Combat Sports International: Pro-Style Shin-Instep Guard

[Wolf]

These were the first pair of shin guards I got, and I have to say I was pretty dissappointed with them. First, however, I'll say what I thought was good about them.

They do offer a solid amount of protection, and they're pretty lightweight. They seem to hold up pretty well through numerous sparring sessions. The velcro straps are reasonably comfortable. The joint at the ankle is flexible enough to make movement pretty easy.

Now, for the bad. There's really only one bad thing about these, but I think it's bad enough to make me significantly drop the ease of use category. While the idea of the extra padded ridge down the shin bone sounds great, it causes serious problems with the guards. Anybody who sweats a decent amount, knows that minor slipping of shin guards can be an issue, but this is really unreasonable. Because of the ridge, if your kick is not dead center on the ridge everytime the force will instead be directed on the corner of the ridge driving the pad around your leg. It was so bad that I would fix it once, then in ONE KICK the pad would be driven a quarter of the way around my leg. This, obviously, became a serious issue as I kept having to pause in sparring sessions to adjust the guards.

CSI offers a wide array of shin-instep guards. For your money there are definitly better solutions.

edit: added 8 for Materials/Production Quality. The elastic footstraps on these are kind of flimsy, and I've seen them break. As for protection, because of their tendency to slip they can lose a lot of the protective ability since the thick padded center part isn't what you're kicking with when it slips.

[revisionist00]

I recently purchased this product and have been met with the same issues. The first day I received these shin guards the elastic on the instep guard snapped, leaving me no other choice then to return them and wait another week for a replacement pair. After receiving my second pair to took me a good month of hard kicking just to get them to the point where it did not feel like I was wearing 2x4's on my legs. But after using these shin guards for a couple of months now they have been a pretty solid product. For the price you pay, they give people with fragile legs like me (as Backfist) good protection for little moolah.