Alé Plus leg warmers review

Alé makes some of the brightest coloured and most distinctive cycling kit around. So it’s a bit of a surprise that its leg warmers eschew loud colours and large Alé logos in favour of plain black. Indeed, the only adornments are two small sewn-on rubber patches bearing a fluoro Alé logo, one on each lower leg. This does have the advantage that the leg warmers will go with pretty much any other kit which you have, either from Alé or from another brand.

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In fact, they’re a pretty standard set of leg warmers all-around. They’re made of fleecy Roubaix-style fabric which is soft to the touch, warm and stretchy enough that they are easy to get on without needing to use the ankle zippers on the inside of each leg. The single non-flatlocked seam too runs up the inward side of the leg. There’s no pre-shaping of the warmer, so you get a bit of bunching behind the knee, but I never found this uncomfortable.

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The leg warmers are quite long too, so you can pull them up to mid-thigh with ease and there’s little chance of ending up with a gap below your shorts. There’s no bottom gripper, just a rolled back layer of fabric sewn into the hem.

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I did find the top gripper problematic though. It’s just over 1cm wide and bears a narrow silicone band and a thread-like elastic top edge. This I found rather too tight and narrow, so that it dug into my thigh. This wasn’t so noticeable when riding, but off the bike soon became uncomfortable. After wearing for a few hours, there was a pronounced pressure line when I took the leg warmers off.

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So in summary, the Alé Plus leg warmers are a useful addition to the cycling wardrobe which will go with any other kit and are well-priced. It just would have been nice to have had a wider gripper to distribute pressure on my leg more evenly.