Cycling Apparel for Bicyclists

Video Transcript

" This is Jim Toledano for Expert Village and we’re going to talk about bike clothes. You can actually wear anything you’d like on a bike, but clothing designed specifically for bikes is designed to give you as much comfort as possible. This is a jersey; it’s designed and made with fabric that wicks moisture away. What it does is it takes the moisture from your body when you’re sweating and it moves it out, gets rid of it, takes it off your body and gets it out into the air. Bike shorts are designed again for comfort. They’re made of lightweight fabric and they’re padded. Bike shorts come in various kinds of padding, but the purpose of the padding is to give you something extra between you, your butt, and the bike seat, and they’re designed to wrap around. These are what are called legs. They go over your leg. They zip so that they can go around your shoes. You put them on when you’re cold; take them off when you’re warm. They’re also arm warmers. Same thing, you put them on when you’re cold; you take them off when you get warm. You can also get a vest, which goes on over your jersey; it gives you some warmth. You can get jackets; you can get rain jackets. All of these are designed to allow you to be warm enough, but not too warm during any kind of a bike ride. Bike gloves; come in short finger and long finger versions. Again, long finger version if you’re riding in very cold weather. But in warm weather you want to be able to have your body sweat without having it sweat inside a glove. Bike gloves are padded. Again, it gives you more padding between your hands and the handlebars and more comfort. Bike jerseys you will find come in bright colors, so do jackets. There’s a reason for that aside from the fact that you might think it’s stylish or looks nice. The brighter the colors, the more likely you are to be seen by motorist if you’re sharing the roads with a car. You have to assume when you’re riding on your bike and there are cars around, that there is high likelihood you are invisible to the driver because the driver isn’t thinking of bikes; he or she is thinking about everything else. If you wear really bright clothing, you’re much more obvious to a driver. If that driver decides they want to turn in front of you or do something that’s going to make you unsafe, the fact that you’re wearing nice bright clothes gives you and extra chance to be visible and have the driver realize you’re there and not run into you. "