How To Properly Wear Body Armor - Safe Life Defense

One of the most important things when wearing body armor is to ensure that you have the proper fit. I'm Nick Grote, President of Safe Life Defense, and today I'm going to show you how to properly wear your body armor. So if your vest has adjustment from the rear, you're going to want to start by adjusting from that point. That way you can do all of your on-the-go adjustment from the front of the vest. So we take one side off from the back, and if we can get one arm up please Jordan. All right, so first things first, you want to make sure that the base of the vest is at the top or center of the navel, and that the neckline of the vest is at the first notch in the sternum. That makes it so when you sit down it doesn't push up into your neck and it's much more comfortable. So once we have that in about the right spot, we're going to do all of our adjustments from the rear to start at least. I'm going to make sure that everything is nice and straight, and that the front and the rear panels are even. If the front and rear panels are not even, the vest is naturally going to try and balance itself out at the shoulders, and then the comfort straps with the elastic core are going to counteract that and try and pull that back straight. So as long as this is straight, the vest will stay exactly where you put it. It won't ride up, it won't sag, it won't move around on you, you don't need tails. Now we're going to do the exact same thing from the other side, and you're going to want to make sure that you have a nice snug fit. Once you have your rear adjustments taken care of, we're going to want to do the same for the shoulders. We're going to want to make sure this is nice and snug, while not actually pulling up on the neckline, you want it to stay right where you have it. And of course again, we're going to do the same thing from the other side. As of right now, we have a nice quick and easy fit, and how does that feel for you? A little tight. Okay, so like we were saying before, you want to do all of your initial adjustment from the rear, which leaves some room for fine adjustment on the front. Now, Safe Life Defense Armor is designed so that the panels meet back to back. What that means is that the front panel meets the back panel, and they're pushing up against one another. There's two other main methods of body armor. You can have a small gap, which helps promote airflow and is a bit more concealable, but you do sacrifice protection. Finally, there also is an overlap, where you have the front panel overlapping the rear. Now, if you do have an overlap, it is really important that you do follow that front over the rear. Again, Safe Life Defense, we prefer the back-to-back method. It provides the most concealability, while being the most comfortable and the most protection. If you have a gap at the side of your vest, you can go up a size for increased coverage. Likewise, if you have an overlap, you can go down a size for increased concealability and comfort. That's all assuming that the length of the vest is appropriate for body type. Now, one other thing that I do want to note is that some people may have an issue with a bulge in the back of their vest here. That does happen with a few body types, and that is easily fixable. One thing that you're going to want to do is adjust. Let's get you back this way, Jordan. You're going to want to adjust from the front. We're going to take the shoulder strap off, and we're going to pull the front as far as we can toward the shoulder, and we're going to cross the rear strap over it. We're, of course, going to do the exact same thing on the other side. You always want to make sure that your vest is even. If you have the shoulder straps pulling on either side like that, it's going to make sure that the back is nice and flush and flat, and you won't have anything bulging out, anything that isn't concealable. So this is the ideal fit that we're looking for. Everything fits nice and flush. It has full coverage, and as you can see, has a full range of movement. If you have any questions regarding the fit of your armor, please feel free to email us, give us a call, or message us on Facebook. We're always happy to help. Thank you for choosing SafeLife Defense, and have a fantastic day.