 Saddle tilt, what is the best approach for cyclists? How do you best protect your region down there for both men and for women, and what are some of the different types of saddles available to provide the most comfortable riding platform? All that coming up. So welcome back to the 26th edition of the RCA Training Tips Show where today, I'm joined again by the bike fitting expert, Neil Stambry, who's been fitting road cyclists for around 10 years in conjunction with being a sports physiotherapist. Now I've been meaning to do this for a while, and a channel supporter reminded me last week, and that is creating a playlist or series of all the Neil Stambry bike fitting videos, which you'll now find on my channel page, and I'll also provide a thumbnail at the end of this video, which you just need to click on, that'll take you directly to the playlist. Now please, if you're getting value out of these Neil Stambry bike fitting videos, don't forget to like them, and also subscribe and hit the bell to ensure you get notified of when videos like this go live in the future. Now saddle tilt, interestingly, according to UCI regulations, which changed in 2015, you can tilt your saddle up to nine degrees now, which many pro cyclists rejoiced about after the original legal tilt was only 2.5 degrees. Now the vast majority of us out there were not pro cyclists, so we're not gonna be tilting the saddle aggressively, but what I find interesting when you go to your local bunch ride, you often see many saddles, tilting a little bit down, and some even a little bit back. Why is that? Well, in today's video, Neil Stambry is gonna walk us through what you should do and how to find the best position for ultimate comfort and pressure release. Now very quickly, before Neil gets into it, you may have heard me in previous videos, discuss an opportunity to join the Beta Release Program for the up level road cycling course, which will be released at the end of October. Well, if you're keen to learn more about this Beta Program, I'm gonna be sending out an important email to my email newsletter list next week. So make sure you join that list, I'll provide a link below alternatively. You can download my free e-book for road cyclists looking to take their performance to the next level and you will be automatically added to my weekly email newsletter list. So let's get into it. Saddle tilt, highly individualized, very difficult to explain in a short YouTube video again, but I'll attempt to sort of outline a way that you can try and figure it out yourself a little bit and give you a bit of a rough idea of different types of saddles, roughly what angle you should start with. So in terms of saddle tilt and how it will affect your position on the bike, the logical, let's assume that the seat height and the setback and the reach and the drop are all pretty good. The further nose down you tilt the saddle, the more it will incline the person to be able to roll their pelvis forward or anteriorly rotate their pelvis. That can, that's quite logical. You know, tip it forward, they roll their pelvis forward, but at the same time, there's a tendency therefore especially at light load when they're pedaling at 100 watts or 150 watts or something, there's a tendency therefore to slip forward on this seat. There's also a tendency as the pelvis tips forward to load the upper body and have to push yourself back using your upper body and your triceps. Yeah, of course, a numb hand, I would have thought. Yeah, exactly right. So as the seat gets too nose down, you'll tend to load your hands and all that kind of stuff as well and experience excessive quad fatigue because your hamstrings might not be working well because the pelvis is rolled forward at a weird angle and that type of thing. As the seat gets too nose up, this one's pretty straightforward, the front of it's probably gonna crush your gentleman's regions or your lady's region. So as the seat gets too nose up, there'll be a tendency to roll the pelvis back away from that pressure, but assuming that the front end stays in roughly the right spot, eventually it'll start to cause pressure there whether you're a man or woman, it doesn't matter. When the seat gets too nose up, it'll cause trouble. Now at what angle does that occur? This is where it gets tricky. The angle where it occurs is highly individualized between each person. Depends upon the shape, the curvature of the bottom of their pelvis, how rapidly the isiopubic ramai or your sit bones taper inwards, how rapidly they taper upwards at the front, all this kind of stuff, how stable you are, how strong you are, how strong your quads are versus your hamstring, how flexible you are. There's a lot of other things which come into determining what seat angle you should ride with and then there's all the differences between different saddle. So for example, this is a specialized tupe, or tupei, I'm never really sure. Yes, tupe, but just on that, the benefits of tilting it down would be aerodynamic gains, right? Yes. Why would you tilt it up? You would, you almost never, almost never. The one major exception to that is brooks seats. Anyone who's ridden a brooks leather seat, they tend to operate a little bit better when the nose is tilted up slightly because they sag down, you sit really low. And almost everyone using a brooks seat is riding order axle, ultra endurance, or touring. And so they're sitting very upright anyway. So they sag back into the leather slings that support the seat bones. So there's no power benefits or physiological gains from tilting the saddle back like there is when you tilt it forward. Not at all. Aerodynamic gains. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, if we're talking about road bikes, generally not in my experience, there might be the odd exception to that rule, but generally not, no. So for a flat style seat, and the tube here is relatively flat. A lot of seats, like if we chose, if we looked at the manufacturer's saddles that they're producing, all the big manufacturers, there's a lot of seats that are shaped roughly like this, okay, where they've got a bit of a channel or a cutout and wings which spread out and drop away slowly at the edge here. And looking at them from the side, they're flat for the first half and then they have some type of slight rise at the rear. There's a lot of seats like this, like this heap, so many that we can't even mention it. So this is probably the largest category of saddles that you'll come across. Almost invariably, for anyone who's vaguely functional, who rides with a normal amount of drop to the bars and whatnot, the best angle to have these things on is where the front half of the seat is level or very, very close to level. So this is precluded by the fact that your bike has to be level when you measure it. Yes. So you must put the bike on a perfectly flat surface with a spirit level between the axles and make sure that the axles are level. Because if they're tilted down, if the axle, if it's one degree down at the front because your living room floor is on a slight angle, the saddle angle will be one degree down, yeah? So you've got to make sure the bike is level first. But a good place to start is to have one of these things, and this is a dodgy old Audi spirit level here. That's why you lent it to me for a number of weeks. That's why I lent it to you. Don't need this one. Don't even know how accurate it is. But if you put this thing level, and I can't see the little bubble there, but if you had that thing level, and you leveled the front half of the seat. Hands in the way of the bubble. Sorry. No, that's a hot thing. If you leveled the front half of the seat, you'd be pretty close to being in the ballpark. The saddle is patently then not level, okay? It's slightly nose down, and that depends upon how far the rear of the saddle rises up. And a lot of these, all these soil seats have got some type of rise at the rear. But if you get the front half of it level, you'll be in the ballpark. And then what you want to do is tilt it very slightly. It nose up or nose down from there to gain the optimum kind of comfort. If it gets too nose down, you'll find yourself starting to slip forward off it. If it gets, and loading your hands like we spoke about before, if it gets too nose up, you'll start to feel unpleasantness across the front of the seat. If you then throw your hands down in the drops and it's really killing you, and you think, well, I'm just not gonna ride in the drops, that's probably too nose up or it's just not the right saddle design for you. You need something which allows more ability to roll your pelvis forward and get down to the drops. So the drops test, I've just made that up then. It's not exactly high tech. But the drops test is a good one as well. If you're riding along at a solid load on the hoods and the seat feels fine across the front, but you go into the drops and it feels unpleasantly discomforting so that you can only really spend 30 seconds or a minute there, it's probably not the right saddle angle, it's probably too nose up. Or you need a different designed seat which allows more forward pelvic rotation to occur. And as you go into the drops, that anterior rotation of the pelvis will want to. Which is why those other saddles are there in front of you. Yeah, so if you're having trouble with a flat style seat and you're getting frontal pressure. Which I was after the crank length change. You were because it allowed you to roll your pelvis further forward. Yeah, traditionally I've used Sela SMPs for a long time. These are a great designed seat. They've got a lot of curvature depending upon the model that you use. There's a dynamic and a light 209 there which are some of the more curved ones. And these things are basically shaped much more like a human pelvis. And these will allow you to roll your pelvis forward more than one of those most of the time. Some people find them worse but they're the outliers, right? So these things operate on a totally different angle. Normally what you'll want to do with one of these things is level the bike and then have about a 14, see how it rises up at the front there and the front of the seat comes close to the spirit level again. You'll want to have about a 12 to 14 millimeter gap between the spirit level and the seat at the front. Think of it as one finger's width depending on how fat your finger is. So that's about the right angle and then you can tweak it from there in small increments. But it's extremely unlikely that you'll ever want it to be level. So where the two highest points of the rise are level that's very unlikely. It does happen occasionally if you've got a really upright rider but most of the time they'll want to be somewhere between 12 and 14 millimeters nose down at the front depending upon which model you've got. So these things need to sit more nose down than a flat style seat. How do you figure it out? Well, you've just got to go and play with it a little bit yourself, right? Get it in the ballpark. There's a million other saddles out there so I can't cover them all. But I think what you're telling me which I didn't really recognize was it's really about getting it as close to straight as possible but then tinkering it a little bit from a comfort perspective, what suits you as opposed to going for aerodynamic gains or going for extra power. It's all coming down to comfort and how it suits you. Yeah, generally speaking, I always tell my clients there's three critical things, three critical factors that you need to consider when you're looking at a seat. There's comfort, comfort and comfort. Right. And far behind that is other stuff like the slight aerodynamic gain of being able to roll your pelvis. Unless you're a professional time trialist or you're competing at some really high level and you just wanna be able to get through a 20 kilometer TT and you don't care if your crotch is killing you at the end of it and you wanna gain another one kilometer an hour by rolling your pelvis forward and you're just like, stuff it, I'm just gonna do it. There are certain situations where you might wanna go crazy with the seat angle but for anyone, any mere mortal like you and me that's doing any normal type of riding, it's all about comfort and stability, right? And so using that guideline of if it's a style of seat like that, having the front half of it flat and then tweaking it very slightly from there, if it's an SMP, try for somewhere between one finger's width nose down and tweak it from there. These things in particular are extremely sensitive to angle changes. If you change the angle half a degree, they can feel terrible or amazing. They're very, very touchy. So don't be afraid to play with it a little bit is the moral of the story. And when you start feeling like you're slipping forward or loading your hands too much, it's probably too nose down. If you're feeling the opposite and you go into the drops and you're feeling pressure across the front that's hurting a bit there, it's probably too nose up. Yeah, tricky thing to explain and there's so many different seats out there that this can never work for all of them. If you're one, a special mention should go out to, if you've got a person who is struggling with perineum pressure and a lot of people that are searching for this, they'll be looking for saddle angle because the front of their perineum is hurting or they're getting numbness in there in their gentlemen's or ladies' regions during or after a ride, the best saddle that I've ever found for reducing perineum pressure is a saddle called the, it's made by a company called SQ Labs and we might put a link to this one in our video. The SQ Labs 612 Ergo Wave Active, it's a bit of a mouthful, is one of my favorite seats now. In fact, it is my go-to saddle now for reducing frontal perineum pressure. I've got one on my bike and we might take some photos of that or a short bit of footage in a minute and splice that in. But those things have a totally different design where you sit up on this shelf at the back and the back of the seat flexes and then there's almost no contact across the perineum. So the ability to unload the front of the seat with an SQ Labs 612 is exceptionally good. These are a close second, the SMP range. And behind that I find things like the specialized power saddles and the Shimano, the Pro Stealth, whatever it is that's very similar to the SnubNo seats. They're pretty good as well. And then fourth behind those is a flat style or a seat that's long in the front with a slight rise at the rear. With the SQ Labs seats, if you're having trouble figuring out saddle angles because of perineum pressure and numbness at the front, get your hands on one of those. They're not terribly expensive and it's a very unusual design but very, very effective for unloading the front. Yeah. Good.