The reason for putting the padding in your shorts instead of seat is very simple: the seat does not move with your backside, but your shorts do. putting soft squishy parts of your seat under your sit bones (the one part of your ass designed to support your weight) causes weight to be borne by the soft tissues elsewhere. A hard seat, the correct width for your sit bones, with padding under your sit bones wherever they may be moving as you pedal, is not comically silly, it’s anatomically and biomechanically correct, for many types of cycling.
Which to me sounds like marketing scam BS to sell shorts and more expensive yet more cheaply made seats. It's nonsensical. If the whole seat is padded, your "sit bones" -- Ischial Tuberosities -- will always be on padding. Whether that padding in on your ass or on the seat should make zero difference. Seriously,
think about what you just said! Do you not see the absurd logic fallacy?
NOT that the ridiculous leaning forward straight or drop bar position even involves that part of the pelvis! You end up rotated forward so far that the tuberosities don't even make flipping contact!
The entire "sit bones" rubbish seems to be devoid of actual knowledge of anatomy or seating.
Kind of like those idiotic "ergonomic office seats" that were hot and trendy in the '90's. The ones that ended up causing chronic knee pain and eventually injuries by moving more weight onto the knees. Or the ergonomic "split" keyboards that cause joint pain in the elbows after prolonged use?
As someone who's worked in accessibility and usability for a decade and some change, I know ergonomic bullshit when I hear it.
In fact the seating position that seems to work best with the thin seats puts all the weight on the perineal, not the so-called "sit bones". Aka "the taint" for those not versed in anatomy, aka the "Ischiopubic ramus" for the nit-picky. To that end I would suspect the real reason the thin seats work better than wide for forward-leaning riders is it means your additor magnus, semitendinosus, and biceps femoris aren't bouncing on and off the seat directing force into the gluteus maximum.
In other words your legs aren't giving your arse a pounding. In the forward leaning position your butt gets rotated back and your legs smack the wider seat. Since the weight in that position is moved to the perineal, all the thin seats are doing to help you not chafe.
Much less the pressure tests used almost never actually line up with the actual bones in question! NOR are said bones actually where most of the pressure is put, it's just where the most pressure
may end up located. The plot of six fallacy! A bit like explaining sound or nuclear blast radii. Just because those are the points of highest pressure, does not make them where the majority of pressure is, or a great place to focus even more pressure on.
Unless of course you
WANT ischial bursitis. This is probably why upright riders with cruiser bars end up with massive pain in their sacrum and coccyx if they try to use the butt floss seats... and why peddling the "sits bones"
lie seems to be more marketing scam than fact.
But of course like other gibberish scams people blindly believe -- Amway, Mary Kay, HTML/CSS frameworks, Religion -- daring to even say that will drag the know-nothing fanboys out of the woodwork blindly parroting propaganda. Here's a tip, alleged "medical studies" done by the companies selling the seats are likely about as legit as a cancer study funded by cigarette manufacturers.
Or at least the ones they decide not to bury.
it’s a time tested and scientifically proven way for people of moderate to high fitness to comfortably cycle extremely long distances at decent speeds with lightweight, aerodynamic equipment. Not the only way to ride, of course, but the only reason one would laugh at it is because they don’t understand it…
If by "time tested" you mean 8 to ten years, scientifically proven being card stacked studies by people with a deep financial interest... and of course your key words "people of moderate to high fitness" aka people who like -- and or can bend themselves -- into the back-breaking crotch-rocket position.
Which means dick-all to casual riders looking for actual comfort without being a master of contortionism.
I'm actually going to be writing an article on Medium about this because whilst the thin seat rubbish can work for the "over the bars" riders, the claim that the sit bones have ANYTHING to do with this is utter and total nonsense, ignorant of the most basic bits of how anatomy works.
It seems to me like little more than a marketing scam the foolish and gullible have yummed up hook, line, sinker, and a bit o' the rod! It sounds good to the ill educated, little different from the type of hoodoo voodoo the likes of Oz, Gwenyth Paltrow or that dirtbag calling himself an avacado peddle like tumeric cleanses, bleach enema's, alkali water, or shoving jade eggs up the holiest of holies.
Enjoy your toxoplasmosis ladies!
