Photo courtesy of US Equestrian.
Virginia Tech has long been at the forefront of helmet safety tech, with its state-of-the-art Helmet Lab putting equipment through rigorous tests with the aim of preventing injury during sport. For much of its existence, though, the Lab has focused its attention on bicycle helmets, hockey helmets, football helmets, baseball helmets – and, basically, any sport that doesn’t involve a horse. Now, though, they’ve made their first steps into our industry, revealing their picks of the safest helmets in the bunch across forty different riding hat models.
“The Helmet Lab specializes in injury biomechanics, with particular emphasis on investigating human tolerance to impact loading,” explains the Lab on the Virginia Tech website. “Rather than studying how to treat injury, we explore ways to prevent injury. This research involves identifying and characterizing injury mechanisms, quantifying the biomechanical response to impact, determining tolerance levels, and evaluating protective design. We study injuries to the whole body but primarily focus on advancing the understanding of concussion and how to decrease the incidence of injury.”
“Studying concussions is challenging because it is impossible to produce human brain injury in a laboratory environment. To work around these challenges, we instrument populations (athletes) at elevated risk of sustaining a concussion. This approach allows us to collect biomechanical data characterizing concussion in an observational manner. We aim to quantify concussion mechanisms and how they vary with age, sex, and environment through this work. The translational outcomes of our research have led to improved helmet design and new rules in football.”
The Helmet Lab’s equestrian-specific findings — which began as a research project in 2019 and were propelled by funding from Jacqueline Mars, USHJA, USEF, and USEA — are neatly summarised into a star system, and a scoring system, that us eventing fans will find very easy to follow. Five stars are the top of the ladder, and the lower the score is, the better. And in further good news? Though the best-rated helmet will cost you (that’s the Champion Revolve X-Air MIPS, which retails at around $460, if you’re curious), the only other hat to earn five stars is just $58. That’s the TuffRider Carbon Fiber, which sits pretty in second place overall, followed by another hat under $60: the $50 IRH Equi-Lite.
You can check out the rankings, which include both peaked hats and skull caps, here.
