With the speed you can ride on modern mountain bikes, it’s a good job helmet construction and safety technology has kept up. More stable and assured than ever, the latest machines allow you to ride technical trails faster than ever – with the added risk that entails – and no one wants to second-guess whether or not a helmet is going to protect their head if the s*** hits the fan.
As trail and enduro helmets have evolved, they’ve picked up more features along the way, with many becoming standard issue on premium helmets. These include technologies like MIPS (and equivalents) that aim to reduce rotational impact forces by twisting a fraction in a crash, while special layers and varying material densities hidden inside helmet shells offer better ability to absorb the impacts of different velocities.
Like most modern consumer products, computer modelling power and FEA analysis have aided helmet development; they’re now safer and more capable of muting bigger impacts without compromising overall size, weight or cooling. It’s great news for us as riders and means modern lids have deeper shells and more protection above the ears and down to the nape of the neck while still packing all the ventilation you’ll need during hard exertions.
Another shift in helmet tech reflects the growth in popularity of longer-travel enduro bikes (and more recently e-bikes) creating a bigger market for full-face lids. This has forged an entirely new category of lightweight full-face and convertible lids you can wear all day and pedal uphill in, rather than just roll downhill at the bike park. E-bikes also reduce the need for cooling and ventilation as an absolute priority when a motor is helping you climb hills, so extra coverage helmets work well in this regard.
The 10 lids here represent the different ways of interpreting a modern trail/enduro helmet across a broad price range. We’re splitting the products between the two distinct categories mentioned: better ventilated and lighter open-face half shells more suitable for trail riders, and full-face (or convertible lids) that you can wear on every ride if you regularly hit up aggressive terrain.
USED & ABUSED
How we test
As well as one tester wearing each helmet on multiple rides over the last few months, lids here have done the rounds between friends and models on various test rides and photo shoots. This gives a better consensus for different head shapes and sizes, and also feeds in information from riders that run at different temperatures or sweat different amounts.
The main tester has a 58cm skull, so all helmets reflect that circumference, and where size options were limited, we chose the best compromise. On top of actually riding in them, the lids had to deal with an extended life hung up in the back of a van that’s often home to muddy test bikes and kit; something of an accelerated, real world test scenario for the kind of knocks and scrapes all helmets are subjected to over time.
JARGON BUSTER
Know your helmet
VENTILATION
Typical EPS (expanded polystyrene) liners have excellent insulation properties, so helmets use cooling vents, rear exhaust ports and a combination of internal shaping to encourage air flow to reduce heat build-up. The layout and design of these vents (as well as pad design) is critical to cooling.
PEAK
Peaks provide shade and keep stuff out of your eyes, but need to be out of your line of vision while riding. If you wear goggles,
