I can only speak personally but mine has stopped me from hurting my back ……2 years ago I was launched and landed on my back on fiber footing, I was out for 2 months. Bought an air vest and my horse bucked me off in an under saddle last summer, onto fiber footing again, landed on my back again, I got up and walked away! Personally I now wear mine everytime. Will it work for every type of fall? No….if you land on your butt it’s not going to help, if you hit your head etc it’s not going to help….but for me, personally, I’m 56 this year, I feel better wearing it now!
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That’s a strange comparison, as you would not want an air vest to deflate on impact like a car airbag and also a car airbag deflates a moment or 2 after impact, not immediately. I’d imagine that’s more for prevent of suffocation but I’m no expert. I’ve had bruises and known others to have broken noses from them, but it’s prevented a lot worse head injury.
An air vest pops when you’re shook loose… so it essentially makes you a bouncing object, which I’d rather than letting my spinal cord/column take the direct hit.
To each their own, but this has been a lifesaver in both the equestrian and motorcycle community. It’s a tool to save lives or prevent life-changing injuries. It’s not perfect, but it’s something.
There are people that are also convinced that helmets cause whiplash… which is a bit wild, but hey… as I said… to each their own.
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Mine doesn’t deflate on contact….I feel like the Michelin man when I get up lol……it slowly deflates but definitely not on contact!
Many years ago, I knew someone who forgot to take her helmet off when she left the barn, and she got in a car accident. Her helmet cracked the windshield, but she didn’t even have a headache.
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I wouldn’t want an air vest at all because it is just another thing for your body to crash into. And car airbags absolutely do deflate as you make contact not after otherwise it would be just another hard surface to crash into
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That is exactly why I said I would never use one.
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I’m seeing air vests being used more and more in both endurance/CTR and in fox hunting. I wish I had been wearing one last Sep, although I don’t think it would have protected me from breaking a collarbone, I know it would have prevented the massive bruising on my back and spinal pain that lingered for months. I’m a proud owner of a HIT-Air vest now… but… I have to confess that since I know I am going to forget to disconnect myself from my saddle, now that I am finally back to riding, I am practicing first connecting the vest to the saddle with a thread instead of the cannister lanyard. Hopefully soon my “reflex reaction” to disconnect my aattachment before dismounting will be developed! And then for sure I will wear it regularly. I’ve seen so many falls in the last couple of years where the rider (many of whom, like me, are aging) was absolutely fine… but I don’t think they would have been without the extra cushioning!
I will provide my “N of 1” story to add to this thread. I have a Helite air vest and had a fall where I got launched upward about as high as I have ever been from a massive unexpected buck. I came down at a very high velocity and landed flat on my back on relatively hard footing. I have borderline osteoporosis and have previously broken bones (prior to having the air vest) from much less of an impact. Amazingly, the only thing that got hurt in this fall was a finger. I didn’t even get the breath knocked out of me. The vest when it inflated did not feel like a rigid hard shell (tight but not so tight that I couldn’t breath), but more like a cushion of air with some amount of give. I believe I would have been seriously injured without it, as did my trainer, who was also amazed that I was able to bounce up almost as if nothing had happened. Call it anecdotal, but that’s my personal experience.
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Same here. Another n=1, but it happened to me. I didn’t have the whip-lash effect that I was expecting, and although knocked about a bit my only “injuries” were bad bruising to my arm.
I feel as though my air vest likely saved my neck and back from injury. I was still able to do chores like nothing happened.
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Another n=1, but I’ve had many, many hard falls in my vest (Helite), including landing flat on my back, and I wasn’t even bruised or sore. I popped right up and was fine. Before I got my vest, I was in the ER several times a year. I’ve only gone without my vest once since I got it, and that also ended up in an ER trip. I never ride without it now.
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This is just a single anecdote, so take it with a grain of salt. But I had my first fall in an airvest recently, and I think the rapid inflation and the spinal rigidity it caused made me way more sore than I would have been just hitting the ground. Mine was a pretty slow motion fall onto my butt, and as soon as the thing inflated, I felt like I had been punched in the chest. I am sore up my sternum and from my neck down through my thoracic spine.
I popped right back up, and feel extremely grateful not to be injured. And, of course, I do not know the counterfactual where the vest wasn’t there. But I feel way more beat up than I would have expected.
The whole experience has made me wish we had better evidence about the value of these devices. My instinct is not to use it any more. But I suppose it is also possible that my fall was worse than I thought, and I would be even more hurt if I hadn’t used it.
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I think it makes sense that your body position at the moment the vest inflates would influence the outcome. Visualizing it, it seems like a vest inflating while I was half way into an “I’m going to die fetal position” might feel a lot different than a vest inflating while I’m in an “I’m falling like a sky diver and I’m going to die” position.
Among the things we talk about in my field of work is that there are things we will never be able to know because the outcome is influenced by so many things that each have a wide range of variability. I wonder if the reality is that even with additional research, the best we will be able to say is something like “most of the time, under these general circumstances, the vest will reduce the incidence of these types of injuries.”
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The spine is actually VERY strong laterally. I would rather land flat on my back than on my tail bone or head. Vertebra in the axial (head to toe direction) are insanely weak. Hence why burst and compression fractures happen. The cortex of vertebra are so weak that we can push through them with what looks like a stylus when we do surgery. Something we can not do with any other bone.
However, even with airbags we see tons of broken spines in motor vehicle accidents. That is because the air bags don’t mitigate axial forces. Thus you can detach the head from the spine in a car wreck (those are fun cases). And many patients walk away unscathed even if their head is detached!
Airbags in cars do NOT work to prevent injuries when they inflate (hence the warnings to not have child seats in the front seat, or to drain ALL electrical charge before working on an airbag).
Airbags work during DEFLATION. Airbags are highly porous and it is when the gas escapes as your body slams forward that it dissipates the forces. Hence why airbags inflate in microseconds using explosive charges so that they are fully inflated and ready to deflate by the time you hit it.
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I ride in mine whenever I jump. I’ve had one fall in it and everything worked fine and so weird soreness etc. I have the helite and really like the feel on having it on. As an older rider, I just don’t bounce like I used to.
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Curious which brand you have? I believe some of them inflate outward, while others inflate inward. But it’s been a while since I read that so I could be wrong.
Slight tangent but the whole “people will act more foolhardy if they have protection in place” argument is not unique to equestrians or sports.
There’s an entire federal rule of evidence (Rule 411) that prohibits the admission of evidence that a person did or did not have liability insurance at the time of an accident. The theory being that someone might argue “this person acted more negligently because s/he knew s/he had insurance to cover any damages that resulted” based on the fact that liability insurance was in place. It also prohibits the counter argument “this person was more cautious because s/he didn’t have insurance.” So, for better or for worse, our legislature and courts think people might make these arguments if they were permitted to. Which suggests that some people actually might think and behave this way.
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Yes, and moral hazard is a concept in economics also!
With respect to eventing, it has been debated whether frangible fence make riders more likely to take chances.
I find that I am willing to take the same risks (aka jumping) that I did when I was younger and did not wear an air vest. However, now that I am riding less frequently I feel more comfortable having it on. Would I ride a horse out of my comfort zone? Probably not. But it does make me feel more comfortable doing the things that I used to do! Could be the placebo effect or something along those lines…
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I’ve said this before but I’m not a big fan of the air vests.
Just in my personal experience they have caused more problems than help.
I had a kid on a horse, horse gets down and rolls in a puddle, kid spends waaay too long worrying about unclipping as horse is getting down, can’t unclip, jumps off and vest explodes. Noise spooks another horse in the ring and other kid falls off.
I’ve had way too many kids forget to unclip while dismounting and scare the horses terribly.
I’ve had people fall and the horse was absolutely going to stand calmly for their rider until a vest exploded in their face and cause the horse to gallop around full speed.
I’ve been at shows where the noise of someone else falling off caused someone else’s horse to spook.
I’ve actually had a student fall off with one on because a pony tripped really badly and they were so low to the ground when they fell the vest didn’t even go off until way after they were off the horse.
And I just don’t know that it really makes you hit any lighter. Maybe but I haven’t seen it lol. But I am kind of traumatized by these vests lol I do t ever discourage clients from getting them because I don’t think they would even care if I did lol but I’m really not sold. But maybe I’m just being old and crusty and not into new things lol.
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I have seen/heard a number of them go off without any visible reaction from a horse. It’s more of a metallic sound than an explosion.
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