Is there a stigma to only wear a cap?

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classic33

Leg End Member
If weight is that much of an issue in helmet usage, why do some folk cycle wearing a Camelbak, nearly 10lb in weight in some cases, or a small rucksack, empty weight approx 3lb.

1lb on the head, or 10lb on the back, which is worse in the event you and your bike part company, with you having an unplanned meeting with the road? What damage is done to the spine from this extra weight alone, in a sudden stop?

The chances of hitting your head on the road, in an unscheduled parting, can come down to simple luck and your instinct. "Runners Wrist" has been mentioned, where the arms are used to stop/slow a fall. Bad move, but human instinct to do so.
 

rogerzilla

Legendary Member
A parachutist's roll is the way to do it, but you have to practise on grass*. It's saved me a couple of times in high speed crashes, once on a road and once on an MTB on a gravel road. The idea is not to come to a dead stop and to spread the impact over a wide area of the body.

*preferably using someone else's bike :laugh:
 

Drago

Legendary Member
If weight is that much of an issue in helmet usage, why do some folk cycle wearing a Camelbak, nearly 10lb in weight in some cases, or a small rucksack, empty weight approx 3lb.

1lb on the head, or 10lb on the back, which is worse in the event you and your bike part company, with you having an unplanned meeting with the road? What damage is done to the spine from this extra weight alone, in a sudden stop?

The chances of hitting your head on the road, in an unscheduled parting, can come down to simple luck and your instinct. "Runners Wrist" has been mentioned, where the arms are used to stop/slow a fall. Bad move, but human instinct to do so.
I've very wary about putting anything solid in a back pack, on the basis that severe spinal injuries can make ones eyes water somewhat.

I also don't get people who preach helmet safety, go to all that effort to buy one and wear it, and then go and completely negate it by strapping cameras and lights to them. I've given CPR to someone (successfully, as it happens, the only time I've done it and it worked) who did just this, took a tumble, and ended up with a Fenix torch poking out of his skull - aside from that massive trauma, he suffered only cuts and grazes to the rest of his person.

And then there's the issue of the item ruining the smooth profile of the lid, giving the ground something to grab onto and vastly increasing the chances of rotational brain or torsional neck injuries.

If people believe in helmets, want to wear one, that's fine, but for the love of Trump don't go strapping solid objects to them. That's like using 'safety' matches to look for a can of petrol in a darkened shed.
 

faster

Über Member
Because they're not rigidly connected.

[ I didn't mean any offence by changing your quote - it's a common forum technique, often the neatest/quickest way to illustrate some point or facet of the discussion. I hope you see that to me, it's not nonsensical - it's very sensical! ]

Agreed - as you say, they aren't rigidly connected, but they are very, very closely connected.

In any given impact, the brain will see a slower deceleration than the skull, but it almost goes without saying that if we can reduce the deceleration that the skull experiences, we will also reduce the deceleration of the brain and thus help reduce the risk of brain injury.

I can't work out where you are going with this.
 
Think about how often people get skull* fractures without even a concussion.
The situation is clearly more complex than you suggest. After all there must be some reason that no studies show a decrease in concussions from helmets.

*Cheekbone is probably the most common - it's not usually described as part of the skull!
 

classic33

Leg End Member
Agreed - as you say, they aren't rigidly connected, but they are very, very closely connected.

In any given impact, the brain will see a slower deceleration than the skull, but it almost goes without saying that if we can reduce the deceleration that the skull experiences, we will also reduce the deceleration of the brain and thus help reduce the risk of brain injury.

I can't work out where you are going with this.
The brain sits inside the skull, in a fluid dampened environment, not attached/connected to the skull. It's this fluid filled environment that allows the brain to "bounce". Something that doesn't stop straight away. Helmet or not, at the time any movement was brought to a sharp and sudden stop.

529987
529988
You can see that fluid filled environment in the pictures. The darker area around the brain.

Tap your head on a wall, the brain will continue moving. Only you'll not notice. Same sudden stop, only the speed at which movement ceased. The fluid, at body temperature is a little thicker than blood, and it feels like blood as it runs down the head on the outside. Only when you put your hand where the 'blood" is, it isn't as visible as blood. You might even think its "just you" at the time, because the hand has no blood on it.
 
Location
Hampshire
If you want to wear a helmet, great, no problem, the vast majority of people I ride with do and I wouldn't dream of questioning they're decision to, it's up to them. But, for gawds sake if you're going to wear one at least fit it on your head properly, the number of people I see with one perched jauntily on the back of their head or with the straps in danger of catching in a wheel, they're probably the same ones that are horrified if you say you don't wear one.
 

Drago

Legendary Member
And that's the problem. The reduction in velocity and rate of of reduction that a cycle helmet has been proven to provide is insufficient to prevent meaningful injuries.
 

faster

Über Member
1) Cycle helmets are only designed to protect against impacts up to 12MPH. It is unlikely impacts at sub 12MPH velocities would cause brain impact injury or structural skull injuries anyway.

I hadn't heard this before, so I Googled it. One of the first hits suggests that:

"Cycle helmets must adhere to standard EN1078, which states that a helmet must be designed to withstand an impact similar to an average rider travelling at 12mph falling onto a stationary kerb-shaped object from a height of one metre"

The bit you missed out puts a completely different spin on it in my opinion. That sounds like an absolutely brutal accident which I guessing would result in an extremely nasty head injury. 12 mph sounds more than sufficient to me, as your head is unlikely to hit something directly head on in the direction you are travelling at the speed at which you were travelling when the accident happened. A glancing blow being more likely, along with a some deceleration before finally hitting something.

The falling from a height of one meter onto a kerb feels very relevant to a cycling accident. I'm pleased that they are designed to this standard.

Even so, this is a minimum standard - it does not mean that some/many helmets are not designed to significantly exceed this standard. It also doesn't mean that at 13 mph, the helmet suddenly becomes completely useless. At higher speeds, would it not reduce the impact down to a level below those that you would see in those sub 12 mph which according to you are unlikely to cause serious head injuries?

I'm not sure if this is still the case, but in the past the NCAP tests that cars had to pass were carried at at speeds no higher than 30mph. The cars were designed to pass these tests. This did not mean that the cars became death traps and all of the safety feature became pointless at 31mph.


2) If this is the case, why is there no reduction in death by and serious head injuries among cyclists in countries and states where compulsory wearing has been introduced? The correlation is the opposite - the countries with some of the lowest rates of this type of death and injury among cyclists also have some of the lowest helmet wearing rates.

We're back at @boydj's points 4 and 5 again. Using the powers of critical thinking bestowed on him by Human Factors Ltd and having read "as much of the research as he could find on cycle helmets", the best evidence he could come up with was fatally flawed and didn't stand up to even the slightest scrutiny. I'd go as far as saying it was completely pointless.

He was in the 95th percentile too, so he's basically the 'top gun' of critical thinkers. Do you think you can do better?

3) Motorcycle helmets work by a difference mechanism. The hard outer shell spreads the mechanical load, and thus gives a genuine and useful reduction and progression or deceleration as that also spreads the area of internal deformation. Cycle helmets give only a localised deformation, and do not reduce the deceleration curve in any where the same manner.

Yep - motorcycle helmet are more effective than cycle helmets. So what? You'd hope they would be as the speeds involved are that much higher. Rather than falling off from a height and hitting your head on the ground, there is much more of an element of sliding along at speed and eventually smacking into something hard at speed. Agreed that cycle helmets will give more localised deformation and don't reduce the deceleration curve (whatever that is) in the same manner as a motorcycle helmet, but I'm not sure this is relevant. I think even you will agree that the impact will be less localised and the deceleration will be significantly reduced compared to a bare head.

They also provide zero penetrating and virtually no direct trauma protection as they lack the outer hard shell of motorcycle helmets.

Agreed on the first bit, but so what? Sounds like the most unlikely of injuries. Feels like you're really scraping the barrel. No direct trauma protection!?

Because they also lack the hard, featureless, slippery outer shell it has been discovered that they can cause rotational brain injury and torsional spinal injuries, injuries that can themselves be fatal, yet a couple of years ago before this was discovered you were still preaching that helmets save lives. MIPS mitigates this somewhat, but does not eliminate it, particularly the tortional spinal injury, but the majority of helmets do not have this type of construction anyway, yet still you blindly claim helmets will save us.

I find this interesting, but I'd like to know how common these sorts of accidents are. I would've thought extremely rare. If you find out, please let me know. I haven't been preaching for a couple of years - I think you've got me mixed up with someone else.

People thoughtlesly believe cycle helmets save lives. Well, they surely must, right? They're helmets, safety devices after all. OK, then show us the clear and reproduceable evidence of this instead of make claims that are not founded on actual evidence. There have been some fantastic, ultra large scale real life experiments out there with entire countries that have made helmet wearing compulsory, populations of tens of millions, yet you have failed to explain why they are universally seeing no reduction in death or serious injury among cyclists in these countries if the helmets they are now forced to wear are the life savers you claim, despite the much lower number of cyclists that the legislation universally leads to.

What claims have I made? Please post links of the the fantastic studies and I'll take a look.

In fact, the reduced cycling numbers of cyclists in these countries is very relevant to the helmet issue, as death through physical inactivity is many times more likely than death by cycling. Hell, death by walking is more likely than death by cycling.

I've not once suggested that helmet use should be compulsory. I often don't wear one myself on short trips. There's an awful lot of anti-helmet stuff out there which is clearly nonsense though, and plenty of it has ended up in this thread.

I was just wondering if there was any good evidence that helmets did not reduce the risk of head injury. Googling for this evidence just results in reams and reams of badly interpreted statistics masquerading as science imo.
 

classic33

Leg End Member
@faster, what height are you and what's your inside leg measurement?

Both relevant questions you need to have the answers to before you do some tests. If you feel like it.

First Test
Fall straight to the floor, like a log that's been knocked over. Also known as a log fall.

Test Two
This is where you need the inside leg measurement. Sitting on the floor, fall sideways.

Note in both of these tests, you do not put your arms out to prevent the fall or to slow your fall.

Give the results of these two tests, when completed.

I look at this problem, for & against helmets, in a way that seems to put me at odds with everyone else. That being that I have had multiple blows/impacts to the head that are not related to cycling, climbing, caving or canoeing. In some there's been no damage. Others I've been kept in under observation because of the damage.

You seem fixated on an internal organ, which you believe can be slowed down, stopped even, slower than the rest of your body. Simple physics will prove you wrong on this part.

I use a full face cycle helmet, there's some side impact protection in the design. Unlike a "normal" cycle helmet. The odd thing is, I'm just as likely to cycle without it as I am with it. My choice, I don't appreciate being told I'm an idiot for not wearing one, or for wearing one. I've voiced that opinion when I've been told either way on my choice.

You agree with something, then say "whatever that is". How is it possible to agree with something when you say you have no idea what it is.

To put the bicycle/motorbike question another way. A cyclist and a motorcyclist have parted company with their respective vehicles at 30mph.
Who will come to a stop the quickest, cyclist or motorcyclist?
Both are of a similar weight, for the purpose of this question.
 

hatler

Guru
I did the maths one time.

When your helmeted head is hit by a car doing 30 mph the head suffers the same accelerative forces as an unhelmeted head hit by a car doing 28mph.

(And apologies, this was a while ago, so my poor old memory might not have remembered those numbers precisely, but this was certainly the general gist of things.)
 

hatler

Guru
The falling from a height of one meter onto a kerb feels very relevant to a cycling accident. I'm pleased that they are designed to this standard.
I think that's the speed (12mph) your bonce achieves when falling from that height.

Even so, this is a minimum standard - it does not mean that some/many helmets are not designed to significantly exceed this standard.
Do you really think manufacturers would build helmets which significantly exceed this standard. If they did, do you not think they would blab about that in their advertising ?

It also doesn't mean that at 13 mph, the helmet suddenly becomes completely useless. At higher speeds, would it not reduce the impact down to a level below those that you would see in those sub 12 mph which according to you are unlikely to cause serious head injuries?
See my post above.

Agreed on the first bit, but so what? Sounds like the most unlikely of injuries. Feels like you're really scraping the barrel. No direct trauma protection!?
Serious brain injuries on a bike are almost vanishingly rare already.
 

mjr

Comfy armchair to one person & a plank to the next
If weight is that much of an issue in helmet usage, why do some folk cycle wearing a Camelbak, nearly 10lb in weight in some cases, or a small rucksack, empty weight approx 3lb.
But they don't strap that weight on their head!

1lb on the head, or 10lb on the back, which is worse in the event you and your bike part company, with you having an unplanned meeting with the road?
1lb on the head.
 
We're back at @boydj's points 4 and 5 again. Using the powers of critical thinking bestowed on him by Human Factors Ltd and having read "as much of the research as he could find on cycle helmets", the best evidence he could come up with was fatally flawed and didn't stand up to even the slightest scrutiny. I'd go as far as saying it was completely pointless.

He was in the 95th percentile too, so he's basically the 'top gun' of critical thinkers. Do you think you can do better?
Wow. This is some convincing, science-based debate. This is clearly someone who has done his research.

You've won me over! :notworthy:
 

rogerzilla

Legendary Member
Neglecting air resistance, an object falling a height of one metre, starting at rest, would be travelling at 10mph when it hit the ground. Your head is twice as high on a bike. 12mph is probably an arbitrary number, and a compromise between safety and making something light and attractive enough for people to buy. EN1078 is a pretty weak standard anyway. Snell B.90 was supposed to be a lot better but AFAIK no modern helmets comply.
 
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