When it comes to parts of a bike, saddles might be the most personal of them all. What’s bliss for one rider is punishment for another, and while it’s easy to pretend your saddle’s 'just fine', once you get the right one, it's a game-changer for comfort, efficiency, and how long you actually enjoy riding your bike.
But because of the personal aspect, saddles are a component where advice and recommendations from others can be useful, but they come with many variables. Riding style, bike fit, physiology, injuries, and sensitivity all impact how the same saddle works for each individual, but hearing others’ experiences can help narrow down what to try in the endless sea of options.
So, in this round of Collective Favourites, we're sharing our favourites, and advice from us and longtime professional bike fitter Jon Wild on how to pick a saddle. If you want to check out the previous editions of these features, where we advise on how to pick shoes, pedals, bib shorts, and supermarket snacks, and list our personal favourites, then head over here.
How to find a good saddle?
As mentioned earlier, saddles are deeply personal – but just as crucial is the context they sit in. No matter how many you try, if your overall bike fit isn’t right, discomfort will almost always happen.
Saddle pain can often also stem from elsewhere: a cleat position that’s a few millimetres off, cranks that are too long, bars that are too low. Even something as simple as saddle height – too high and you’ll rock side to side – can introduce chafing and numbness. And don’t underestimate saddle tilt, either, or forget the part that padded cycling shorts play in all this.
So, before blaming the saddle, it’s worth getting your bike fit dialed in. "Most saddles are actually pretty good – it’s the position that’s often the problem," says Wild.
Once your fit is sorted, the saddle search becomes far simpler, though still not necessarily easy. As Wild puts it, "If you just buy a saddle, and it's the only thing you ever try, you'll always be wondering, or you'll just suffer because you've already spent your money. So I think you have to try a few just to get an idea of what the differences are, and then you can start gravitating towards the kind of saddle you like."
One of the big challenges when testing saddles is that they don’t all sit at the same stack height, which can vary a good 20 mm between brands and models. "You see people who got a handful of saddles and the one that feels the best just so happens to be the lowest-stack one, because their saddle was too high," Wild says. "So then they go 'this one feels the best,' but actually, it's just because that accidentally was lowering their saddle."
So remember, you do need to change your saddle height depending on the saddle – or else you're effectively testing saddle height, not saddle shape.
These days, saddles are increasingly expensive, especially with the rise of 3D-printed models and boutique brands like Infinity or Gebiomized. And while testing them all isn’t easy, bigger brands like Specialized, Fizik and SQlab at least offer 30-day return policies, making the process a little easier.
What size and shape saddle?
Width is one of the most important but complicated aspects of saddle fit. Saddles generally come in different widths to match your sit bones, measured at the widest part. This can make a huge impact on your comfort: too narrow, and you’ll feel unwelcome pressure; too wide, and you’re likely to chafe. Saddle widths usually start from around 130 mm and range to 170 mm.
However, there is no bulletproof method of measuring your sitbone width at home, and even if you manage that, it doesn't mean that it's the only metric that you should look at when choosing a saddle.
"I would try to discourage that fixation [on saddle width]. You could definitely tell – if you just sit on a few saddles – like, 'Whoa, that just disappears right up into me,'" Wild explains. "The way I get people to do it would be to sit in your most upright position you'd ever need to sit on the saddle, and then just ever so slightly, like, sway from side to side on your saddle. If you feel like you kind of fall off the edge very quickly, or you feel yourself almost come up onto the saddle, then you know the right width for your actual pelvis, not just those two body prominences right at the back."
In terms of length, traditional saddles are longer and taper toward the nose, giving you more room to shift around. A newer design is called short-nose, these are the likes of the Specialized Power or Prologo Dimension, saddles that ditch the extra length. These were originally made to comply with UCI saddle rule of having the nose of the seat 5 cm behind the bottom bracket, only to then become the norm.
Again, there is no clear definition if you should choose one over the other; it's more to do with the overall shape of the saddle rather than the length only. On longer-nose saddles, Wild explains, it's easier to extend the pressure relief channel further forward, while on short-nose saddles it can often be too far back to be effective.
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