Scottish company Manta has taken it upon themselves to completely re-engineer the bike seat. Driven by the love of cycling and the refusal to accept inadequate seating, Manta has solved the problem of pressure point discomfort in conventional bike seats.
Manta believes the parts of your body that support you as you sit and read this at your desk are the parts that should also be supporting you on your bike seat, not your perineum, or "bits" as the Scottish like to call the general area. Your bits were not designed to bear the weight of your body, which makes conventional bike seats uncomfortable or even down right hurt.
Designed by Jon Catling, Manta's revolutionary bike seat supports your weight through a platform of plastic struts, most of which pivot around a central spine to allow your legs to move up and down. A stainless base rail attaches the bike seat to your seat post clamp. Grippage on the struts ensures you won't slide off and the bike seat keeps you cool and comfortable as your ride.
Manta claims you will no longer have soreness, chaffing, numbness or circulation impairment. The Manta bike seat distributes pressure over a larger area, including not just your natural sit bones but your legs as well. Many other new bikes seat designs have gone the route of simply removing the nose, a good way to ease unwanted pressure points but the result is a massively reduced support area.
The Manta bike seat removes the nose yet offers the same, if not more support as a conventional bike seat. The bonus is that the Manta bike seat does not make any contact with your bits. With the Manta design, long term damage caused by lack of blood flow is unlikely to happen, nor will the more abrupt potential damages happen when you hit that pot hole.
I would love to try out the Manta bike seat or even the carbon saddle from RideOut Technologies, as I have had it with being sore even after a short ride. The Manta bike seat costs £77.96 with free shipping across the EU. Drop the company an email for shipping costs to North America and other parts of the world.
UPDATE: Manta has recently released the Manta Saddle Lite version which is shorter in the front. Scotland's Scott Napier used the original Manta Saddle while breaking the record for cycling the Pan-American Highway in just 125 days. Scott found that the original model tapped the back of his legs on very steep climbs. Based on Scott's and other testers' feedback, the Manta team trimmed the forefront of the seat and released the MSLite version (seen below).