Tips on Sport Bike Protective Pants

Video Transcript

"Hi, my name is Chad. We’re talking about sport bikes and related equipment, and we’ve been talking about gear. We’ve talked about jackets and helmets and gloves, and now we’re going to talk a little bit about some of the pants you can wear. When you go down, one of the things you will damage almost certainly is your knees. Your knees will go into the ground; the best you’ll get is a little bit of road rash, torn up skin, or a hole in your knee. You can also shatter bones if you go down fast enough, or hard enough. So, when you can, there are certain things you can buy- pants that will zip into your jackets. And this is one set right here. These are made of leather; they correspond with the jacket- they’re made by the same company and there’s a zipper that goes all around the edge so when they fall down, they don’t separate. So you don’t have this big gap between here and here. The leather stays together and protects you. They have leather reinforced on the seat, down the sides, and then armor. This is not actually armor here, the armor’s actually inside. It’s got a lot of padding underneath and it runs all the way down to the shin so that you hit something here, like a bar or stick or something, you don’t break your shin bone. This right here is not armor. This is called a knee slider, and when you’re on a bike and you’re going really fast on the track and you’re leaning over farther and farther and farther as you’re going faster and faster around a corner, you stick your knee out, and this grinds against the pavement. So you know where you are, you know how far you’re leaning, how far you’ve got to go, how close you are. It lets you get really close to the ground without hurting yourself because you’ve got this grinding instead of your leather. And a lot of racers actually use- when they start to lose the back end- the bike starts to fall- they’ll actually lift themselves up with their knee, hold the bike up and get through the corner. So these sliders are on there to basically allow you to ride fast on the track. But the armor is here, and there’s armor in the hips and armor in the backseat and it makes these a really nice piece of equipment to have. There’s another version you can buy for more street that allows you to ride more often because these are very hot being leather. They’re all made of mesh, like the mesh jackets. Once again, the protection is not nearly as good as leather, but it’s a whole lot better than a pair of jeans. And if you can get a pair of those and you can stand to ride them- you’re going out for a good long day of riding, they’re definitely worth having. "