and registers the blood-oxygen concentration inside my penis by measuring the release of oxygen on the skin's surface. Once I'm properly wired, I pull up my shorts, hop onto a stationary bike, and start pedaling like a bewildered test monkey for the next several minutes.

Back in the Saddle Again
CLICK HERE for an overview of a few saddles that outshine the traditional domes
I'm suffering this indignity in the name of science. For several years now, a fear has haunted men, and it goes like this: Riding a bike for long distances can bring permanent impotence. As fears go, it's an effective one, but it's based on the unproven theory that the restriction of blood flow caused by bike seats results in impotence. Sommer is focusing on the first part of this assumption, and if it turns out that bike seats are a problem, his work will be invaluable in helping produce the best possible seat designs.

For their part, bike manufacturers long ago started creating seats in response to this perceived malady. Since 1998, Specialized Bicycle Components, of Morgan Hill, California, has sold more than 1.5 million seats featuring a wedge carved out of the rear, a design meant to maintain blood flow through the penile arteries. Their success drove other seat makers to develop their own versions. Some products, like the Selle Italia SLR, place an elongated hole in the middle, while others, like the Selle San Marco Racelite Gel, employ strategically placed gel cushions.

"Originally, the industry thought these saddles were going to be a fad that would soon disappear," says Dr. Roger Minkow, an ergonomic consultant from Petaluma, California, who develops saddles for Specialized. Five years later, the fad continues to affect nearly every saddle's design.


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