Canadian television recently interviewed me on work in our bioengineering lab investigating how bicycle seats may cause problems with erections, and how current seats fall short in protecting men. The interview may be viewed here. It took place over Skype, and the sound quality is poor. (I don’t really sound as if speaking through tissue paper.)
Male Health
A blog about male fertility, potency and health by Craig Niederberger MD FACS.
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this kind of thing scares me. I’m 43, and a long time mountain bike rider. It’s a huge passion for me, and i ride in group settings, sometimes for 2+ hours at a clip, a couple times a week.
I believe this has done wonders for my overall fitness and cardiovascular health. It’s depressing when you try and work out and “do the right thing,” yet at the same time you could be damaging an obviously critical part of your body.
I’ve had some issues with ED, nothing too bad, but now i can’t help but be paranoid about all this. But I was diagnosed with pretty low T- one test at 194, and another at 287. Again – this is a big part of my life. What to do? i can ride in a standing/crouched position, but not all the time.
Too many things i read make me depressed these days. This included.
i’m going to try and *bump* this and ask another question: just how much biking are we talking about? How much to cause a potential problem? not sure if you have that kind of information, or if you’ve come across any research relative to this.
I understand bike cops, who spend at least 8 hours a day in the saddle, 5 or 6 times a week, have had issues. That makes sense – that’s a lot of time in the saddle. What about weekend warriors (i’m actually a “weekend warrior +”, as i really do more than the average weekend warrior)
Nothing like a properly fitted bike seat. Your sit bones should take the brunt of pressure – the skinny part of your bike seat is not for sitting, it’s skinny to make it easy to get your legs around it. You should feel no pressure on the perinium area behind the scrotum when you ride. Some readers may think this quite obvious, but if there are men who are impacted by a poorly-suited bike seat, or who ride a little far forward on the seat, and this resonates with them and their bottoms, that’s a good thing. Ride on, it’s really good for your heart.
Dr Niederberger, was was ISM adamo seat used in the study? This seat has a very strange shape and the studies or marketinglinked to the seat indicate that it removed 99% of the pressure on the perenial nerves/arteries. I have this seat and think it help but your opionion holds a good deal of H20 http://www.ismseat.com/technology
Thank you, Michael. We used six seats with differing typologies that describe the geometries of seats currently available, and concluded that no current seat was likely entirely protective. This conclusion is of course subject to the obvious caveat that we couldn’t test all of the available seats 🙂 We’re working on systems to let riders test their own seats to figure out what works best for them, and we’ll keep you posted as we do!