How to choose a bike saddle

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We are not going to publish a “best road bike saddles” roundup. Not this year, not ever — and not because of our usual reason.

On every other page of this site, the disclosure is that we haven’t tested the products. Here the disclosure is stronger and more interesting: testing wouldn’t help. Nobody can review a saddle for you, including people who genuinely have ridden them. A saddle review is a report on the reviewer’s pelvis. Their sit bones are a different distance apart from yours, their pelvis rotates differently, their flexibility is different, their bike puts them at a different angle, and their soft tissue is arranged differently. A saddle that a reviewer calls transcendent may be, for your body, a small torture device. There is no version of that article that is about the object.

This is not a rhetorical position we’ve adopted for effect. It is roughly what the peer-reviewed literature concludes, and we’ll cite it below rather than assert it.

What the published research actually says

A 2023 narrative review by Vicari and colleagues in the Journal of Functional Morphology and Kinesiology examined the factors driving saddle pressure across road and off-road cyclists of both genders. Its conclusion, quoted: these factors are “individual and depend, among others, on gender, anthropometric measurements, and the type of bike”. The review emphasises fitting to the individual over universal prescriptions — which is the academic register of “there is no best saddle”.

On the specific question of cutouts, the same review found the evidence mixed: one study showed holed saddles reduced perineal pressure by directing load onto the sit bones, another found saddle design had no effect on pressures except at specific intensities in female riders. That’s not a ringing endorsement of the feature every manufacturer now sells as standard.

A 2020 systematic review and meta-analysis by Litwinowicz, Choroszy and Wróbel in Sports Medicinelooked at strategies for reducing cycling’s impact on the perineum in healthy males, and it is worth reading carefully because the findings are sharper and less convenient than the marketing.

On cutouts: central-cutout saddles produced a “significant decrease in anterior, and significant increase in posterior seat pressures” — but no improvement in penile oxygen pressurecompared with a standard saddle. The cutout moved the pressure around. It did not, in that comparison, deliver the physiological benefit it’s sold on.

On width: the review reports a study finding an “84% decrease of penile blood flow for the narrow saddle and a 19% decrease for the wide saddle”. Read that again — the width mattered enormously, and it mattered far more than the presence of a hole in the middle.

On noseless saddles: a 71% reduction in anterior seat pressure, increased penile oxygen pressure, and perineal numbness falling from 73% of riders to 18% over six months — at the cost of increased pressure on the sit bones, more discomfort there, and lower perceived stability. The review’s primary conclusion is that “current evidence supports the use of no-nose saddles as a means to reduce the negative impact of cycling on penile oxygen pressure”.

We want to be scrupulous about what that does and doesn’t establish, because it would be easy to over-read. Litwinowicz et al. studied healthy males; it does not speak for female riders, and the Vicari review notes that the wider gap between the ischial tuberosities in female cyclists “could reduce the load on the posterior bone structures and increase the load on the perineal region” — a different problem with a different answer. And “the evidence supports no-nose saddles” is not the same claim as “you should buy a no-nose saddle”: the same review records that riders found them less stable and harder on the sit bones, which is exactly why almost nobody rides one.

But the headline is hard to dodge. The width evidence is dramatic and the cutout evidence is equivocal — and the industry sells you the cutout.

Sit bone width: the one number worth having

Your ischial tuberosities — sit bones — are the two bony points at the bottom of your pelvis that are supposed to carry your weight on a bike. The whole design intent of a saddle is to support those two points and keep pressure off everything between them, which is soft tissue containing the nerves and blood vessels responsible for the numbness cyclists complain about.

This gives you the one genuinely objective input in the entire process: the distance between your sit bones is a physical measurement of your body, it’s the same today as it was last year, and a saddle either supports it or it doesn’t. If the saddle is too narrow, your sit bones hang off the sides and your weight lands on the soft tissue in the middle — which is the 84% blood-flow number above. Too wide and you get thigh chafe and a saddle you fight.

The measurement itself is a solved problem and it’s free. Sit on corrugated cardboard or a memory-foam pad on a hard chair, lean forward to roughly your riding posture, stand up, and measure between the centres of the two dents. Most shops that sell saddles have a purpose-made pad and will do it for nothing.

SQlab — which publishes its pressure-mapping methodology and states it “became the first saddle manufacturer to introduce a system to measure the distance between the sit bones and to calculate the optimal saddle width” — is a useful source here, and also, obviously, a company that sells saddles. A saddle maker telling you that your correct saddle width is measurable is a saddle maker telling you to come to them for the measurement. That doesn’t make it wrong; the anatomy is real and the pressure maps are published. It does mean SQlab is not a disinterested witness, and neither is Specialized, and neither is anyone else who’ll measure you for free.

The genuinely annoying part, and the reason we can’t turn this into a chart: there is no industry-standard formula from sit-bone width to saddle width, and every manufacturer applies its own offset and measures its own saddles its own way. So the measurement is objective and what to do with it isn’t — which is a much smaller mess than not having the measurement, but it’s still a mess, and anyone printing a universal millimetres-to-model table is inventing the mapping.

Everything else about a saddle is not about the saddle

Here is what makes this category genuinely brutal: most saddle pain is not caused by the saddle.

Saddle height. Too high and your hips rock side to side with every pedal stroke, and you are effectively sawing at yourself for four hours. That pain feels exactly like a bad saddle. It is a seatpost.

Saddle tilt. A nose tilted up drives pressure into soft tissue; tilted down slides you forward so you brace with your arms and hands, and now your wrists hurt too. Degrees matter here.

Fore/aft and reach. How far you stretch forward sets how much your pelvis rotates, which sets which part of you is actually on the saddle. A long reach rolls you forward off the sit bones and onto the soft tissue. Same saddle, different contact point, completely different experience.

Your shorts.A good pad and a bad saddle beats a great saddle and cheap shorts, and it isn’t close. If you’re troubleshooting pain and you’re riding in cheap shorts, that’s the variable to change first — our kit guides cover pads and bib shorts.

Time.Some genuine adaptation happens in the first few weeks of riding regularly. Not to a saddle that’s the wrong width — that never comes good — but a new saddle at the correct width is often uncomfortable before it’s comfortable, and the people who swap saddles every fortnight never find out.

So a reviewer riding a saddle is reporting the interaction of their pelvis, their fit, their shorts, their flexibility and their adaptation. They’re publishing it as a review of a saddle. It isn’t one.

What we’re not going to do

No roundup, no ranking, no top pick, no scores. It would be the best-performing page in this hub and we’re not writing it, because the honest version has one line in it and that line is “measure your sit bones and buy from somewhere that takes returns”.

We also can’t tell you which saddle suits you, and the difference between us and the sites that will is not that they’ve ridden more saddles. It’s that they’re willing to present a fact about one person’s anatomy as a fact about a product. If someone tells you a specific saddle is the best road saddle of 2026, they are telling you something true about themselves and nothing at all about you.