The Selle San Marco Mantra is the ideal mountain bike saddle for all riders and trail types
The Mantra will support your climbing and enhances descending in the steepest terrain, with MTB specific design features
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There's a lot more to choosing a mountain bike saddle than comfort alone. Technical descending, technique and cornering confidence are underestimated riding dynamics influenced by saddle shape and features.
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With a saddle design legacy proven over nine decades of product development, Selle San Marco knows what riders need. The Italian saddle specialist understands how shape, padding, and rail construction enhance the rider experience, especially in the most testing riding environments: steep and technical mountain bike descents.
Features that make a great saddle are similar for all mountain bikers, from advanced enduro riders, to e-bikers, or riders who prefer the simplicity of smooth singletrack carving on hardtails. Selle San Marco enables riders across the mountain biking spectrum with its new Mantra, featuring a shape specially developed by Selle San Marco's industrial designers.
Created for comfort on all terrain types
The comfort needs of mountain bikers relate to the diversity of the terrain they ride. From those severe braking bumps on summer bike park descents in the Alps, to jarring rock gardens and rooty forest singletrack climbs.
2025 selle san marco 4.jpg, by Liam Mercer
A great saddle must reduce rider fatigue by allowing the greatest freedom of movement when seated. And that's exactly what the Selle San Marco Mantra's delta shape does, allowing riders to naturally find their ideal seating position, regardless of pedalling position or terrain type.
Mantra measures 154mm wide and 244mm in length. Dimensions chosen for the purpose by Selle San Marco's experienced design team. Why? The Mantra is sized to deliver the best outcomes for all off-road riding conditions, from maintaining control in the air to sustaining comfort for hours on that zone 2 endurance ride.
When rolling along on a long climb or a rocky Highlands climb, the Mantra's generous delta shape supports all those micromovements each rider subconsciously makes, enhancing pedalling comfort and reducing fatigue. The Mantra combines its delta shape with an open-body design to relieve pressure on the perineal area.
Saddle nose shape becomes crucial when those climbs start steepening into double-digit gradients. You'll be seated far forward on the saddle nose once you shift into that 50- or 52T gear. That's where a narrow, underpadded saddle can become agony. Selle San Marco's Mantra features a generously padded nose, 40mm wide, to ensure your seated comfort during a steep climb, even when you are suffering away at a zone 4 effort.
It helps you steer with the hips
An excellent mountain bike saddle is about more than seated pedalling comfort on long climbs or flat zone 2 gravel rides. The contouring, profile, size, and shape of a truly enabling mountain bike saddle come into their own during technical descents.
All riders know the best cornering posture when descending serpentine singletrack with severe switchbacks is getting down low, using the inner thighs as a touchpoint on the saddle, to control and steer the bike with complete confidence and exact line-choice accuracy. It’s what expert riders and coaches call ‘steering with the hips’.
2025 selle san marco.jpg, by Liam Mercer
Saddle shape is even more critical during descents for enduro and downhill riders, especially when boosting air or launching off drops. Selle developed the Mantra's shape and size to work with riders who need to use their inner thighs as touchpoints to control and stabilize the bike in the air, or dramatically adjust cornering lines through high-speed berms or intimidatingly steep off-camber corners.
Whether you're dropping into that treacherously steep double black diamond descent or rolling into your local flow trails, with its kickers, you want a saddle that's entirely predictable in its shape and profile. When you need to use your inner thighs as a contact point to steer and control the bike, Selle San Marco's Mantra is shaped to help you retain the control margin when ‘steering with the hips’, thanks to its completely flat profile throughout.
2025 selle san marco 2.jpg, by Liam Mercer
Mountain bikes and mud are unavoidable. It’s one of the saddle issues that Selle San Marco considered when developing its mountain bike saddles, unlike the needs of road bikers, who never encounter mud. The Mantra has a sealed cover to prevent mud seepage, which is invaluable if you are the kind of mountain biker committed to a year-round riding cycle, regardless of the season or weather conditions.
Available in three rail configurations, Selle San Marco's Mantra range tops out at £199.99 with the 229g Manganese rail version. Select the £134.99 Xsilite rain option, and saddle weight drops to 212g, with riders seeking the lightest Mantra having an option on the Carbon FX rail configuration, at only 187g, for £179.99.
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