Winter Running Apparel For Your Torso

by | Workout Tips

All of this week I will be sharing some tips on Winter Running Apparel, with some strategies on how to keep yourself warm, safe and comfortable in cold and dark running conditions. Today is the 3rd of 6 videos, with strategies on how to keep your torso warm.

Hello. This is Blaine Moore from RunToWin.com and I’m going to show you a few things about winter running apparel so that you can go out and be prepared for the colder weather as it comes in.

Your Torso

For your torso, it’s all about layering up. On the outside you want to have some kind of a windbreaker, whether it’s a full zip or some kind of a half zip that only goes down to your chest. The nice thing about the half zip’s and the full zip shirts are that you can regulate heat really well. On the colder days when you first get out running and you haven’t warmed up yet, you can zip up all the way to protect your neck, not so much for this jacket, but you get it over your face or sometimes your nose as you are running and once you warm up you can let some of the heat out just by unzipping it.

Underneath of that you are going to want to wear at least one if not two shirts. I like to have a long sleeve and then a short sleeve underneath. This is good for as you warm up, you can strip off a layer, you can take your jacket off or you can take one of these layers off from underneath or push your sleeves up.

I recommend against wearing cotton, and wearing more technical fabrics instead. And the reason for that is when you are running and you sweat, (even when it’s cold you are still going to sweat,) if you are wearing a cotton shirt and it gets wet, then the water is just going to pool up on that spot, and it’s going to get heavy and it’s going to get cold and it’s going to freeze. Whereas if you are wearing a technical shirt and you get water on it, the water is just going to wick from your skin out and then once it gets on to the shirt it’s going to spread out along the fabric. So it’s not all concentrated on one spot so you wont get as cold. And if you have a good shirt, like this one, it will bead up and it will just run right off of the shirt and it will barely get wet as you can see. Most of it has wound up on the ground.

Another option for the torso is, for just keeping your torso warm, you can wear some kind of a vest as a base layer or as an outer layer. That’s good for protecting you from the wind and those kind of situations.