Cycling and erectile dysfunction

By Kyrylo Lozovyi · August 10, 2026

This is one of those health claims that circulates permanently and is rarely checked against the research. The short version: the risk is real, narrower than the folklore, and mostly about pressure rather than about cycling.

What the large studies found

Awad and colleagues surveyed a large, multinational sample of athletes and compared cyclists with swimmers and runners on sexual and urinary function. Nearly 4,000 responses. The cyclists did not have worse sexual function than the other athletes.

That is a cross-sectional survey rather than a trial, with all the usual caveats about self-selection and self-report. But it is a large sample with a sensible comparison group — other endurance athletes rather than the general population — and it is the best answer available to the plain question.

The companion finding is the more useful one. In a related large study, bicycle-related genital numbness was associated with worse scores on the Sexual Health Inventory for Men. Not riding. Numbness.

The mechanism, and why the distinction matters

The perineum — the area between the sit bones — carries the pudendal nerve and the internal pudendal artery, which between them supply sensation and blood to the penis. A saddle that puts your weight there instead of on your sit bones compresses both. Sustained compression reduces blood flow and irritates the nerve, and the immediate result is the numbness cyclists know well.

So the causal chain runs through pressure, not through pedalling. Two riders doing identical mileage can have completely different perineal loads depending on saddle, fit and posture, which is exactly why "does cycling cause ED" gets a muddy answer at the population level while the numbness question gets a clear one.

The other half of the ledger

Cycling is aerobic exercise, and aerobic exercise is the single best-evidenced non-drug intervention for erectile function. The systematic review evidence points to roughly 160 minutes a week of moderate-to-vigorous activity improving erectile function in men whose difficulty is vascular or metabolic — which is most men whose difficulty is physical at all.

Quitting cycling to protect your erections therefore has a good chance of achieving the opposite. The exercise evidence in full →

What to actually change

1. Treat numbness as a stop signal. Not something to push through, not something that toughens up. If you go numb, the setup is wrong.
2. Get your sit bones measured. Most bike shops do it in two minutes. A saddle narrower than your sit-bone spacing forces load onto soft tissue no matter what shape it is.
3. Consider a cut-out or noseless saddle. Both reduce measured perineal pressure. Neither is magic, and fit still dominates.
4. Level the saddle. A nose-up tilt drives pressure straight into the perineum. Level, or very slightly nose-down, is the usual fix.
5. Check the bar height. An aggressive low position rotates the pelvis forward and shifts you off the sit bones. This is why the problem is commoner on road bikes in a racing position than on upright bikes.
6. Stand up regularly. Out of the saddle for ten to twenty seconds every ten minutes or so restores flow and costs nothing.
7. Break up very long rides. Risk concentrates in duration and cumulative pressure, not in whether you ride at all.

The pelvic floor angle

Long hours in the saddle are also one of the contributors to a chronically tight pelvic floor, via sustained pressure and the hip flexor shortening that comes with a seated, forward-rotated position. If you ride a lot and have perineal pain, urinary hesitancy or pain after ejaculation — rather than simple numbness during rides — that is a different picture and strengthening exercises will make it worse. What that looks like and what helps →

Sources

• Awad MA, Gaither TW, Murphy GP, et al. Cycling, and male sexual and urinary function: results from a large, multinational, cross-sectional study. J Urol 2018;199(3):798–804.
• Baradaran N, Awad M, Gaither TW, et al. The association of bicycle-related genital numbness and Sexual Health Inventory for Men (SHIM) score: results from a large, multinational, cross-sectional study. BJU Int 2019;124(2):336–341.
• Gerbild H, Larsen CM, Graugaard C, Areskoug Josefsson K. Physical activity to improve erectile function: a systematic review of intervention studies. Sex Med 2018;6(2):75–89.