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Outside Magazine, September 2004

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Bodywork: Bicycle Seats
You May Be Seated (Cont.)

THE GREAT ERGONOMIC freakout dates back to 1997, when Bicycling magazine's Ed Pavelka claimed that his 14,000-mile-a-year riding regimen had left him temporarily impotent. Pavelka quoted one of his doctors, urologist Irwin Goldstein, of Boston University, who had said his research indicated that cycling may cause impotence—a.k.a. erectile dysfunction—"in a very small percentage of cases." The story was picked up by the TV newsmagazine 20/20, and Goldstein became the go-to guy on the subject. Before long his tone sharpened, and he started dispensing quotes like "There are two kinds of cyclists: those who are impotent, and those who will be."

Goldstein's findings had one flaw, his critics charged: They were based on studies that evaluated tiny numbers of cyclists. Even today, the best statistics available come from the Massachusetts Male Aging Study, conducted by the New England Research Institutes, which evaluated 113 cyclists. The study's published results, in 2001, showed that the 90 men who rode less than three hours a week were less apt to experience impotence than similarly active noncyclists. But the study also discovered that the 23 men who rode more than three hours a week were more likely to have impotence problems than the other cyclists. This last result now forms the foundation of Goldstein's stance. "These days, I'm a little more moderate in tone, but I'm not any less convinced. I want men to know that riding involves risk, and let them know what to do about it," he says.

But Martin Resnick, chairman of the Department of Urology at Case Western Reserve University Hospital, in Cleveland, believes that 30 years of research on this question have not yet provided a final answer. "Ask any other urologist about these numbers and he'll probably tell you that nobody knows for sure if there's a problem," Resnick says.

"There isn't any clear, definitive data yet, just theory," he adds. "Truth is, we simply don't know if sitting on a bike and reducing blood supply to the penis for half an hour, an hour, or two hours is even relevant to erectile dysfunction."

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