Understand the Benefits of Bike Gloves

Video Transcript

"A really good piece of performance enhancing and protective equipment you can use is a pair of cycling gloves. Gloves are available in both long, full finger designs, and half finger designs. I personally can't see any reason for half finger gloves to exist for mountain biking. I mean, the big things that gloves do, besides, you know, give you a little protection, which obviously a full fingered glove is going to protect your fingers more, is, it helps with grips on the handle bars. So, obviously if you remove all the fabric from here out, you get rid of having you know, nice consistant grip on the handle bars. So, full finger gloves come in many different varieties. This is sort of the gamit here, running from a super light weight, more exy intended glove. It's just some mesh and then a super thin palm. That palm is like about a milimeter thick. Right there, like, you can see the outline of my fingernail right through it. Going up from there, this is a 661 glove called the Raji. It's a very light weight glove. This is more a downhill specific glove. It still doesn't offer much padding, but it's a thicker material, which is going to be more abbrasion resistant, and it has a palm pad to help absorb impacts if you get off. Often times people end up putting their palms down so it's a good place to put some padding. And then from there on, your adding when you're going up in glove weight, you're doing it for warmth. This is a very light weight and thin glove but it's made of a hollow spun acrylic material that keeps it pretty warm. So, for rides in the thirty five to forty five degree range this is a really good option. The nice thing about these is if it gets warmer during the day you can take them off and put them in your pocket. Then for the coldest rides, rides for under about fifteen to twenty degrees, you can get a glove that's almost like a ski glove. It's very thick. It still has five fingers so you can operate your mountain bike pretty well. When it's really cold out, you can wear mittens or lobster saw gloves where you have two fingers together, two fingers together, and a thumb. For mountain bikes we really want to be able to use all five of our fingers independently because there are so many different little control functions that we need our hands to do. But, that's pretty much the full selection of gloves that I would recommend for mountain biking."