Being in the pack, enjoying the outdoors, racing the clock – cycling can be an exhilarating experience, but when your seat is uncomfortable it makes even the strongest of warriors want to retreat.

Let’s think about why a bicycle seat is less comfortable than an office chair.  Your bottom has sit bones that support your weight, when those bones don’t have anything to make contact with your soft tissue will support the weight of your body which as any cyclist can attest to, is painful.  Some fancy schmancy bike shops do make a tool called a saddle-measuring device; here’s a link for a look:  http://www.nidus-corp.com/bass.html. 

If you’re not so fortunate as to have access to an official sit bone measurer you can make your own at home.  Take a brown paper bag and cut it open so that it is one layer thick.  After you shower while the floor is still wet dry your bum off and lay the brown bag on the wet floor (just set the brown bag down as to keep the top of it dry).  Sit down on the brown bag, check where your two sit bones are, take a pencil and mark the spots.  Measure between them and that’s the minimum width your seat will need to support your weight on the bones of your sitter downer.

Method two for those of us not ambitious enough to cut out a paper bag – has anyone really done that since covering a book in grade school?  You can place your fingers underneath you while sitting in a chair and kind of rock back and forth until you feel the bones, measure between them and there you go- that’s your minimum seat width.

So now I know my minimum seat width needs to be 140 mm or what have you.  So what?  Armed with this new parameter you can check to see if your current ride is up to snuff.  You can shop for a new seat; you could even consider a nose less seat or one with suspension.

Instead of hanging up your helmet or creating a small graveyard of bicycle seats in your garage, find out how wide your knobs are that you sit on – not how wide your dairy air is, but how far apart the bones are and for goodness sake get out and ride!