Motorcycle Accessories: the Anatomy of Good Motorbike Boots

When you are buying motorcycle accessories, you want to know that you are buying the right items: helmets, gloves, boots and jackets that will offer a degree of protection in keeping with their good looks. Motorbike boots, for example, have a number of qualities that are reflected in their anatomy and which are directly related to the performance of the boot.

The sport of motocross or off road dirt biking naturally carries specific risks. Those risks can be offset by buying the right kinds of kit to see the rider safely through the conditions at hand. Those conditions tend to involve uncertain or slippery terrain, loose rocky trails, trees and sharp changes in elevation. As such the motorcycle accessories being used need to show some common properties.

The most important property of all, when you are talking about motorbike boots, or gloves, or jackets or any other form of riding accessory designed to help in off road biking, is flexibility. To be completely accurate, flexibility and strength. The one is useless without the other and so the common element you are looking for in all of your off road biking kit is a good blend of the former with the latter.

Strength alone, or flexibility alone, can be dangerous. Motorcycle accessories with high levels of reinforcement but a lack of give are liable to break as many bones as they save through not being able to protect against whiplash forces and the sudden changes in direction of stress that a riders limbs, particularly wrists and ankles, encounter.

Similarly, motorbike boots that offer great flex but fall down on rigidity can damage as many limbs as they help protect, for the opposite reasons. The existence of flex is vital to let limbs turn in their natural directions, when under the directional stress of (for example) hopping over a jump or taking a very tight corner. Without the stability given by motorcycle accessories that have been designed with the trail in mind, though, that flexibility can be as dangerous as a lack of movement.

What you are looking for, then, when you start looking at motorbike boots, is an item that can cope with the conflicting demands of the human limb and the terrain it is trying to master- something that protects in a tough shell without that shell inhibiting free movement of the leg and torso.

This logic applies throughout the range of motorcycle accessories you will be looking at. Try to imagine the flexibility required of the wrist, for example, when making a hard turn – and bear that in mind when you are choosing a pair of gloves. Look at the movement of the leg going into a jump and factor that in when you choose a pair of motorbike boots.

Good motorbike kit is about meeting in the middle: about making big demands of rigidity and flexibility to meet the requirements of the environment. Look for give as well as toughness and you will be on the right track.