I sell bikes to lots of really awesome bike riders and some on their way to being awesome, or even riders just looking for a good time on the weekends.

One thing that I keep seing from customers and I see way, way too much of on the internet are seats that are pointed down. Not a teeny-tiny little bit, but pointed down so far that the saddle rails are parallel to the ground. That is just massively the wrong way to attach a seat to a bicycle that it makes my know-it-all elitist brain melt. Sometimes I even yell at the screen. So wrong.

I understand(a little) when I see a new $1200 bike setup nose-down, it takes a while to understand how everything works and bike shops do a horrible job selling road bikes, but I've seen more and more(and more) $5000+ bikes that are otherwised dialed and balanced looking setup wrong, patently, objectively, inexcusably wrong. Wrong! Those stupid(yes, I said it) SMP seats get a pass, because they are just so fundamentally odd that you actually are looking at relatively level rails.

There is no way to deny this. If all of your mass is sliding down onto your hands, your bike isn't going to handle right and you are going to be using way, way more upperbody strength than you should be. You like like a fool too, but we all do by simple act of getting gussied up in our plumage and heading out onto the road, so we can't hold it against y'all too much.

What's to blame here? New younger riders that have always seen track bikes in their neighborhoods setup wrong? The death of proper group road rides full of experinced riders telling people that their bike setup is stupid? It's a shocking trend.

What concerns me most is the bikes I see with 2.5 feet of seatpost extension and a seat pointing at the stem. Dudes- lower your seat two or three centimeters and stick the seat where it belongs. Seats that are centimeters too high are redolent of one common American trait, cock-sizing. Same thing goes for stem length or really small frames. Sometimes it's the unholy trinity all at once. Hell, when I was in middleschool I used to buy shoes that were too large and stuff the ends of them with newspaper to feel more confident in the halls.

Does your dick hurt? If it does, you're not going to solve the problem by messing up your bike. Proper weight distribution is the first step to comfort and efficiency on a bike.

People who are doing it wrong, please, try this-
Grab a level, grab some allen keys and level out your seat. You'll probably want to lower it while you're at it. Rotate the seat a few degrees in either direction to get what you need.
DO THIS. TRY. PLEASE.