Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)Having had prior experience with nerve injury and having some familiarity with anatomy I do take the danger of cycling inflicted nerve and vascular injury seriously. Often such damage is just compression nerve injury which reverses itself in a matter of days or weeks, but there is also the real possibility of more serious damage to the nerves or local artherosclerosis which does not normally heal by itself. Possible symptoms are tingling, loss of sensation, erectile dysfunction and even urinary continence problems. The risk is probably more serious for men than for women. There is also very little that medicine can do for you in these cases.
Studies show that some of the ergonomic saddles on the market with cut-outs of various designs cases can in some cases actually make the risk of injury greater, but concentrating pressure on a smaller area than conventional saddles. Only noseless saddles like this one can really eliminate the danger by entirely tranferring the weight from the perineum to the buttocks.
I ride regularly and intensively (80-90 minutes a day) in crazy Manhattan. Here are my observations.
1. This saddle is not only safer than conventional saddles, but also more comfortable. I had not realized that my previous saddle was causing me discomfort until I started using this one and found that it was a more pleasant experience.
2. It takes a few weeks to get used to this saddle. At the beginning it felt like somebody kept trying to push me off the bike. After a while it feels perfectly natural.
3. There is a reason that most saddles have a nose. Correcting the alignment of your bike by pushing on the nose from the side with your thighs has a more important role in controlling a bike than most people realize. Without the nose some of the gracefulness and manouverability is gone. I ride a mountain bike and I am often heavily loaded with bags, etc., so I don't exactly swoop through the streets, anyway. On a road bike or natural terrain this might be a forbidding problem, though.
4. Using a noselss saddle considerable weight is transferred from the saddle to the handlebars. This in turn leads to an increased risk of injury to the hands, wrist and arms. I recommend using cycling gloves, preferably the gel type. My feeling is that this sort of injury i smore likely to be noticed early and has a better chance of being reversed than damage to the perineum.
5. Related to the previous point, unless the road surface is very even and I am going straight and at a moderate pace, it does not feel safe to take either hand off the handlebars, which means that I cannot give hand signals in traffic anymore. This is perhaps the most serious problem I have with this saddle. Have to be very careful when changing lanes.
6. I found that the patches at the back are not truly retroreflective, so I taped them over with reflective tape.
Overall, this is a product well worth considering, but unless you buy one and try it out, you won't know whether it is a viable solution given your particular riding style and anatomy.
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Ergo The Seat Ultimate Bicycle SaddleTHE SEAT ERGO GEL/LYCRA BLACK SADDLE Ride in healthy comfortNo painNo more numb buttRide safe/ scotchliteTM reflectors on back Seat post not included.
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