You're riding home, it's dark, windy, wet, and most of all, cold. We've all been there at some point in our riding lives, and if you aren't prepared for it, it's a miserable experience. All you can focus on is being cold and getting home, and everything else fades into the background. When you get home it still takes forever to warm up again! What if there was a way to prevent this from ever happening though, without having to splash out on a massive tourer with huge fairing, heated saddle and grips, and the best textile winter gear? Thankfully it's simple, heated motorcycle gear; easy to fit, use, and highly effective at keeping the chill out of your whole body.
Heated grips are one of the first steps bikers often take in the attempt to keep warm, after stuffing on bulky layers underneath their gear, but when it comes to your hands there's only so much you can do. Heated grips are good to a point, but they do nothing to protect the backs of your hands that are actually exposed to the elements. Heated gloves were the first heated garment I bought, and quite honestly they're a lifesaver on long (or short), cold motorcycle rides.
Heated garments have come a long way from when they first started appearing; issues with the heating filaments, no option of battery power, and simply not being very convenient meant they weren't massively popular, nor particularly reliable or potent. With modern advancements in the filaments and in battery technology heated garments are now useful for the average rider, not just the hardcore winter rider.
Arguably the most important parts of your body to keep warm whilst riding are your hands; both from a comfort and safety point of view. When you get cold, your extremities have their blood supply restricted to maintain core body temperature. While this is great for your wellbeing, it's potentially dangerous on a motorcycle, almost all of your speed control is done via your hands after all, and sometimes split second reactions are the difference between life and death! As mentioned, heated grips go some way to counteract this effect, but heated gloves offer far better distribution of heat. The Keis G501 gloves, for example, offer a high-quality, waterproof, armoured gauntlet, with heating all along the backs, palms and fingers, and Keis also do a heated inner glove that you can fit under your favourite winter glove, or even a Goretex 3 season glove, such is the benefit of the extra warmth. Battery power is available for both, which makes hopping on and off the bike a breeze as you won't need to hook yourself up to a pig tail lead, but for a long trip it's hard to beat hard-wired power.
The next part of your body to get cold after your hands is usually your feet. At least with your hands you can flex them, or even hold them against the engine casing while riding to try and keep them alive, but your feet get something of a raw deal. Much like your hands, when you get cold less blood will circulate, and eventually it'll become awkward, even painful to change gear or operate the rear brake; not ideal! Even the most hardy of winter boots can't keep all the chill out. An easy fix to this is to use a heated insole, such as the Keis X300 which will fit into your boot to keep your toes chill-free.
If it's really, properly chilly out, even the best gear isn't going to keep you entirely warm, and that's when you want to bring out the big guns; heated jackets and trousers. Some people suffer from the cold more than others (whether they like to admit it or not!) and keeping your core warm will make riding in the cold a much, much more comfortable experience. Different levels are available when it comes to keeping your core warm; simple vests are available, all the way up to fully heated jackets that you wear under your armoured outer one. The vest will simply keep your core warm, a bodywarmer will added a heated collar (great for countering nasty draughts) while the jacket will even keep your arms nice and toasty.
Trousers include heating at strategic points, such as the shins to try and keep the cold out, and will fit under your usual motorcycle trousers to maximise the insulation offered.
While, obviously, it isn't wise to buy excessive gear, there is one significant benefit from using an entire set up of Keis gear rather than mixing, say with Gerbing, and that's the wiring. If, say, you want just gloves, you'll need to run wiring from the gloves through your jacket to a pig tail lead that connects to your bike's battery terminals. In itself, this isn't much of an inconvenience, and if you're using a battery it's irrelevant. If you go for insoles as well, that's a second cable that needs running up to your battery...and so on and so forth. A very handy feature of the vest/bodywarmer/jacket is its ability to combine connections to your bikes battery, thus negating the need for running wires through gear altogether. The gloves can connect directly to the jacket, as can the trousers, and insoles can connect directly to the trousers, which in turn connects to the jacket, resulting in one convenient connection to your bike (and you being the most smug winter rider in the world).
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