Why don’t we do what we know is good for us? Researchers dig into why riders don’t wear body protectors

Normalising wearing body protectors day to day and more research into female bodies could help change attitudes towards wearing them.

Lorna Cameron, senior lecturer in the equine department at Hartpury University, spoke at the British Equestrian Trade Association (BETA) safety conference (21 April) about early stage investigations into body protectors and female bodies.

Her talk, titled “Safety versus comfort”, centred on the work she is doing as part of a team led by fellow senior lecturer Victoria Lewis into the impact of body protectors on comfort, rider position and considerations for female riders.

“One of the things that is a real human nature is the fact that we know what is good for us and we know what makes us safer, and then we do not do it,” she said.

She spoke of findings from a 2024 study, to which 97% respondents were female, that found that hacking, schooling on the flat and showjumping schooling were the three most common activities during which falls happened.

“So we wanted to find out, what is it that is driving our choice to either wear or not wear a body protector, and what actually are the barriers to taking that up?” said Ms Cameron.

The team set up a 24-question online survey and had 1,010 responses, of whom 97.8% were female and 89.8% were amateur riders.

Among the findings was that 61.5% of female riders reported that they felt wearing a body protector altered their position, that comfort, fit and restriction of movement were the primary barriers to wearing it, and that non-users were three times more likely to report stiffness or rigidity as reason not to wear one.

“There is some evidence that the less we use our body protectors in our everyday riding and training, the more awkward and clunky they feel when we go to a competition,” said Ms Cameron.

The team carried out a very small-scale pilot study and the initial findings “did suggest that rider position was altered by the body protector”, so decided to dig further. This included looking into research into body armour in other physically demanding occupations, such as for soldiers and police officers, in which some findings suggested women are wearing ill-fitting body protection to “fit the ‘girls’ in”.

This led the team to start looking into exercise-induced breast pain in different types of bra and body protector combinations, which they would like to investigate further.

“I had a waiting list that was five times longer than the people I could fit into the data collection day, which suggests […] there’s an issue,” Ms Cameron said.

She added that the team’s recommendations include thinking about the female form in body protector design, perhaps trying to push for more consistent wear in training and possibly while off the horse.

“I’m a coach and I do notice younger riders don’t seem to find their body protectors as uncomfortable because they grew up with them,” she said. “It would be really useful to investigate if there’s an impact on how comfortable we feel a body protector is when we’re actually using it on a regular basis in our training and what impact that might have.”

‘The manufacturers really helped us out’

FEI chief medical officer Mark Hart gave a whistle-stop summary of the FEI’s approach to safety and personal protective equipment.

He said “tradition” is one of the barriers the FEI has come up against in PPE adoption.

“In 2021 we mandated [helmets] for all disciplines, with the exception of vaulting. The manufacturers really helped us out in this,” he said. “The manufacturers figured out that when they made the helmets and they put bling on it, dressage riders loved it.”

Speaking generally about PPE, Dr Hart expressed frustration at the “total lack of harmonisation of global [safety] standards”.

“Heads and gravity and ground are pretty much the same around the world,” he said.

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