Over or under?

How do you wear your gloves?

How you wear your waterproof gloves can be an incredibly divisive subject.

The traditional approach is to wear gloves over the sleeves – particularly if they’re gigantic gauntlets. The theory is that, as you ride along, the wind fires water up the back of the hand and down the arm. If riding with elbows below the bars, then water rolls off the gloves without getting up sleeves.

A good portion of the people reading this will now be spluttering and spraying their tea across the page. Because, as they’ll tell you, rain runs down your sleeves and fills your gloves with water. So the sleeve of the jacket goes over the cuff of the glove.

But when you do that you get draughts and water blown up the sleeves. And even if you do get a wind-tight seal at the wrist, water will still soak into the glove’s surface (especially if it’s a textile one) and wick its way up inside the jacket sleeve.

So what’s the right answer? The simple answer is… actually both approaches work, but which is best depends more than anything on the bike. The amount of weather protection and the riding position can make one approach better than the other. When changing bike, it’s worth experimenting with how you wear your gloves to find the system that works best.

But really, the answer is to go over AND under. That’s easy when wearing a waterproof oversuit, as you can have the gloves over your base garment (be it a leather or textile jacket) with the waterproof on top of the glove, sealing nicely. Water can wick its way up the glove all day long: it rarely manges to then run down the sleeve of the inner garment and get into the glove.

The other over-and-under solution is the double cuff. Some winter gloves have an inner cuff to go inside the jacket sleeve, with a second cuff to roll over the outside of it: a double seal. The other way to achieve this is to get a jacket with a double cuff: a soft inner cuff to go into the glove, with the tougher outer layer fastening around it. Of course, the ultimate system is the double-double cuff: jacket inner cuff inside glove inner cuff, with jacket outer cuff sealed around that, then the glove outer cuff rolled over it.