Potentially the answer to a comfortable ride
Words Pete Muir Photography Patrik Lundin
There are few components that can have such an impact on the enjoyment of a ride as the saddle. Get it right and you’ll barely notice it’s there; get it wrong and it will leave you raw, sore and frustrated. Finding a saddle that you get on with can be a lifetime’s pursuit, and some people may struggle to ever find one that they are fully comfortable on. The solution may lie in a Reform saddle, which can be moulded to the shape of a rider’s behind.
Canadian company Reform currently offers two models, the Seymour and the Tantalus, with the Seymour being the lighter at 197g and boasting a carbon shell and rails, while the Tantalus is 235g and has titanium rails and a carbon/nylon shell. They’re also mildly different in shape, with the Seymour being the more racy, road version, and the Tantalus leaning towards gravel, although their suitability is more to do with rider build than cycling discipline. How the Reform works is remarkably simple. Set your bike up on a turbo, fit the Reform saddle as you would normally, plug in the adapter (there’s a metal contact point on the underside of the saddle), pedal while the carbon shell heats up and moulds to your backside, then unplug it and keep pedalling while it cools down so it hardens in the correct shape. Job done.
In theory, it would be easy to buy the saddle and do the moulding at home. But to give yourself the best chance of a perfect fit, you really need to get it set it up by the professionals.
Crunching the numbers
‘It’s the data,’ says Phil Cavell of London-based bike-fitter CycleFit, which is currently the only UK outlet working with Reform. ‘You could just buy the saddle and mould it yourself at home, but why would you do that when you can have 45 minutes with us? The process is important. It will work out better if I do it because I will play around with the saddle angle and fore/aft, and I will know how to interpret the data. That’s worth a lot.’
Included in the £335 cost of the Seymour saddle (£275 for the Tantalus) is time spent with some of the best bike-fitters in the world, who will use pressure mapping to assess pressure points, and who can see on a computer screen whether the newly moulded saddle is relieving pressure or helping to balance out asymmetries.
‘It’s worth a lot because at some point we might say, “This isn’t working.” And you might say it feels good when I’m looking at the data an
