Santini BeHot leg warmers review

The period of mild weather at the start of January gave us an excuse to put the winter tights back in the wardrobe for a few days and hit the road in shorts and leg warmers, namely the excellent Santini BeHot leg warmers.

The headline grabbing features of these leg warmers is the BeHot fabric, which Santini claims not only protects you from the cold, but also generates a small amount of heat as it stretches and compresses during your pedal stroke. While the claimed temperature gain with the company’s bibtights is 4ºC, the Santini BeHot leg warmers give a more modest figure of an extra 1ºC.

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OK, so we’ll admit that we weren’t able to verify whether or not this is entirely true, but what we are sure of is that these offer warmth that goes beyond what we’d usually expect from a pair of leg-warmers. Quite simply we were never cold, even on chilly mornings before the mercury climbed out of the lower echelons of single figures. What’s more the Santini BeHot leg-warmers also coped well with fairly consistent rain, and even if they didn’t keep you dry, they certainly kept you warm.

The leg-warmers are kept in place by the tacky anti-sliding elasticated bands around the thighs and ankles. In general these do an excellent job, gripping onto your skin without being to tight. However if we had one complaint it would be that the ankle could be a tighter, and was prone to riding up a little – not a problem with overshoes, but certainly an annoyance on warmer rides when there will be a gap between your socks and the bottom of the leg-warmers.

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Perhaps this isn’t helped by the lack of ankle zip, meaning that Santini have had to make the fabric extremely elastic to allow you to fit the thinner end of the leg-warmer over your foot. However if this slightly compromises the fit, it certainly makes the Santini BeHot leg warmers extremely comfortable. And what’s more, in our opinion at least, the yellow pair are some of the best looking leg-warmers we’ve seen.

For more details head over to the Santini website.