What to look for when buying a road saddle

Gender

It’s an unfortunate fact that most road saddles are designed with male anatomy in mind by default.

That’s not to say that a bike seat designed for men can’t work for women too, but the realities of biology mean fit requirements are likely to be somewhat different.

Don’t worry though, BikeRadar has handily produced a guide to the best women’s road bike saddles, so if you’re yet to find saddle nirvana, this could be a great place to start your search.

Shape

The most important differentiator between road saddles is shape. Long, curved shapes such as the Selle San Marco Concor were the hot item through the eighties and nineties, then we had long and flat like the Fizik Arione in the 2000s, and more recently the trend has been for short and wide, such as the Specialized Power.

Personal preference will always play a big role, so ideally you want to be able to try out bike seats of different shapes before you commit to anything. That said, it’s becoming more generally accepted that for optimum comfort and performance you want to put the pressure on your sit bones and off any surrounding soft tissue, so finding a saddle that enables you to do this is often crucial.

A high-quality bike fit from a reputable brand can be helpful here – all good fitters should have a sizeable range of saddles for you to try. You can of course go it alone, but the trial and error process can get expensive very quickly unless you beg, borrow and steal from your riding buddies.

If you’re taking part in time-trials or triathlons it’s also worth considering a saddle specifically designed for those disciplines, such as an ISM saddle. These saddles tend to feature more radical shapes and designs, all with the intention of maximising soft-tissue pressure relief while in an aggressive riding position.

Width

Once you’ve found a shape that works for you, the next variable to look at is width.

Some brands make a bigger deal about width than others, but no one’s anatomy is the same, so it intuitively makes sense that sit-bone width will vary between riders.

Specialized, for example, offers an in-store method of measuring the distance between your sit bones and determining the ‘correct’-width saddle you require. A comprehensive bike fit would also take this variable into account.

Length

As already mentioned, the current trend is for shorter saddles that aim to fix you in a single position (i.e. with the pressure on your sit bones) while you ride.

This doesn’t work for everyone though, and there are many who prefer the extra room to move around that a longer saddle provides. Longer saddles offer the opportunity to shift your weight around, rather than keep it concentrated in one place for the duration of your ride.

This sounds great in principle, but if you’re finding that you just can’t get comfortable on any saddle, and need extra length to move around and constantly relieve the pressure on your undercarriage, there may be other fit issues at play, such as excessive saddle-to-bar drop.

In any case, if you’re suffering, it’s always worth seeking out professional advice from a reputable fitter.

Padding

It might be counterintuitive, but when it comes to padding, less is often more. Shape is usually the biggest determinant of comfort, hence why full-carbon saddles can be surprisingly comfortable.

That said, most saddles do incorporate some sort of padding as a method of protecting against vibrations and bumps in the road. Generally speaking, though, we would tend to recommend harder padding for road cycling because a saddle that’s too soft can often lead to an inconsistent fit over the course of a long ride.

If you’re finding pressure building up in specific areas, more often than not it’s a problem with shape or width, rather than a lack of padding.

Again, we’ll have to caveat this by saying that everyone is, of course, different and that a good bike fit is often the best way of targeting any specific issues you’re having.

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