The Advantages of Wearing Cycling Shorts
If you can get over the social hurdle of walking around in tight padded bicycle shorts, the advantages of these skin-tight pants are plentiful. There’s a reason every major competitive cyclist across all cycling disciplines wears cycling shorts. The cycling short and its inner pad, called a chamois, protects the rider from the jarring vibration from normal road and off-road conditions. Wearing these shorts can greatly improve your cycling comfort. Showing off your powerful thighs can be considered icing on the cake.
Advantages of Cycling Shorts
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Cycling shorts protect your most sensitive regions from the pain of long contact with a bicycle seat. The rubbing action of your inner thighs against the bicycle seat is offset by the smooth face of the cycling short, and a generously padded chamois will protect your nether regions from painful vibration and impact-related soreness. A good chamois will be padded along your sit bones at the base of the hips, so that pressure is distributed off of the sensitive tissues between your legs.
Breathable cycling shorts are also close-fitting to maximize aerodynamics, and give a full range of motion to the rider thanks to four-way stretch materials. Finally, the mild compression provided by a tight-fitting pair of cycling shorts can increase blood flow to the legs, aiding in muscular function to provide a bit more sustained power.
