Sure—your friends, family, and maybe even your dog will make fun of you for wearing them, because they really can look ridiculous. To get the right size, most people are going to look for the standard glove size they wear for everything else. While our tester wears XL in most gloves, he’s running Large in these for a more secure fit and grip on the bars.

Bar Mitts

Made of 5mm thick neoprene, the cornucopia-shaped pogies slide over the bar ends, enclosing the brake levers and hoods, and attach to your bars using an integrated velcro strap. And of course, bonus features like padding for mountain bikers, electric heating elements for fat bikers, and little loops to help pull gloves on and off are great bonuses. This article does a huge disservice to winter cyclists by not discussing how to keep your hands warm when temperature is below 20 degrees, other than putting a huge insulation bag on the edges of your handlebar.To fully enjoy riding a fat bike during the winter, there needs to be a way to keep the entire body warm. Pogies only play well with MTB handlebars (just b/c you can use them on a drop bar doesn’t mean they work well) and beyond that they’re unwieldy and clumsy at best.

Bar Mitts Extreme Cold Mountain Mitts Review - Singletracks Bar Mitts Extreme Cold Mountain Mitts Review - Singletracks

Known as one of the true leaders in the industry for bike pogies, the mittens can easily be installed when the temperature gets to a certain level.Fabrics that use technology like GORE and Polartec are great for wind- and waterproofing, and be on the lookout for DWR treatments, which make a glove water-resistant. Here, we’re embracing the lobster claw, a mitten/glove hybrid that lets your hands stay warm by keeping fingers together, but also allows you to shift and brake. We will say, though, when we say “ultra-cold,” we’re still talking about temps hovering in the low 20s, not into the teens and single digits. The drops and tops of the bar are still available, but you can only safely use them when you know you won’t need to stop or shift quickly. After getting caught out by a low snow line on a recent gravel ride —and crying in my car afterwards as the fingers painfully came back to life—, I turned to Bar Mitts to see how these compared to the best winter cycling gloves.

Bar Mitts for Winter Riding | Bicycling Cold Hands? Try Bar Mitts for Winter Riding | Bicycling

And there are small details like microsuede fabrics inserted into the first two fingers for improved grip when shifting and braking — and the fingertips are also treated so that you can use your smartphone without taking them off. Most people operate their lights, indicators, and other switches by feel, meaning they won’t need this feature.If you can’t brake or shift easily, or you don’t feel like your grip is solid, you may need a different pair. And head to the frequently asked questions sections for a few tips and tricks to make gloves more effective! Bar Mitts offers sizes Small through XL, so it all comes down to one’s preference, the temperature you’ll be riding in, mechanical vs electronic shifting, and the size of your hands and bulkiness of your gloves. And he says the Toko Classic is the only glove he’s found that that allows him to maintain circulation while fitting tightly enough to allow for good handling on the ‘cross course in snowy conditions.