Off Road riding gear

Bike Bandit is having a big sale on riding gear and I figured I would scoop some up. Anyone have any suggestions.

Mostly about helmets. What are good brands and what should I look for?

Well I have a helmet, pants, gloves and goggles on the way.

That didn't take long.

Helmets for off road need a big visor to keep the sun out of your eyes and protect your face in brush. For that reason they also need to be full face. I'm partial to Arai myself but dayumn they expensive. Some of my buds bought HJC's and Fox, etc and were happy with them. I'd avoid polycarbonate shells, stick with fiberglass. Polycarbonate will crack open big time. I saw it happen to one that fell off a truck bed onto a concrete parking lot 'stopper'. Fiberglass will also crack etc but it will stay together.

Pants, it's not so much the brand as the material (ballistic nylon is best) and the way it's sewn. On off road pants you want the least number of seams, every seam is an opportunity for a split. I wore Moose XCR stuff for years, it was comfortable and wore like iron. I'd look for some with knee cup pockets made into them. Take it from me, knee cups are worth every bit of aggravation!

Gloves, no two guys are alike. It wasn't unusual for someone sponsored by, say, Thor to use another brand of glove but cut the name off because they just couldn't stand the Thor gloves. Note I am not saying Thor's stuff is junk, I just used an example name. The #1 problem with gloves is they can 'bunch' in your palm and create nasty blisters. Those Nomex gloves for working on cars help a lot with that but you need to go up on the size of the outer glove to compensate; maybe you take a medium but with the Nomex gloves underneath you'll need a large. There's a brand called 'Underwares' (misspelling is intentional) that works well but you can find a good alternative locally. One thing to avoid is the 'rubber band' closure around the wrist, it will restrict blood flow to your hands and lead to tingling. The same thing can happen with Velcro closures that are pulled too tight.

Boots, again it's sorta personal. I have a pair of Alpine Stars, very tough boots but they chewed my ankles up big time. I had to soak the boots in hot water and stick a piece of PVC pipe in the ankle area to force it outwards then let them dry, that rehaped the leather so it would no longer eat me alive. The problem was I had to do this every time I took them off.

I got Fox gloves, Thor goggles (they were the only smoked ones I could find on sale and I have worn some before) and a Z1R Intake Flame helmet. I read some good reviews online and it was one of the few Snell rated helmets for a reasonable price.

Cool. About goggles: to me, smoked lenses (the dark gray or green ones) were a problem because when ID'ing trail obstacles you depend very much on shadows and the dark lenses can help mask them. Yellow (the same shade as shooter's glasses) makes the shadows stand out. In fact, on cold days when goggles are very likely to fog I used to wear contact lenses and shooter's glasses.