Unless you have a cast iron backside, a set of the best cycling shorts is the most important piece of cycling clothing you can buy. They can make the difference between a dream ride and a truly miserable experience, though making sure you have the best road bike saddle is also a big part of the puzzle.
Over the last year we here in the Tech team have been collectively testing a veritable mountain of cycling shorts in a bid to sort the wheat from the chaff. Each of us has been in charge of a particular segment, testing numerous shorts back to back. For my sins I have been in charge of thermal shorts and cargo bib shorts, meaning lots of cold, wet, and gravelly excursions. My colleagues Tom and Josh have been interrogating standard all purpose bib shorts and budget options respectively.
There’s more to a truly great pair of cycling shorts though. You need a comfortable chamois pad for sure, but you also need a great fit to keep it in place. You need straps that won’t cut into your shoulders, but are firm enough to keep everything from falling down. You need fuss-free stitching that won’t dig into your legs, and you need leg grippers that mean the shorts won’t ride up, but not so aggressive that they themselves become uncomfortable. It’s a hard line to tread, and that’s before you factor in the fact that they have to be durable enough to stand up to repeated wash cycles and not be so prohibitively expensive you can’t afford them anyway.
It must be said that, more than any other item of cycle clothing, cycle shorts are a personal choice. By that I mean that what works for one pair of sit bones may not work for others, and with that in mind we’ve not based our decisions solely on whether the chamois agrees with our lower anatomy. Without further ado, then, here are our winners.
The winners
Best overall
I found the premium bib shorts category of our bib shorts testing one of the more difficult tests I was tasked with over the last few months. Testing a range of, on paper, very good cycling shorts meant that margins were fine and no shorts could be discounted easily due to the generally high-performance bar.
Slowly, but surely the Pas Normal Mechanism bib shorts…
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