Originally Posted by
Moe Zhoost
Old thread, I know, but I wanted to point out that everybody's experience may be different. I've been living with bulging disks for at least a decade and I find that riding my recumbent trike for more than 3 hours causes a bit of back pain. Riding my upright bikes for that long is no problem. In fact, it seems to alleviate any back pain I may have started with. I don't know what background @
tonibat has so I can comment on his post.
Different seats on different recumbents on different backs. Lots of variables here. No recumbent seat or posture is uniformly comfortable for everyone. I sure hope all concerned have enough common sense to recognize that. Myself as one example, since I have ridden almost every kind of bent out there, is that upright seat angles and soft mesh seats make my lower back hurt. Only takes about 30 minutes for that to happen. But hardshell seats laid way back with some lumbar recurve in the seat shape - that's pure heaven. And it has remained so on into ultra-cycling time scales.
But strong pedaling forces being resisted by the seatback then in turn stressing your back so it hurts? That's a different and novel theory I have never heard before. I experience that on my upright road bikes when doing a lot of climbing if I let my form slip and I round my back. But stomping on the pedals on a recumbent with a hardshell seat the forces are so spread out, and the back is so effectively braced (so it doesn't move at all) has never produced even a slight amount of back pain. Now, the fact that pedal forces are braced by the seat so well can cause knee problems (due to forces larger than body weight), and that issue is pretty well documented among recumbent riders, but not back pain.