Well Being: Potent reason for pedalers to adopt a gentler seat

My beloved Cratemobile, the battered Chinese 10-speed that I rescued from the trash and equipped with a milk crate, finally conked out last winter.

When I bought a new bike, I also bought a new kind of seat - one without a nose.

I use my bike to perform errands and commute to the Word Mill. Over the years, cycling with a conventional seat has irritated my male plumbing. A while back, my urologist, alarmed by the condition of my prostate, asked, "Do you do a lot of bike riding?"

Standard bicycle seats, it turns out, are hazardous to your health, especially your reproductive health. The bill of indictment includes numbness, hemorrhoids, bloody urine, and impotence.

And it's not just a guy problem. Women who log high mileage may develop "bicyclist's vulva," becoming susceptible to yeast infections, lymph-system blockages, and chronically swollen labia.

"You don't have to be a scientist to look at human anatomy and see that we were made to sit on our butts and not on our groins," says Steven Schrader, a reproductive physiologist with the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH).

For more than a decade, Schrader and his NIOSH colleagues have been studying bicycle seats. They began exploring the issue after receiving complaints from bicycle police officers of numbness and erectile dysfunction (ED).

Using a device that measures erections during sleep, NIOSH scientists found that biking cops had erections of shorter duration than men who did not cycle regularly. When sitting on a conventional saddle, 25 percent to 40 percent of your body weight rests on the nose, crushing the arteries and nerves that serve the genitals.

"There's as much internal penis as external penis," Schrader says.

With a conventional seat, pressure on the perineal region more than doubles, blood flow to the genitals falls to near zero, and oxygen levels may plummet 60 percent to 80 percent. Says Schrader: "Cutting off oxygen to any part of the body is not a great idea."

It also has consequences likely to manifest in the bedroom. Compared with the general population, ED among professional cyclists was twice as prevalent, a German study showed. No less an authority than Hippocrates noticed this phenomenon 2,500 years ago. Of the Scythians, nomadic people noted for their horsemanship, he observed, "The constant jolting on their horses unfits them for intercourse."

In a more recent NIOSH study, no-nose bicycle seats were provided to 121 bike cops in five cities. The no-nose seats reduced contact pressure by 66 percent. After six months, the number of officers reporting scrotal numbness dropped from three out of four to about one out of five. There was significant improvement in penis sensitivity. More telling: Only three of the 91 men remaining in the study had returned to a traditional saddle.

Declares NIOSH: "Contrary to some cyclists' belief, it is not normal for any part of your body to go numb or lose feeling. Numbness in the groin or genitals is a warning sign that should not be ignored."

The agency's recommendation: Use a no-nose saddle.

Some bike-seat manufacturers have addressed the problem by producing seats with splits, grooves, holes or channels down the middle. But because the pudendal nerves and arteries don't run along the center of the groin, such seats may actually increase pressure on the blood vessels.

Not everyone is convinced. You won't see no-nose seats in the Tour de France.

"The bike saddle shouldn't be an issue if you're fitted correctly to the bike," argues Brady Gibney, 30, general manager of Cadence Cycling & Multisport Center in Manayunk and a Category One cyclist who has been racing for nearly 10 years.

"Saddles are long so you can sit on different spots. With a no-nose seat, you're stuck in one position and can't change the placement of your rump and the mechanics of the pedal stroke."

I defer to my urologist, Jim Squadrito, chief of urology at Bryn Mawr Hospital. The pounding and rubbing of riding on a conventional bike seat is "a physical trauma," he says, that can cause prostatitis, recurrent infections, and elevated PSA.

Through online research, I discovered more than a dozen different no-nose bike seats. I chose the $81 Spongy Wonder, the brainchild of Canadian inventor Jeff Dixon, who experienced severe numbness during a long bike ride in 1999. It's basically two small pads that support only the sit bones. He has sold about 20,000 to customers all over the world.

Declares Dixon: "Human beings are not designed to sit on something that resembles a rounded two-by-four."

My new seat is weird and wonderful and attracts plenty of quizzical looks and comments. It took about a week to get used to, but I'm pleased to report that my male plumbing is happy and performing optimally.