an embarrassing question.

Maria, Not a woman, but a magazine writer. I recently did a story on new research about bike seats and nerve/blood vessel damage. This topic was pretty big several years ago, when Dr. Irwin Goldstein, a Boston Univ. urologist, first published data linking bike riding to male impotence. His work, largely lambasted by USA Biking, Triathlon, etc., was criticized as being based on too small a sample. Since then, however, several other studies have come to similar (rather scarey) conclusions. For example, researchers analyzed data from the Massachusetts Male Aging Study, which has followed 1709 randomly selected men age 40-70. After adjusting for age, hypertension, smoking, diabetes, and other factors, researchers found men who rode their bikes a mere 3 hours or more per week had a 72 percent higher risk of impotence than the general male population. In a second study, scientists from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, responding to complaints of genital numbness in bicycle cops averaging 5.4 hours a day "in the saddle," undertook a comparison of biking and non-biking officers in Long Beach, California. Among other things, the researchers measured saddle pressures and subsequent nocturnal erections during sleep, a normal phenomenon in healthy men. Their findings: cycling cops averaged 40 percent fewer erectile events per sleep cycle than non-cyclists, and the magnitude of individual reduction correlated directly with how many days a week they rode, how many hours per day, and how much average pressure they exerted on the nose of the bike saddle. The gist of the anti-conventional bike saddle argument: when a rider "straddles a saddle," he or she is not sitting on the sit bones (or "ischial tuberosities" in medical terminology) that we bipeds evolved in our butts to safely cushion our body weight. Because of narrow saddle design, our weight is distributed instead on the base of our genital tracts, including the tube-like Alcock's canal through which course the nerves and arteries that supply the penis and clitoris. "Why would any rational human being want to put a 150 lb. weight on these structures?" asks Goldstein. Over time, he maintains, chronic pressure can trigger everything from perineal numbness, to shooting pains in the pudendal nerves, to reduced oxygen flow and localized atherosclerosis in genital arteries resulting in erectile dysfunction in men and anorgasmia in women. Unfortunately, the much hyped bike seats with the hollowed out center lines don't help. Goldstein told me he thinks those might even exacerbate the problem, because pressure is lbs. per square inch, and these seats simply remove some of the "square inches", making the pressure of sitting even higher on the areas that still contact the seat. My article came out a couple months ago in National Geographic Adventure. The main recommendation was to get a seat specially designed for the sit bones--something most hardcore bikers are reluctant to do, because these make it hard to use your thighs to help "steer" the bike. (Plus these seats look dorky, one friend told me.) The other recommendation is to try to stand up on your bike frequently to relieve the pressure. It's funny, but people who work out on stationary bikes often have an even worse problem because they almost never "stand up" while peddling. Good luck!

Maria, Not a woman, but a magazine writer. I recently did a story on new research about bike seats and nerve/blood vessel damage. This topic was pretty big several years ago, when Dr. Irwin Goldstein, a Boston Univ. urologist, first published data linking bike riding to male impotence. His work, largely lambasted by USA Biking, Triathlon, etc., was criticized as being based on too small a sample. Since then, however, several other studies have come to similar (rather scarey) conclusions. For example, researchers analyzed data from the Massachusetts Male Aging Study, which has followed 1709 randomly selected men age 40-70. After adjusting for age, hypertension, smoking, diabetes, and other factors, researchers found men who rode their bikes a mere 3 hours or more per week had a 72 percent higher risk of impotence than the general male population. In a second study, scientists from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, responding to complaints of genital numbness in bicycle cops averaging 5.4 hours a day "in the saddle," undertook a comparison of biking and non-biking officers in Long Beach, California. Among other things, the researchers measured saddle pressures and subsequent nocturnal erections during sleep, a normal phenomenon in healthy men. Their findings: cycling cops averaged 40 percent fewer erectile events per sleep cycle than non-cyclists, and the magnitude of individual reduction correlated directly with how many days a week they rode, how many hours per day, and how much average pressure they exerted on the nose of the bike saddle. The gist of the anti-conventional bike saddle argument: when a rider "straddles a saddle," he or she is not sitting on the sit bones (or "ischial tuberosities" in medical terminology) that we bipeds evolved in our butts to safely cushion our body weight. Because of narrow saddle design, our weight is distributed instead on the base of our genital tracts, including the tube-like Alcock's canal through which course the nerves and arteries that supply the penis and clitoris. "Why would any rational human being want to put a 150 lb. weight on these structures?" asks Goldstein. Over time, he maintains, chronic pressure can trigger everything from perineal numbness, to shooting pains in the pudendal nerves, to reduced oxygen flow and localized atherosclerosis in genital arteries resulting in erectile dysfunction in men and anorgasmia in women. Unfortunately, the much hyped bike seats with the hollowed out center lines don't help. Goldstein told me he thinks those might even exacerbate the problem, because pressure is lbs. per square inch, and these seats simply remove some of the "square inches", making the pressure of sitting even higher on the areas that still contact the seat. My article came out a couple months ago in National Geographic Adventure. The main recommendation was to get a seat specially designed for the sit bones--something most hardcore bikers are reluctant to do, because these make it hard to use your thighs to help "steer" the bike. (Plus these seats look dorky, one friend told me.) The other recommendation is to try to stand up on your bike frequently to relieve the pressure. It's funny, but people who work out on stationary bikes often have an even worse problem because they almost never "stand up" while peddling. Good luck!