This Is the Right Amount to Spend on a Mountain-Bike Helmet




If you want to buy a trail mountain-bike helmet these days, you’re in luck. Half-shell helmets—the most common style for mountain biking and the only type we are dissecting here—are a popular category. There are about three dozen options from ten or so brands, spanning a massive price range, and all of them must meet the same Consumer Product Safety Commission impact-testing standards. That can make choosing a helmet quite difficult.To get more news about ebike helmet, you can visit magicyclebike.com official website.

There are several reasons to spend extra on a lid, starting with the fact that, well, it’s your head we’re talking about here. Aside from additional features (like improved ventilation) and better fit, pricier helmets have better design and construction that can—but won’t always—make them better performers in an actual crash. So if more-expensive helmets are lighter, better ventilated, and sometimes safer, how much should you spend?
Aside from cheapo lids at big-box stores, most mountain-bike helmets sold at independent bike shops start at $50 and go up to $300. For trail riding, our sweet spot—the point where you get the most performance for the dollar, and where additional gains per dollar spent start to tail off—is around $100 to $160. That’s a wide range, but as you’ll see, there’s a good reason for that.
How to Understand Safety Ratings
The primary job of a helmet is to protect you in a crash, right? Even though safety is the central goal, there’s not a lot of great information out there about how mountain-bike helmets stack up to one another. That’s partly due to how testing and certification work. The CPSC does not test helmets; instead, helmet manufacturers do their own testing (or pay a third-party lab to test them) and essentially self-certify. Also, CPSC standards are pass-fail, with no discussion of relative performance above the minimum thresholds, or compared to other models. For legal reasons, helmet makers almost never make safety claims or even talk about how far their helmets exceed testing standards, which means there are very few ways to really compare helmets for crash performance.

For higher-price adult helmets, the best source we’ve found for safety-performance testing is Virginia Tech. It is the only independent body in the U.S.A. publishing helmet-test results that reflect both linear and rotational impact forces (more on that soon) and assign overall numerical scores that allow limited comparison between models. There are other factors in buying a helmet, of course, but crash safety should be your main focus, and VT’s ratings offer the best method we’ve seen for comparing lids.
Features that Matter
Rotational-Energy Management
Every helmet listed below has a rotational-energy management system. This is a kind of “slip-plane” technology, typically a liner that sits close to your skull or between two layers of helmet foam. The most popular is from a third-party provider, MIPS (an acronym for “multidirectional impact protection system”), but some brands use proprietary systems (such as POC’s SPIN pads, or the honeycomb-like WaveCel technology exclusively licensed in Bontrager helmets).

Research suggests that traumatic brain injuries like concussions may result mostly from rotational forces that violently twist the brain inside the skull, rather than the linear impact force directed straight into whatever object you hit. Rotational-energy management systems work by letting the helmet slide and rotate slightly against your skull in the crucial milliseconds after impact, dissipating some of the forces that create that twisting or shearing stress on the brain.

These systems first came into existence about a decade ago. But no official certification standard (from either CPSC or similar protocols in other countries) measures rotational energy, so helmets are tested and certified only on how they handle conventional, linear impact forces. Still, we recommend that you buy a helmet with a rotational-energy management system. Thankfully, except for helmets purchased from mass-market retailers like department stores, it’s hard these days to find one without it.

Additional Safety Tech
Around $150, you’ll start to find helmets with roll-cage reinforcement: essentially a plastic or polycarbonate lattice inside the EPS foam that works a little like rebar reinforcement in concrete and helps hold the helmet together structurally in an impact. Some top-tier helmets also come with multidensity construction, which basically uses higher-density foam in some zones for better protection against high-energy impacts, with lower-density foam to help mitigate lesser crashes.

Fit, Comfort, and Ventilation
First, look at the fit system: typically a dial at the back that tightens the helmet around your occipital lobe. The best fit systems completely encircle the skull at the rim of the helmet, keeping your head centered; cheaper ones are anchored only halfway around and basically shove your forehead against the inside front. The cheap systems are less comfortable and may inhibit the function of rotational-energy management systems. (For folks with large heads and/or who wear larger-volume hairstyles, look for helmets whose size XL fits a head circumference greater than 60 centimeters, instead of going by the listed size.)