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I’ve been using a Leatt spine vest on uplifts recently, its great but it doesn’t protect my ribs.
Does anyone use a separate spine vest with a roost guard on top of it?
Do roost guards protect your ribs?
Well they’re supposed to protect your chest from rocks flying up from Motos, but have been adopted for mtb protection too...
Anyone one used one?
An actual roost guard's pretty close to useless for most people's mtb, it could help if you were to impale yourself on a branch or something but that's so freaky it's not really worth planning for. But some suits like 661 do have soft chest protectors which might possibly help... (really big jumps swing this all a bit, where you're way more likely to fly into something jaggy)
Thing is, most mtb chest injuries are momentum injuries- it's not what you hit that does the damage, it's the rest of you squashing your ribs. So it's the equivalent of a truck with a loose load, it doesn't matter how good the bumper is, the stuff in the back is what gets you. Very hard to protect against, to actually make a big difference you'd need a huge soft chest protector, like inches thick.
The other things that can help rib and sternum injuries though is actually pretty unintuitive, hard slidy shoulder and elbow pads- they can help with the whole "fast deceleration" problem just by having you slide more and basically extending the length of the crash.
But all this stuff imo is pretty marginal. Some injuries are just very hard to protect against, and rare enough that even when doing so is practical it's probably not sensible
Thanks Northwind that does make sense. I hit the floor pretty hard at Antur a couple of weeks ago - enough to knock the wind out of me a bit.
I'd always thought it was impact rather than momentum that caused me problems, but what you say makes a lot of sense and probably explains the lack of external bruising on my chest too.
Think I'll stick to my Leatt spine vest, it's very comfy indeed.