Downhillers looking for a cooler way to protect their joints, spine and other bones and bits now have a few more colorful options to choose from. But, several of G-Form’s innovations will also benefit enduro riders that are pedaling up the hill as well, and women finally get their own line of full body protection, too.
The new pattern prints don’t do anything to make you safer, but they do add a bit of color to an overwhelmingly black category. Check out all the details below and see what happens when you try to smash candy through their harden-on-impact padding…
Among the more impressive displays at Interbike was G-Form’s M&M crush test. Inside a cylinder (to keep things from flying everywhere), they placed a a snack bag of M&M’s underneath a competing pad first (left), then dropped a big weight on it. The soft gel pad found in cheaper body armor did very little to protect the candy that melts in your mouth, not in your hands.
G-Form’s gel pads, however, use the impact energy to turn the polymer hard, which means much, much less of the energy is transmitted through to your body. Watching the weight drop directly onto their pad with the M&M’s bag underneath and then seeing perfectly intact candy emerge is a helluva parlor trick…and one that’s impressively effective.
That armor is now placed on updated body suits with more mesh panels and smaller pieces of pad material clustered together rather than one solid block of padding improve airflow and keep you cooler.
For the fairer sex, they have a new women’s specific shirt and shorts, the former getting a new, smaller pad for the chest plate.
Shorts have a version with and without chamois, and they’re shorter than the men’s with a mesh panel on the inside leg.
Not shown, they say they’re now the first company to make a motocross level knee shin guard that passes the 1621-1 certification that’s not a hard shell. So, for moto or enduro and DH riders that want something lighter, more flexible and breathable, there’s your answer.
They also added new youth sizes that get all same tech, but for little humans. Works great for any sport, from soccer to skateboarding to BMX and mountain biking. Shoulder to shin coverage with elbow, knee, shin, shirt and shorts. Fits roughly 4-13 year olds depending on their size before move into the adult sizes.
It’s all made in the USA and it’s all machine washable.
