Can A Triathlon Saddle Be Comfortable AND Make You Faster?

We’ve been invited to the Ergon Campus in Koblenz, Germany to check out their new triathlon saddles! The SR Tri features two different shapes for both men and women, offering a total of four saddles tailored to meet the unique needs of riders with aggressive, aerodynamic fits. James is meeting Head of Ergonomics Simon Schumacher for the day to figure out which of their new range suits him the best.

In association with Ergon: https://gtn.io/Ergon

⏱️ Timestamps ⏱️
00:00 – Intro
00:49 – Simon Schumacher, Head of Ergonomics
01:26 – The Ergon Development Centre
03:21 – The Ergonomics Lab
07:22 – A Front Loaded or Mid Loaded Saddle

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How important is comfort on the bike for you? Have you ever considered changing out a saddle or contact points to pursue comfort?

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Triathlon settles can be a pain in the butt and it’s no wonder because if I asked you to sit on this chair for 5 hours you’d be pretty uncomfortable after a while so it’s no wonder you’re uncomfortable on a saddle what if there was a company that promised not only to make you more comfortable but also faster with their saddle interested to find out more I certainly was we’ve come to the ergon headquarters in Germany to find out more about their latest release the ergon SR track Aon saddle designed with input from Yan feno it promises to not only solve the age-old Comfort on a triathlon bike problem they also claim it’s going to make you faster on the Run bold claims indeed let’s head inside and find out some more Hello nice to meet you yeah nice to meet you this is Simon schum here he is the head of ergonomics here at eron so what am I holding my hand actually it’s our new Sr triin s it looks pretty good but I assume you didn’t just sketch this up on a Blackboard in the last month and then make it and now you’re selling it yeah it was a quite short process just kidding it took us like two to three years and uh I will show you around and show you how we get to this point that you have yeah let’s go find out the process that got to this point that I’m holding a new saddle first I’m going to take you through the Saddles this way this way cool so come in [Music] all right where are we now we are right at the heart of the Argon Development Center I would say okay this is where all the magic happens this is where all the magic happens yes so we worked or we asked Jan frino if he has some problems and he he came to us and say he guys uh um couldn’t solve all his problems but I promised to solve his try on settle problems at the very least okay so what did that look like Yan F came in you the first time and you just said he has 17 mockup Saddles choose one and then take it from there or actually I I went to him it’s you got him he doesn’t come to you uh yeah but um we we almost we we start with an interview say what are your problems try to imagine them then we start with pressure mapping um couple it with our experience in pressure mapping say okay there are some things with his current settle he’s using we could improve okay there were some things we some features we have to try if they work or if they didn’t and so we went Step by Step Building prototypes testing building prototypes testing doing pressure mapping bringing all things together and then at the end we came up with a shape that we hope and it was a feedback of yan uh that it really helped him to improve his overall writing you can turn around prototypes here in this lab pretty quickly can’t you yeah I would say it would take us like one one week to to build a prototype like from the idea scratch CID reshape it um bring it to the 3D 3D printing machine bring to our milling machine and then we could we can very easily and very fast check the prototypes great and here we are all right now we’re in the ergonomics lab and we’re going to play a bit with a few of the things here but first introduce the actual saddle the SR triathon except these four settles yeah said you had one new settle you got four new settles what what am I looking at you yeah one one would be boring obviously right well I mean what is the difference uh like typical for agon we decide between man’s and wom’s version and we stick to this with our Trion series but we bring up new to our SS is the power position we call it front and mid and so we have to bring two woman’s Saddles a front and a mid and two man’s specific settles a front and a mid type ah so these are different one of them’s front one of them’s mid yeah what what is is this is this predetermined like oh can I just choose whether I’m a front or a a mid you are born mid and born front oh okay right it is yeah do I do I go into a bathroom to check to check do I need to like go to the little boy’s room and have a have a good look with am I am I front or am I it’s about the the sitting type and the sitting position like the sitting point on the saddle when you compare them to each other like you see that the one has a very long and shallow nose the other has a very wide and short nose and so it is the sitting point on the front or it is made to sit on the front and it’s made to sit in the in the middle region of the sadle so do I just look at my current settle and go ah mostly sit on the front I must be a front sitter there are is there some way I can out that’s that’s a good point there are some uh there are an anatomics and subjective behavior that brings you into a position that you are a front user and a mid user and it is that you cannot change this Behavior so one of the setle would fit you better and you cannot say okay I’m I want to be a mid user I go with the mid so it is there are certain like a Sit bone with it’s the same you cannot change your sit bone withth it’s it’s when you’re born and so you’re going to tell me which one of these I should be riding and I don’t get to choose front or mid in this case um there’s we we make a video um where we explain in detail how to get to your decision whether you are front or mid oh easy we’ll put that link below this video all right so then what is the difference between men’s and women I see is that 3D printed yeah it is it is 3D printed the men didn’t qualify for 3D printing budget that form no it’s it’s too it’s too too technical okay no what is the real reason why women have 3D printing don’t we understand that there’s a man’s and a woman’s specific anatomy and so we have to make sure that we find the right features to improve the comfort of them and there we speak about the type of pressure relief the the the mans have to have a very wide and surface orientated front nose area which is like you see the pressure relief channel is very very shallow yeah and the wom they are very sensitive in their front genital area and so we had to bring another function into this pressure relief Channel then we decided to go with a 3D printed material where where we can change the shore hardness so then you have like a hard sh harness to hold the the bone structures and the weight and then we have this uh soft tissue kind of material to add a little support even to your pressure relief Channel and so in total you increase the overall surface area so you incre oh you decrease the pressure on each point you’ve increased slightly in their pressure release Channel whereas the men can just have a big Channel there in the middle exactly interesting I mean I think I know which of these two I need to choose uh not that one uh now I going to choose which of these to front or mid so let’s get into my uh truit and figure out whether I’m a front or a mid [Music] is that normal that you’re off to one side most people have a bias yeah from one side the other like everyone is is not homogeneously balanced yeah so this is a very common pressure pressure [Music] mapping all right so we’ve done some pressure mapping and decided that I I am actually just like Yan frino I told you I’ve got exactly the same saddle that Yan frino rode at the end of his career that he won the PTO race on in his final win that he rode at IM man World Champs n in his final race this is the same sadle and it’s my saddle see I told you okay jokes aside I am a mids sitter and we use pressure mapping to figure that out but as we said earlier you don’t need to use pressure mapping to figure that out right no we uh as I said as I just said you can look at our video that we’ve just made where we try to clarify the process how to get to your uh to your best position to your power position figure out whether you’re a mid or you’re a front uh I am a mid so we’ve put that on my bike an Sr Tri men’s mid saddle that I I am in uh I’m going to I’m looking forward to many miles on this saddle it’s actually really comfortable I’ll get back on in a minute uh but there’s one more thing we haven’t spoken about and that is as we said earlier this SLE makes you faster but it’s not just because it’s super sleek and aerodynamic it’s got a power position that you spoke about but that doesn’t lock you in to a position which is a bit counterintuitive can you explain that a bit it is a dynamic power position that means we have to make sure that you can move around in a in a slight certain way so that we add a new pressure point to your old pressure point and in this case you get a certain relief on this loaded area so you can move slightly forward slightly back without affecting the amount of power you’re putting out but you can relieve maybe hamstrings a little bit or your quads a little bit depending on what you’ve been overusing for a bit yeah and also preloaded areas uh from your sitting in your sitting anatomics all right yeah you can change to slightly move the pressure points a little bit I mean that can only be a good thing and without losing any power and I’ve had saddles in the past where there was a comfortable spot and it was just so and if you were a little bit forward of that you were not comfortable you further back you were not comfortable and you can obviously see the issues with that on the back end of an Iron Man bike where your hamstring stock in or your quad stock getting tacked and you can’t move because there’s one spot that you have to be in so solve that that’s obviously free speed because you can keep ping that power that’s definitely a win and then you also told me which is a bit of a dubious claim because you’re leaving the saddle in T2 that this saddle is going to make you faster on the run and I’m not entirely sure how can you explain that it’s about running stronger it’s mainly about the transition from from cycling to running it’s mainly about changing from sitting to standing or to to walking which is from a biomechanical perspective a very a very problematic process and a big shift it’s a big shift and it and it took you like 5 to 10 kilom and in this period there are marginal gains that will make you faster because you get to this point where you run in a very comfortable way quicker quicker yeah faster because you you can make that shift is that because of the multiple power positions so you’re relieving some pressure or is it because yeah is it because you You released some pressure on your hamstrings or power position means that you can concentrate on paddling not on holding your position on the saddle like your your lower back your upper back the your shoulder regions because the saddle does its job just as a stable weight loader I would say you can fully concentrate on pedaling and your lower back and upper B is very distressed when you get to running so take the pressure off your lower back we’ve all been there where you got off your bike and your lower back was just like oh I can’t move right now so hopefully that’s going to solve that I’m going to hop on right now and uh ride it a little bit more I’ll let you know how that goes when I’m next to an IR man Marathon not in the near future anyway I’m enjoying the [Music] sale well I’m pretty happy with my new settle on my TT bike it’s uh pretty comfortable actually I’m I’m very very stoked thank you so much Simon for walking me through it and giving me my new settle and making sure it’s the right one for me very importantly we’re actually giving some of these away in a competition on gtn so watch the gtn show this week for uh your chance to win one of your Sr Triathlon settles from erone this month uh yeah get your hands on one of those thanks for watching everybody and goodbye