TESTED: Leatt Trail and Enduro Mountain Bike Clothing
Leatt's extensive range of gear covers riders from head to toe - Hayden tested their trail and enduro clothing out.
Words: Hayden Wright | Photos: Gerard Lagana
Leatt’s range of products have exploded over the past years. While the South African brand’s name is built on their highly innovative neck braces, they can dress and protect riders from head to toe. Leatt offer a wide spectrum of clothing choices, with their 1.0 – 4.0 lines ascending in quality and technology, and their 5.0 line being dedicated to all weather specific apparel. All Leatt products ship in either recyclable or compostable packaging, a trend we’re happy to see most brands now adopting over single use plastics.
Leatt Enduro 3.0 Jersey | $99.00
Available in 5 different colours and a whopping 9 different sizes, there is bound to be a variant of the Enduro 3.0 jersey that suits your body type. The polyester/nylon material blend is fairly light weight and has a large amount of stretch, while not being so soft and malleable that it lacks structure when you’re wearing it or making it feel like it is pulling apart when you take it off.
The fit is fairly slim on this jersey, with the sleeve length seemingly taking cues from what is currently the height of fashion in the lycra scene. They go right down to your elbows, giving extra sun protection and ensuring they don’t bunch up during vigorous riding, which is an issue riders with long arms such as myself tend to have with other jerseys. I particularly like some of the smaller touches Leatt have added to this jersey, such as the laser cut vent holes in the armpit and shoulder areas. Anything to keep operating temperatures down and air flow up is a winner in my eyes. Further to this, the addition of a lens cleaning panel on the lower left of the jersey is also a great addition, helping justify the near $100 price tag.
In use, I garnered quite a few positive remarks regarding the fit and styling of the jersey. The combination of plain solid shapes and bold logos is definitely to my taste and the lack of light colours helps keep mud stains at bay. My only criticism of this piece of kit is that the graphics are not sublimated (part of the base material) and are instead a secondary iron-on layer. Typically, this will lead to premature cracking and fading of the graphics in comparison to a sublimated jersey.
READ: Leatt Gravity 4.0 full-face helmet
Leatt Trail Pants 2.0 | $229.00
Similar to the Enduro 3.0 jersey, these pants are also available in 9 sizes from XS right up to 5XL. While the colour options are a little less wild then we have seen from other pants tested by AMB in the past, I find it best to go with dark neutral tones for your lower half. Black is slimming at the end of the day, and also does a better job of hiding marks and stains which are bound to appear when out on the bike.
A unique feature to these pants is that they include a European made Berenis chamois layer in the packaging, making them quite the value option considering a decent chamois can run you upwards of $50 quite easily. The material makeup of the Trail 2.0 pants is primarily a hard wearing polyester, with 10% elastine to help soften up the fit a little. Like the 3.0 jersey there are some small laser cut vent holes to aid in air flow, however I did find these do let in mud, dust and rain quite easily.
The waist closure is a combination zipper with snap buttons, and adjustment is provided through elastic/velcro tabs on either hip. My preference is waist adjustment by anything other than velcro, both for the sake of easy laundering and consistent fit.
There are plenty of pockets provided, with two standard pockets on each hip and a zipper pocket above the right knee. It is always my preference to see zipper pockets on the left hand side, as that is typically the side that chairlift gates scan from here in Australia. On the trail, I found these pants to be comfortable, hard wearing and breathable. There is plenty of space for a regular set of trail knee pads, making these the ideal trail pants for shoulder season and fair weather winter riding.
From: Bikecorp.com.au
Hits
– Breathable stretch fabrics
– Huge sizing range with a slim fit
– Long (short) sleeve length
– Compostable packaging
– Pants include chamois
Misses
– Graphics are not sublimated
– Velcro waist adjustment on pants
